Iraqis to buy $100 million dollars worth of Chinese guns.

Governments often send messages with their actions, particularly messages that can't really be delivered directly. A recent, mostly overlooked example of this was Iraq's announcement of a contract with China to buy $100 million worth of light weaponry.

Despite sounding significant, the amount is a relative pittance. Iraq also recently signed deals to buy $1.6 billion in U.S. arms, with another $1.8 billion in possible future purchases, so $100 million in arms is less than 3 percent of weapons deals planned by Baghdad in recent months.

My first question is "where are the Iraqis getting all of this money?"

The last I heard we were pouring billions of dollars of American taxpayer money into Iraq trying to buoy up its economy.

Are they taking that money and buying Chinese weapons?

And what are these weapons for? Are they going to be sold to Iraqi citizens? Is there any kind of background check involved? And what happened to all of the weapons that we provided to the Iraqi police forces?

There are widespread reports and rumors of Iraqi army and police forces selling their munitions. Indeed, a recent Government Accountability Office report indicated that about 30 percent of all arms distributed to Iraqi forces since 2004 have gone missing, including over 110,000 AK-47s alone.

Oh. Well this whole damn thing stinks, now doesn't it?

Well at least they won't have to worry about the lead content in these Chinese products, because that is kind of the whole point of owning them.