Iraq is buying $100 million worth of weapons from the Chinese.
First off, I suspect that there is a good possibility that, at the end of the day, we're paying for that.
Then there is this nugget:
"In 2004 and 2005, the United States bought 185,000 AK-47s from an Eastern European country -- after Iraqis rejected U.S.-made M-16 assault rifles -- as part of a $2.8 billion program to deliver military equipment to Iraq."
The country was Bulgaria. And besides that, the Iraqis figured out that the M-16 was the wrong weapon a lot faster than the Army has.
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Let me get this straight. People are worried that these AK-47's and 9mm pistols (which is probably what they are) are going to end up in the hands of the insurgency? Uhm, one thing the insurgency does NOT have is a shortage of weapons. Every surrounding country has large stamping plants stamping out AK-47's by the truckload. Iraq itself has an AK-47 stamping plant somewhere, sold to Saddam by the Soviet Union, though apparently it is not operational (or is it? And if it is, who controls it?).
However, if you have money, you want Bulgarian or Chinese AKM's. They have tighter tolerances, don't jam as easily under full-auto fire with large magazines, and are just plain better-built than the junk stamped out in the Middle East. The AKM isn't hard to build, but it's hard to build an accurate one due to various design issues (e.g. gas tube flex, ejector twist), and the ones stamped out in the Middle East or Romania just don't have the same quality as the Bulgarian or Chinese ones.
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