This failure didn't worry me too much since the enemy had massive amounts of money looted from the Iraqi treasury and massive amounts of weapons already inside Iraq left over from the Saddam era. Controlling the border would have been pointless in stopping the enemy from arming themselves and would have wasted troops. Even trying to stop the imported jihadis from coming in would have been a waste of American troops who wouldn't know an Algerian from a Qatari coming across a border unarmed.
As the enemy uses Iranian mines to penetrate our better armored vehicles, we should not lose sight of the fact that imported weapons are still a minority of the problem. The enemy even digs up mines from the First Gulf War between Iran and Iraq:
Despite the recent spotlight on Iran, U.S. officials say the majority of weapons used by Sunni and Shiite extremists have been in this country for years and were looted from Iraqi military arsenals after the fall of Saddam in April 2003.
About 30 percent of the insurgent weapons found here in Diyala province date back to the Iran-Iraq war, said Maj. Suzanne MacDonald, an intelligence officer with the 1st Cavalry Division's 3rd Brigade.
They include not only mines planted along the Iranian border but also weapons caches buried by the Iraqi military decades ago in a labyrinth of clay dunes and stone outcroppings, said MacDonald, 38, from Georgetown, Texas.
This does not mean we ignore the Iranian exports as irrelevant to winning the fight. And with Iraqis guarding new border posts, they will be better able to detect dangerous types crossing into Iraq (assuming they stay honest, of course).
But even shutting down the Iranian operation completely would not end the roadside bombs and terrorism against civilians.
