by Clayton Griffin

Created on: April 29, 2008

Should the U. S. arm Sunnis in Iraq is kind of a silly question really. I believe the real question is, "were the Sunnis in Iraq ever disarmed?" As a veteran of the war in Iraq I know for a fact most Iraqi citizens were always allowed to carry a weapon for personal protection after the initial invasion and they still do to this day. It is true the Iraqi army was disarmed but a good portion of the army was not even Sunni. A lot of foot soldiers were Shiite Muslim. Iraq learned during their war with Iran that it would be a good idea to use Shiites as foot soldiers because the reigning authorities saw them as expendable.

After the invasion of Iraq in 2003 there has been plenty of violence to go around. There has been Al Qaida fighting coalition forces. There has been the new Iraqi forces fighting against insurgents and of course there has been fighting amongst Sunni and Shiites. With all of this fighting going on it doesn't seem like the Sunnis are having any trouble finding weapons on their own to fight with. This all brings me back to my first point that Iraqi citizens are able to keep a personal protection weapon for themselves. I failed to mention earlier that weapon is usually the Alexander Kalashnikov model of 1947, better known as the AK-47. This is not your run of the mill personal protection weapon. This is a weapon that has been used in war against the United States for over sixty years. So if AK-47s are obviously easy to get and everyone has one, what exactly is the United States going to arm the Sunnis with? Are we going to arm them with the M-4 at a price of 1700.00 dollars each? What is the point of spending money to arm these people that probably already have superior weapons already?

As you can see arming anyone in Iraq is basically a moot point. An American gun company must be behind this because the only thing that would change is more money would be spent on American made weapons. The sad truth is that they would flood the Middle Eastern market and would certainly make it to the black market in record time. There is nothing good that can come from this.

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