The idea sounded ridiculous, but everyone understood when they learned that, because of daily attacks on the Zone, the jacket they were being forced to wear into the Blue Star Café simply to eat a sweet-and-sour chicken or smoke from a shisha pipe had to be lined with Kevlar or steel plates. OK, wearing body armor and a combat helmet to dinner can’t be classified as normal, though I have to admit the khaki-colored flak jacket my dinner companion brought did match the dust in the air and camouflage paint on the Iraqi Army helicopters buzzing overhead.
Reporting on the conflict here brings its own version of surrealism. A senior U.S. military official told me during an interview the other day that Iran continued to provide weapons to Shiite militia groups to attack American troops. Coalition forces, the official said, were finding huge caches of weapons with Iranian serial numbers daily, some still in their protective wrappings. The U.S. military has been claiming this with increasing stridency in recent months, but the official I spoke with added a new twist. “There an Internet site where you can buy Iranian weapons with a Visa card,” he said.
The implication was clear: tech-savvy, credit card-wielding Iraqi militiamen can shop online and have weapons sent across the border from Iran. Further inspection suggests otherwise. The Web site in question belongs to the Defense Industries Organization, or DIO, which is the Iranian government’s state-owned weapons manufacturer. Its Web site features land mines and mortar launchers–the kind of weapons that insurgents are using in Iraq. But DIO also sells patrol boats, quarter-ton tactical jeeps and howitzers, which the bad guys neither have nor could afford.
Many countries around the world have state-owned weapons manufacturers. The Italian industrial group Finmeccanica, for example, produces missile systems, torpedoes, naval artillery and armored vehicles. But unlike Finmeccanica, DIO is under sanction by both the U.S. and United Nations for alleged involvement in Iran’s nuclear or ballistic-missile activities. Under U.N. Security Council Resolution 1747, member nations are required to freeze DIO’s assets. Is that why the company is accepting Visa online?
In all fairness, potential buyers must register their name and company on the DIO Web site before placing orders. (I declined, fearing a visit to NEWSWEEK’s Baghdad office by some grim-faced men wearing black suits and dark sunglasses.) Nor is the DIO site the only weapons-selling outlet asking for some form of security: Similar questions are asked at sites like American Weapons, an online gun store in Texas that sells semi-automatic weapons, military rifles, handguns, ammunition and Ninja swords, among other things. As part of its “We Aim to Please” motto, the American store accepts not only Visa, but also American Express and MasterCard. For some reason, that doesn’t surprise me at all.
