American Forces Pull Hidden MiG fighters out of Iraqi Desert

Keep looking boys!

will this silence the "where are teh WMDs???" crowd, even for a moment?
not placing bets, me.

would that thing fly? Fuel and go?

The desert sand must get everywhere.

This story has been totally ignored by the lamestream press. Of course they don't want people to start thinking that if a bunch of jets can be hidden so could the WMDs. That could really interfere with the "Bush lied" propaganda campaign.

In all seriousness one presumes Iraqi technicians are rather adept at dealing with sand in the gears (and everwhere else).

Why would it? What has the MIG to do w/ WMDs?

We used magnetometers back in my oil exploration days .. '70s

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Granted Iraq is a big place but a towed aircraft array should work just fine - maybe what found these toys ....?

That was my first thought too. No way they are going to get that bird in the air without taking it apart down to bare metal, cleaning everything then reassembling it.

Even then, I would not volunteer to be a passenger in it, even if had a backseat, which it doesn't seem to.

One would think that they would wrap the sucker in plastic first. Why bury it bare? Why at all? They knew we were comming - exposed they were toast - sand in the innards would take major rehab - what was their thinking? Beyond me.

You were being sarcastic, right? If you can hide 30 plus jets in the sand and it is readily obvious don't you think it would be possible to hide lots of other things too?----like evidence of WMD

The question keeps buggin me....Why would they bury these things ?

Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. Maybe so they wouldn't be destroyed during the war and they could be dug out later for his glorious return to power.

Well, during the last war he sent all his good planes to Iran to keep them safe -- but the Iranians cheated and kept them when the war ended.

I guess he figured that he could tap dance his way out of war again, or somehow finish it maybe deminished, but still in power, at which time he could dig them out, dust them off and go back to normal.

To what? Tow them during a parade?

Bizzaro

You arn't the only one bugged - it dosen't make sense - well that presupposes that Saddam was/is rational.

Thanx...I thought I was the only one. Others on this thread indicate that to be usefull again, they would have to be dimantled and rebuilt. If they had no pilots or parts or fuel etc...it still makes no sense in burying them to just hide them.
It would make better sense NOT to bury them, but leave them in different open places to make the U.S. use munitions.

Course, they had all the bridges into Baghdad wired to blow, but they didn't blow them.

I would keep an eye out for the guys who dig 'em out, and see if they come down with any weird ailments.

The planes would still look good if toted around in Iraqi military parades. Hussein loved parades and shows of power because even a good bluff IS power, particularly when displayed in the face of an enemy like the US, which is why he had the parade grounds made with the giant upheld swords at either end. In the Arab world, this in-your-face attitude towards the US is considered a victory over the US. He doesn't need a real victory to look powerful in the eyes of the Arab world- we're talking about people who think it a victory if they die while killing pizza parlor customers. Any humiliation of the US is a victory even if it comes at a staggering price to them.

Dictators rule with fear, and conduct foreign policy by blackmail and intimidation even when much out of proportion to their actual abilities. They will win accolades and respect just for having the chutzpah. It doesn't matter if the aircraft actually fly, or if the guns actually work, or if his missiles can actually hit the targets so much as it matters that others think they work and behave accordingly, cowering and giving concessions when the dictator calls.

Weaker nations nearby cannot afford to take the chance that the Iraqi weapons are bluffs. They know already that some, such as his chemical warfare ability, most certainly were NOT bluffs. Iraq used the stuff on Iranians as well as on Iraqi Kurds. So they will behave as if all of Iraq's weapons are functional and ready to go since they have no way to confrim that they aren't. And they know Iraq doesn't bluff when it comes to invading other nations. And it is this blackmail which is the problem, even more so than the weapons themselves.

Don't forget that the blackmail trick even worked on Americans. Remember recent history, when the antiwar crowd was telling us that if the US dealt with Hussein (over his violations of the cease fire this past decade,) that it would be catastrophic, that we would be dragged into another Vietnam, that our troops would be gassed en masse and it would be a quagmire consuming thousands upon thousands of lives, etc? That it would be an "American Afghanistan? Even if the anti-war groups didn't believe this, they cultivated this image of Iraq's fearsome prowess in the first part of the Gulf War in the 90s as well as the second part just recently.

They even played the same game before we went into Afghanistan, essentially trying to blackmail with the old "Arab Street" myth, telling us it would result in even more terrorist attacks than before and the Arab street would erupt and drive out the US... but all we heard was the sound of crickets chirping after we committed to carry out the job of eliminating the Taliban sanctuary.

Iraq was run very much like the former Soviet Union, where to cover for the inherent weaknesses of societies ruled by fear, the dictator must create an image of military strength to bully other nations into providing things Iraq's own society and economy was no longer able, or was never able to provide in sufficient quantities to sate the dictator's desires. The dictator hopes they will never be tested, and relies on people's natural fear of the unknown to ensure no nation interferes with his decisions.

Iraq had the most massive army in the middle east; were the US not in the picture, Iraq could have ruled the entire middle east just because no other nation would dare to challenge Iraq. When Iraq invaded Kuwait and took all of its resources, instead of getting its butt kicked back over the border by the US and UK, Iraq would have been catered to by its neighbors in much the same way you say "nice doggie" when trapped unexpectedly by a pit bull. Every other nation (except Iran) would have given Iraq anything Hussein demanded and praised Iraq for killing Kuwaitis, and would have been reminded of their inferiority- whether real or imagined- every time Hussein parades his war machines down the streets of Baghdad. Other nations would have to feed the Iraqi pit bull all the steak it wanted just because they couldn't take any chances.

Even with the US in the picture, the image we projected over the last decade was of a US that was afraid to take on Hussein. Other nations had to assume that if we were so intimidated (what nation beats an army and then lets it go, and then lets a defeated enemy confound its foreign policy for a decade afterwards and for all the world could tell, this would go on for eternity?) Only a nation which had reason to fear Iraq would behave as we did. It is no surprise that other nations near Iraq would then pay more heed to Iraqi threats than to limp-wristed and vaccilating American policy, and Iraq would gradually gain enough willing European support and reluctant Arab support to have sanctions lifted and defeat the US and UK politically. This nearly happened in 1998 when the US and UK were under extreme pressure to lift the embargo and when the UN gave concession after concession to Iraq at French and Russian and Chinese request. If Iraq had succeeded in getting anctions lifted, all of its weapons programs would have resumed and Iraq wouldn't evenhave to hide them; its MiGs would have come out for the victory parades, and Iraq's stature internationally would have risen and drawn more foreign investment, and then it could acquire more MiGs and Mirages or anything else it fancied. The US and UK defeat would be complete, our stature weakened worldwide, (We were already hurting by our humiliation in Somalia and Kenya and Tanzania which encouraged al Qaeda) and Kuwait would be absorbed into Iraq for all practical purposes because no one would be able to count on the US or UK as allies and would have to abide by Iraq's demands. Kuwait would not be the only nation losing its sovereignity to burgeoning Iraqi/Russian/French/Chinese influence.

Aside froma ll that, if it takes us 60 days to find buried MiGs (which the UN said it couldn't find), it is going to take much longer to find biological weapons, of which amounts sufficient to kill thousands can fit in a two-liter bottle in someone's fridge. Or to find chemical weapons, which can be kept in separate components until use, while Iraq's apologists proclaim the components are just "dual use pesticides or harmless pharmaceutical additives."

People keep forgetting that ALL the terms of the cease fire agreement are the issue; if such things are to have any meaning at all, they must be ENFORCED. Nations should not demand agreements if they do not have the courage and wherewithal to enforce them. And if we do not enforce our terms, our nation's credibility is diminished, and our policy damaged, and in our apparent weakness, we invite attack by other nations and by terrorist groups.

And that is exactly what happened- tallied in with how weak we looked after our humiliation in Somalia, our lack of response to having the WTC bombed the first time, our limpwristed response to having our embassies bombed, to the Khobar Towers bombing, to the bombing of the USS Cole, and to other incidents. We looked weak because our policies were weak.

Some of our people have the attention span of two-year olds. Two year olds never think of the consequences of running away, or looking weak, or not living up to their word. They are utterly irresponsible, living for the moment. People don't even know what the whole cease fire with Iraq entailed. They're thinking only about the media minimalization on what the Iraq issue was all about, and WMD stashes are but a fraction of the issue, which is made up of many things EACH of which is justification for war even by itself.

If Iraq could have staved off this US assault with the help of its European "allies" and so on, it would have looked the victor in the Arab world; oh, heck, it already did look like the winner and was being treated like it, too. The sanctions would have been dropped because the US and UK position would be undermined too much to oppose it- they were almost dropped in 1998 and were already being flagrantly violated. France and Germany's victory over the UK would be secure and the EU would finally crystallize as a French-led continental power, for all intents and purposes looking every bit the equal of the US on the world stage while we would be demonstably impotent. A triumphant Hussein could then display his success in an undeniable fashion by dragging out his aircraft (and whatever else he has) for public display and blackmail and the US wouldn't be able to do a darn thing about it. Our loss would be his gain in the middle east. He would end up with more influence than he would ever have had if the Gulf War had not occured; those allied with him would gain, and we would be diminished, too unreliable to be taken seriously.

In short, if we hadn't taken Hussein out and left him in place, just the fact Saddam Hussein had warplanes to display after a decade-long effort by the US to "change the regime" is enough for the Arab world to see him as the victor. The standard of victory in the Arab world is very low- they view humiliation of a great enemy as their highest practical achievement, sort of the way students from a college with a hopelessly bad football team might gain some brief sense of victory by stealing the school mascot of the better team.

That may be all he was after with regard to the planes.

Of course, counting coup like that only works as PR victories as long as your enemy allows you to do it. When the game is up and the better team wins, the prank isn't so funny.

I wouldn't read too much into why the planes were buried. It's most likely just Saddam Hussein's method of counting coup against the US and UK, to retain some sense of pride by confounding much more powerful foes.

Another plausible alternative is that the people told to hide the planes were doing what demoralized people in dictatorships do- only what the must and no more, with no personal initiative ever used for fear of being punished. If they were told to hide the planes, but not told how in very specific terms, they will do only the bare minimum, just as they are told. If told to bury the planes, they will literally do just that, without thinking about the why, without asking for options, better plans, extra money for preservation, or what the results might be.

In the Soviet Union, factories were told to produce ten penny nails, but were not told when to quit. Without a free market, there was never a reason to question the production of gazillions of ten penny nails even when there was no way there could ever be a market for nothing but ten penny nails. So the USSR produced huge surplusses of ten penny nails for no reason other than some bureaucrat said so. And all the time they did this, there were terrible shortages of other sizes of nails. The same went for tractors. some bureaucrat said to paint them a certain color, they all got painted that color, and when they ran out of that color of paint, the production halted because no one wanted to risk painting them an unauthorized color. There was too much risk in personal initiative to question authority. If the central committee had told them to bury every tractor and every ten-penny nail, they would have done just as they were told.

Aren't dictatorships grand?

	A U.S. military search team uncovers a Cold War-era MiG-25 Foxbat interceptor buried beneath the sands in Iraq. Several MiG-25 and Su-25 ground attack jets have been found buried at al-Taqqadum airfield west of Baghdad. Photo by Master Sgt. T. Collins, USAF
	High resolution photo.
	A U.S. military search team prepares to move a Cold War-era MiG- 25 Foxbat interceptor that was found buried beneath the sands in Iraq. Several MiG-25 and Su-25 ground attack jets have been found buried at al-Taqqadum air field west of Baghdad. Photo by Master Sgt. T. Collins, USAF
	High resolution photo.