This story about looted goods moving from Iraq to Jordan from today's New York Time caught my attention:

American officials say sensitive equipment is, in fact, closely monitored and much of the rest that is leaving is legitimate removal and sale from a shattered country. But many experts say that much of what is going on amounts to a vast looting operation. In the past several months, the International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna, has been closely monitoring satellite photographs of hundreds of military-industrial sites in Iraq. Initial results from that analysis are jarring, said Jacques Baute, director of the agency's Iraq nuclear verification office: entire buildings and complexes of as many as a dozen buildings have been vanishing from the photographs.

It is interesting because I saw pretty much the same thing in the markets of Poland in 1991 when I lived there soon after the fall of communism where sad sack ex-Soviets were pawning off anything they could lay their hands on in Polish marketplaces. The further west they got in Poland the closer they got to German marks and we lived near that border.   In the markets of small towns and cities, there were all sorts of scientific instruments usually with nice osciloscopes with Russian script all over them amongst the bootleg REM tapes, tubes of crappy eastern european toiletries and jars of tasty stuff made by grannies looking for a few extra zloty. The best were the Siberian furs for sale by guys who rode the trains all the way from north of Mongolia. I bought an accordion I left in the UK with friends where it either sits in a closet corner or a part of a landfill.