THE BELGRAVIA DISPATCH: The Great New York Times al-Qaqaa Rollback...

October 28, 2004

The Great New York Times al-Qaqaa Rollback...

Let's briefly recap the NYT's handling of the al-Qaqaa chronicles.

1) First, the Times ran a big lead story saying that the explosives were definitely removed after the invasion. It was, of course, a piece that positively reeked of serving Kerry up an issue before the election. Particularly humorous, to a fashion, the language liberally employed through the article so transparently aimed at conjuring up monstrous Dr. Strangelove scenarios so as to herald the coming apocalypse ("greatest explosives bonanza in history,"It's like Mars on Earth," "easily move into the terrorist web across the Middle East", "Nagasaki,"blackened and eviscerated,", "No Man's Land.")

Shit, scared yet? The nuclear winter is here, man!

2) Mere hours after they 'broke' the story--the Times-Kerry axis had this story on tap. It was almost as if John Kerry had been holding his "great blunders" line in reserve once the Times got the piece up! (Oh, and cherub Edwards was mouthing off about the "clueless" Bushies--mining the Valley girl vote when not making sure his hair was comme il faut for the cameras).

3) Next, Krugman dutifully picks up the story. What's his op-ed called? You guessed it, a "Culture of Cover-Ups"! (Someone should tell Krugman that his credibility would be so greatly enhanced if, even just once, he had a single nice thing to say about this Administration. But, I guess, that's asking a little too much since Bush is the devil incarnate and bearded Kruggie plays ennobled dissident so well--garnering so many big awards from easily wowed Euro crowds who think him the new Sakharov or some such).

4) Next, the NYT gets into (somewhat) defensive mode. But, no repentance, just yet:

President Bush's aides told reporters that because the soldiers had found no trace of the missing explosives on April 10, they could have been removed before the invasion. They based their assertions on a report broadcast by NBC News on Monday night that showed video images of the 101st arriving at Al Qaqaa.
By yesterday afternoon Mr. Bush's aides had moderated their view, saying it was a "mystery" when the explosives disappeared and that Mr. Bush did not want to comment on the matter until the facts were known.

But others would be 'moderating' their views soon too, of course.

5) Next, the Times does its level best to distance itself from a story that, it appears, could be crumbling around them. After all, the key to this entire story (in terms of the political damage it could cause Evil Georgie) is that the explosives dissapeared after the invasion. There's quite a bit to mine here, and time is short, but here are some highlights:

President Bush addressed for the first time today the mysterious disappearance of 380 tons of explosives in Iraq, accusing his campaign rival, Senator John Kerry, of exploiting the issue without knowing, or caring about, the truth. Mr. Kerry, meanwhile, continued to hammer away on the issue.

Do me a favor. Substitute, in the graf above, the words "New York Times" where "Senator John Kerry" or "Mr. Kerry" is mentioned. Funny, huh?

Oh, and then there's this:

The very fact that Mr. Bush mentioned the missing explosives, after two days of silence since their disappearance was first reported, signaled that his campaign strategists recognized the issue's political potency in the final week of a presidential race that both sides agree could be exceedingly close.
People in the Kerry campaign clearly think too that the missing explosives may be a powerful issue...

Again, subsitute "the New York Times" for "the Kerry campaign" in the immediately preceding passage. And, note the transparent spinning in the graf above. First, POTUS was hiding for two days! Like, totally silent dude! And, now he's, you know, talking about it. So it must be a big deal! He's feeling the heat! Its got some, er, "political potency" to it...(Yawn. Can't they at least start doing all this boulot Lockhart with more subtletly?)

Then this:

The timing of the disappearance is crucial. The stockpile was found to be intact in March 2003, when United Nations weapons inspectors checked it just days before the American-led invasion. On April 10, one day after Saddam Hussein was toppled, American troops visited the Al Qaqaa depot, not finding any big cache of explosives but apparently not looking very closely either.
The troops' commander has explained that his unit was on its way to Baghdad and had simply paused at Al Qaqaa to plan the next stage of their advance.

If it could ever be established that the explosives disappeared while Mr. Hussein was still in power, Mr. Kerry's assertions that the disappearance illustrates the Bush administration's incompetence would be diluted.

Mr. Bush encouraged the idea today that the timing remained very uncertain. Accusing Mr. Kerry of making "wild charges," the president said American-led forces had seized or destroyed more than 400,000 tons of munitions in Iraq.

Note what the Times is trying to get away with here!?! It's Bush who is encouraging the "idea" that "the timing remained very uncertain." Translation: We at the Times continue to believe the timing is certain, not ambiguous, so that the explosives were removed after the invasion. But, as contrary facts are emerging, we can't say this anymore (at least not without greatly embarrasing ourselves--though we very much did in our initial 'gotcha' piece). Now, rather than accept some responsibility for all this--we are stepping back and distancing ourselves from the entire mess. See, it's now Mr. Kerry's assertions re: the administration's incompetence that "would be diluted." But, bien sur, nary a mention that our assertions (our headlined, hyped, hypebolic reporting) was perhaps innaccurate.

All pretty shameless, no?

6) Next, roll-back mode begins in earnest:

The disappearance of the explosives has roiled the presidential campaign since the report on Monday, by The New York Times and CBS News, that some of them may have been removed from an ammunition dump after American troops passed by and failed to secure the area. Officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency had warned American officials before the war began that nearly 380 tons of high explosives were hidden at the stockpile called Al Qaqaa. [emphasis added]

"Some of them may have been removed"? Sorry, but that wasn't how W. 43rd St. copy read. Again, so we don't forget, the initial story read thus: "White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year."

So now the Times is mis-characterizing it's original story. Without, of course, even beginning to broach whether they need to prostrate themseleves into full-blown mea culpa mode. But no, Raines has been expunged, so sky's the limit! Party on folks--get out the vote!

7) Signpost moving time. This story is no longer about Bush's personal responsibility in facilitating the greatest terrorist bonanza since the advent of modern history through grotesque negligence. Now, per this Times piece, the story has become much more, er, sober:

The disappearance of the explosives -- first reported in Monday's New York Times -- has raised questions about why the United States didn't do more to secure the facility and failed to allow full international inspections to resume after the invasion.

Hmmm...

8) Le rollback continu. Buried in this Reuters piece carried on the Times website:

Bush and Pentagon officials said the material might have been moved from the site before U.S. forces arrived.
Perkins also said it was ``very highly improbable'' that enemy forces could have trucked out such a huge amount of explosives in the weeks after U.S. forces first arrived there, considering the high level of U.S. military presence and how clogged the roads around the site were with U.S. convoys.

9) Time to play defense--but rollback now complete!

Looters stormed the weapons site at Al Qaqaa in the days after American troops swept through the area in early April 2003 on their way to Baghdad, gutting office buildings, carrying off munitions and even dismantling heavy machinery, three Iraqi witnesses and a regional security chief said Wednesday.
The Iraqis described an orgy of theft so extensive that enterprising residents rented their trucks to looters. But some looting was clearly indiscriminate, with people grabbing anything they could find and later heaving unwanted items off the trucks.

Two witnesses were employees of Al Qaqaa - one a chemical engineer and the other a mechanic - and the third was a former employee, a chemist, who had come back to retrieve his records, determined to keep them out of American hands. The mechanic, Ahmed Saleh Mezher, said employees asked the Americans to protect the site but were told this was not the soldiers' responsibility.

The accounts do not directly address the question of when 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives vanished from the site sometime after early March, the last time international inspectors checked the seals on the bunkers where the material was stored. It is possible that Iraqi forces removed some explosives before the invasion.

The Times is now busily casting about for Iraqi "witnesses." But, no witness accounts can keep them from now admitting what I've bolded above: that some of the explosives may have gone missing before the invasion. Wowser! And still--not an inkling of a retraction or apology. Hell, not even an ensy weensy clarification or such re: the initial story.

10) MoDo picks up where Krugman left off. She doesn't give one little Qa-Qaa about the facts, of course. Just spin, Cheney is Frankenstein, spin, George is hopelessly dumb, spin etc etc. You've read it all before....

11) Now, of course, and not reported in the NYT at this hour--comes this Bill Gertz bombshell from the Washington Times. Gertz is probably the best reporter at that paper--so I take it seriously (though I've always been dubious that massive amounts of Iraqi weaponry were moved to Syria or Iran).

Money grafs:

John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad. "The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units," Mr. Shaw said. "Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units." Mr. Shaw, who was in charge of cataloging the tons of conventional arms provided to Iraq by foreign suppliers, said he recently obtained reliable information on the arms-dispersal program from two European intelligence services that have detailed knowledge of the Russian-Iraqi weapons collaboration....
"That was such a pivotal location, Number 1, that the mere fact of [special explosives] disappearing was impossible," Mr. Shaw said. "And Number 2, if the stuff disappeared, it had to have gone before we got there."

The Pentagon disclosed yesterday that the Al-Qaqaa facility was defended by Fedayeen Saddam, Special Republican Guard and other Iraqi military units during the conflict. U.S. forces defeated the defenders around April 3 and found the gates to the facility open, the Pentagon said in a statement yesterday.

A military unit in charge of searching for weapons, the Army's 75th Exploitation Task Force, then inspected Al-Qaqaa on May 8, May 11 and May 27, 2003, and found no high explosives that had been monitored in the past by the IAEA.

The Pentagon said there was no evidence of large-scale movement of explosives from the facility after April 6.

Look, this version of events ain't airtight either. But, one thing is for sure. The NYT won't give it as much copy as their version of events which, as it turns out, is materially erroneous in terms of any judicious preponderance of the evidence test--as and where we sit today. Just don't look for any corrections or retractions. It's the Times, after all--and they're typically above such messiness. Wild-eyed Kerry ran with their story, you see, and now it's a Bush-Kerry explosives thang.

Meanwhile, the Times regally takes in the passing show--one they erroneously hyped up and published. They could have run a more sober piece--there is still a lot for the Bushies to be embarrassed about here--even in the Gertz piece scenario (why didn't Bush get good buddy Vlado to stop the arms-shuttling out of Iraq). But, instead, the Times tried to score a mega-October surprise style gotcha and hand it over to JFK the Second. And, it looks like, they came up real short.

(thax to reader Chris Jefferson for getting my butt in gear on this story)

UPDATE: The NYT is valianty keeping the story alive! But they are moving the signposts (again) and using lots of weasel verbiage:

A videotape made by a television crew with American troops when they opened bunkers at a sprawling Iraqi munitions complex south of Baghdad shows a huge supply of explosives still there nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein, apparently including some sealed earlier by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
The tape, broadcast on Wednesday night by the ABC affiliate in Minneapolis, appeared to confirm a warning given earlier this month to the agency by Iraqi officials, who said that hundreds of tons of high-grade explosives, powerful enough to bring down buildings or detonate nuclear weapons, had vanished from the site after the invasion of Iraq.

The question of whether the material was removed by Mr. Hussein's forces in the days before the invasion, or looted later because it was unguarded, has become a heated dispute on the campaign trail, with Senator John Kerry accusing President Bush of incompetence, and Mr. Bush saying it is unclear when the material disappeared and rejecting what he calls Mr. Kerry's "wild charges."

Weapons experts familiar with the work of the international inspectors in Iraq say the videotape appears identical to photographs that the inspectors took of the explosives, which were put under seal before the war. One frame shows what the experts say is a seal, with narrow wires that would have to be broken if anyone entered through the main door of the bunker.

The agency said that when it left Iraq in mid-March, only days before the war began, the only bunkers bearing its seals at the huge complex contained the explosive known as HMX, which the agency had monitored because it could be used in a nuclear weapons program. It is now clear that program had ground to a halt.

The New York Times and CBS reported on Monday that Iraqi officials had told the agency earlier this month that the explosives were missing, and that they were looted after April 9, 2003, the day Baghdad fell.

"Apparently." "Appears." Seems the jury's still out. As I said, lots of weasel words. And, critically, note the bolded portion immediately above in the last graf. That's a flat-out mis-statement. The original Monday New York Times story stated that "White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year"--not merely that "Iraqi officials" had so opined.

Again, moving the goal-posts. Look, the point of this post wasn't to argue that whatever went down at al Qaqaa was all just fine and dandy. It, very obviously, wasn't. But it was to showcase, pretty convincingly in my view, that the New York Times--in its so transparent rush to hand Kerry a big issue--1) rushed their copy, 2) given "1", the article in its original form was not factually provable by a preponderance of the evidence standard (especially in that it may have been factually inaccurate with regard to the Administration's reported acknowledgement that explosives vanished after the invasion; or, at best, way too thinly-sourced to convincingly make that claim), and 3) was, in general, evocative more of a NYT that feels simply like a WSJ of the Left than the much ballyhooed even-keeled, wise, ever-judicious 'paper of record.' Don't you think?

UPDATE: The always on the ball Tom Maguire adds more relevant detail. Check it out...

Posted by Gregory at October 28, 2004 01:43 PM

Comments

Interestingly, Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita is not supporting the "Russians ate my homework" theory. Says DiRita: “I am unaware of any particular information on that point.”

Why is that, do you think?

Possibility 1: the Administration knows the Russians did not take the explosives.

Possibility 2: The Russians took the explosives, which the administration knows, but it would be embarrassing or impolitic to admit that.

Possibility 3: The administration does not know whether the Russians took the explosives.

Which of these reflects credit on the Administration's postwar planning? None. Personally, I have my money on Possibility 3, but it's not clear how much the answer matters.

Posted by: mumbles at October 28, 2004 04:00 PM | Permalink to this comment

Ah, but Greg, you're missing a few crucial points to this story. The claims that the facility was "searched" on the 10th themselves crumbled ... which is evidently why the Bush Administration backed away from its claim that the materials had definitely disappeared prior to the invasion:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/politics/27bomb.html?oref=login&oref=login&pagewanted=print&position=

"White House officials reasserted yesterday that 380 tons of powerful explosives may have disappeared from a vast Iraqi military complex while Saddam Hussein controlled Iraq, saying a brigade of American soldiers did not find the explosives when they visited the complex on April 10, 2003, the day after Baghdad fell.

But the unit's commander said in an interview yesterday that his troops had not searched the site and had merely stopped there overnight.

The commander, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, said he did not learn until this week that the site, Al Qaqaa, was considered sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited it before the war began in 2003 to inspect explosives that they had tagged during a decade of monitoring. "

In other words, the "search" by the 101st was not a search at all, but just a cursory stop, and they did not do an exhaustive search. The 3rd Infantry Division did conmduct a brief search, but they also just stopped there on their way to Baghdad, their main objective, but they did find thousands of vials of white powder which later turned out to be explosives --- RDX and HMX are white powders.

Another point is that the original assertion that the weapons disappeared after the invasion came from an assertion by the Iraqi interim government that the explosives were stolen then. If this assertion turns out to be incorrect, I hardly think you can blame the Times for running the story --- those were the facts as reported by the Iraqi interim government at the time.

David Kay says this about the possibility the site was looted (by "the Russians" or anyone else):

"I must say, I find it hard to believe that a convoy of 40 to 60 trucks left that facility prior to or during the war, and we didn't spot it on satellite or UAV. That is, because it is the main road to Baghdad from the south, was a road that was constantly under surveillance. I also don't find it hard to believe that looters could carry it off in the dead of night or during the day and not use the road network."

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0410/27/wbr.01.html

I have to say the "Russians" story really has a "Weekly World News" quality about it. Their only evidence comes from the assertions of one guy, John Shaw.

Anyway, the larger story here is that the US doesn't know what happened to the explosives. They didn't guard it, they didn't monitor it, etc. If it disappeared prior to the invasion, why are we only finding out about it now? It must be that we haven't been paying attention to it, didn't guard it, so it could have disappeared nearly any time over the last year and a half, and apparently we would have had no clue.

Posted by: Mitsu at October 28, 2004 04:08 PM | Permalink to this comment

I think the search that turned up the white powder which was believed to be explosives was not conducted by the 101st, but rather the 3rd Infantry.

And since when is the fact that they didn't secure the site, therefore nobody is certain when the materials were removed a defense?

I agree with Mitsu. It's like saying, "We were so incompetent that we'll never know where the material was taken, who took it, and when. So there!"

http://tianews.blogspot.com/2004/10/curious-defense.html

Posted by: Eric Martin at October 28, 2004 05:15 PM | Permalink to this comment

The larger story here is incompetence: this was not, of course, the only critical site that wasn't secured. For example:

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/
oped/articles/2004/10/27/eyewitness_to_a_failure_in_iraq/

(split into two lines to avoid messing up the comments formatting)

as Peter Galbraith, a supporter of the war, writes, above, many crucial IAEA sites were totally gutted, with entire buildings taken apart, heavy machinery stolen (some of which had been monitored by the IAEA because they were "dual-use", i.e., usable in a nuclear program), biological agents taken, yellowcake stolen (!), etc. There's a huge pattern of incompetence here.

Posted by: Mitsu at October 28, 2004 05:40 PM | Permalink to this comment

An aptly subtle analysis and lucid explication of this Keller/Kerry axis of disinformation, evasions, elisions, casuistries and sophistical b.s. in general. It also demonstrates the lengths one has to go to in order to unmask all the contortionist narrative and vastly more subtle meta-narrative reflected in their logorrhea. Too, this unraveling represents a textbook case for analysing MSM/DNC alliances, even if we may never come to know the degree of overt complicity between all the players and accomplices. (The two hour time frame alone at least lends some degree of probability to a more overt coordination between the Keller/Kerry camps.)

Regarding Krugman and MoDo, your descriptions both in general and more specifically as related to this "explosive" subject matter are apt, if anything you're still far too kind, too reserved. Krugman as poseur/dissenter is particularly deserved as Krugman is well practiced in the art of self-puffery; he seems to sell himself on himself rather well. Much the same for MoDo, the Tammy Faye Baker of the NYT - all cosmetics, little substance or bona fides.

Posted by: Michael B at October 28, 2004 05:57 PM | Permalink to this comment

Um, I don't think so, Michael B.

Here's another breaking news story:

http://www.kstp.com/article/stories/S3723.html?cat=1%3E

A television news crew went to Al QaQaa on April 18, after the supposed "Russian looting" occurred. Quote:

[begin quote]

Using GPS technology and talking with members of the 101st Airborne Division, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS has determined the crew embedded with the troops may have been on the southern edge of the Al Qaqaa installation, where the ammunition disappeared. The news crew was based just south of Al Qaqaa, and drove two or three miles north of there with soldiers on April 18, 2003.

During that trip, members of the 101st Airborne Division showed the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS news crew bunker after bunker of material labelled "explosives." Usually it took just the snap of a bolt cutter to get into the bunkers and see the material identified by the 101st as detonation cords.

"We can stick it in those and make some good bombs." a soldier told our crew.

Soldiers who took a 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew into bunkers on April 18 said some of the boxes uncovered contained proximity fuses.
There were what appeared to be fuses for bombs. They also found bags of material men from the 101st couldn't identify, but box after box was clearly marked "explosive."

In one bunker, there were boxes marked with the name "Al Qaqaa", the munitions plant where tons of explosives allegedly went missing.

Once the doors to the bunkers were opened, they weren't secured. They were left open when the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew and the military went back to their base.

"We weren't quite sure what were looking at, but we saw so much of it and it didn't appear that this was being secured in any way," said photojournalist Joe Caffrey. "It was several miles away from where military people were staying in their tents".

[end quote]

Posted by: Mitsu at October 28, 2004 06:06 PM | Permalink to this comment

I believe that in your item 1 you meant to say the weapons were definitely moved *after* the invasion, not *before*, as you have it now. Otherwise nothing makes sense.

The photo which accompanies Krugman's columns is terrifying. You expect him to start rolling his eyes and wheezing like a bad Peter Lorre impersonator. I don't know why there aren't Krugman masks for Halloween.

This story is rapidly going the way of Kerry's non-meetings with the UNSC. It all comes down to spin. One source says this, another says that, another says well partly this and partly that, and yet another says that aliens from the planet Koozbain swooped down and gathered up all the explosives and left the metal husks, plus instructions in Arabic for making scrapple.

At this point the electorate doesn't know who to believe and goes back to wishing the damned election was over with already.

Posted by: Angie Schultz at October 28, 2004 06:14 PM | Permalink to this comment

BREAKING NEWS. Film Crew May have Smoking Gun

Quoted source is earlier on this thread -- ask the original poster.

Meanwhile...

A US film crew has footage of the explosives at al-Qaqaa that later went missing. This development may be the downside of embedding for the US military. It makes things hard to deny later on if you leave a filmed trail. For instance, the Russians can't have absconded with the explosives before the war if a US camera crew still sees them there in April of 2003.

http://kstp.com/article/stories/S3723.html?cat=1

A 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew in Iraq shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein was in the area where tons of explosives disappeared, and may have videotaped some of those weapons.

The missing explosives are now an issue in the presidential debate. Democratic candidate John Kerry is accusing President Bush of not securing the site they allegedly disappeared from. President Bush says no one knows if the ammunition was taken before or after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003 when coalition troops moved in to the area.

"We can stick it in those and make some good bombs." a soldier told our crew.

In one bunker, there were boxes marked with the name "Al Qaqaa", the munitions plant where tons of explosives allegedly went missing.

Once the doors to the bunkers were opened, they weren't secured. They were left open when the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew and the military went back to their base.

Officers with the 101st Airborne told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that the bunkers were within the U.S. military perimeter and protected. But Caffrey and former 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS Reporter Dean Staley, who spent three months together in Iraq, said Iraqis were coming and going freely.

"At one point there was a group of Iraqis driving around in a pick-up truck,"Staley said. "Three or four guys we kept an eye on, worried they might come near us."

On Wednesday, 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS e-mailed still images of the footage taken at the site to experts in Washington to see if the items captured on tape are the same kind of high explosives that went missing in Al Qaqaa. Those experts could not make that determination.

The footage is now in the hands of security experts to see if it is indeed the explosives in question.

Posted by: Michael Watkins at October 28, 2004 07:37 PM | Permalink to this comment

Mitsu,

First, I'd simply note that in addressing me, you failed to address so much as one lone, single, solitary aspect of my post. (The Russian involvement is still being explored - much like the entire story more generally btw - but I did not so much as allude to it. Even BD, in the original post, didn't mention it until the last few graphs of his somewhat lengthy post.)

Secondly I'd note the story, in terms of what is (now) being emphasized for purposes of political gain, is morphing - and decaying - almost perpetually. In other words you've been handed the baton from the prior runner without acknowledging that he ran across the field instead of staying on the track. You can go ahead and do that, even blithely so and affecting a disinterested, above-it-all panache, but everyone in the stands can see through your facade, you're fooling no one. (Even Bill Keller, albeit with a rather disingenuous use of deflection and misdirection, has acknowledged the story is not what it was represented as.)

Third, what exactly is the 5 Eyewitness News story, the one that a second poster does little or nothing more than repeat, telling us about the original RDX and related material? Anything at all? Or is this nothing more than yet another belated attempt to covertly pass the baton and keep the non-story fresh? I'd say that's exactly what it is. After all, the primary criticism is that this, certainly to this point, has been a non-story (at least in terms of what's been substantiated and verifiable) that's been leveraged for purposes of political gain, nothing more. To this point the 5 Eye News thingee is simply a continuation of that very same motif and little if anything more than that. Fact remains some 400,000 tons of explosives have been destroyed or accounted for, we also know there's been looting and some accounted for - but none of that is terribly surprising in post-Saddam/Uday/Qusay Iraq, nor is it terribly newsworthy in and of itself.

The most basic point being, if the NYT (or 5 Eye News, or whomever) has an authentic story, fine, run with it. But if so, if you do run with it, stay on the track; don't pretend a story is something more than that simply because Bill Keller, Joe Lockhart and company can make political use of it.

Posted by: Michael B at October 28, 2004 08:42 PM | Permalink to this comment

Guys and Gals,

BD is saying we don't know the truth. Nothing you are pointing out changes that. The kstp story doesn't mean anything unless someone says that what we are seeing is definitely HMX or RDX. Some reasons to be a skeptic? First of all IAEA documents now say the RDX was all but gone by then anyway.

http://www.abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=204304&page=1

In addition we don't know the HMX was there in March either. According to the same report from ABC that identified the IAEA documents about the previously removed RDX the HMX was not even checked, the seals were just checked. Unfortunately the buildings were easy to penetrate due to easily removed ventilation slats. Does this mean the HMX was gone as well? No. We do not know.

As for the pictures, nobody is denying that there was ordinance there. Is that the HMX? The pictures do not resemble the unmanufactured powdered form we are told we are looking for, but I am not an expert. Still I would spend more time being sketical rather than just indicting the military on this one. Also since there were fuses I am really suspicious as the HMX wasn't supposed to be ready to use with a fuse yet. Guess we should wait for more info. as should the Kerry campaign.

Posted by: Lance at October 28, 2004 08:44 PM | Permalink to this comment

angie--yes "after," not "before". how embarrassing given my emphasis in that intro portion. thanks for the correction--this was written in great haste. now corrected for clarity. best,gd

Posted by: greg at October 28, 2004 08:45 PM | Permalink to this comment

Alright then, let's look a little closer at what is known at this point in time.

The last time that international inspectors saw the explosives was in early March 2003, days before the American-led invasion.

Then on April 3rd, the 2nd Brigade of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division came to Al Qaqqa. The commander of those troops, Col. Dave Perkins, said the immediate concern when his troops reached the Al Qaqaa site was to defeat a couple of hundred Iraqi troops who were firing from the compound as the Americans surged toward Baghdad.

While there, Perkins' group came across thousands of vials of white powder, packed three to a box. They tested these materials for chem and bio agents, but the tests were negative. The substance was believed to be explosives, according to US officials.

The explosives in question, RDX and HMX, are most commonly in white powder form.

Then on April 9th, a brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, with an embedded NBC reporter present, went to Al Qaqaa on their way to Baghdad.

The commander of the troops that went into the Al Qaqaa facility on the way to Baghdad in early April, Col. Joseph Anderson, of the Second Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, has said he was never told the site was considered sensitive, or that international inspectors had visited it before the war began.

They did not search the expansive facilities at that time, nor did they secure them or leave behind a force to monitor them.

On April 18th, a news crew met the 101st at Al Qaqaa and were shown numerous barrels, drums and other materials labeled "explosives." There is photographic evidence of the exterior of these containers. There were also what appeared to be fuses in the same facility. The site was not secured when the new team and the Army group left to return to the nearby base.

Dr. Mohammed Sharra, who leads Iraq's science monitoring department, denies that the 380 tons of high explosives that has gone missing could have been moved in spring of 2003 before or during the war.

"It is impossible that these materials could have been taken from this site before the regime's fall," Mohammed al-Sharaa, who heads the Science Ministry's site monitoring department, said.

"The officials that were inside this facility (Al-Qaqaa) beforehand confirm that not even a shred of paper left it before the fall.

"I spoke to them about it and they even issued certified statements to this effect which the US-led coalition was aware of."

Still, it is ultimately uncertain when, how, and to where the materials were removed. That in itself is a condemnation of the Bush administration's lack of planning. The reason we don’t know the details surrounding the disappearance of the explosives is precisely because we were not securing or monitoring the site in as thorough a fashion as necessary.

It is possible that the material was removed beforehand by Saddam, or the even less likely option of the Russians, but we don't know because of the Bush team's blunder. Similarly, it is also likely that the material was looted after the fall of Saddam, but again absolute certainty is forestalled by our lack of adequate monitoring. Either way, this is pretty damning for Bush and Rumsfeld, and it once again raises the specter of adequate troop strength (especially considering that other sensitive sites were leeft unguarded and subsequently looted of potentially dangerous material - like the Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center ).

Posted by: Eric Martin at October 28, 2004 10:54 PM | Permalink to this comment

Eric,

There are several problems with your analysis. Here are a few. First you ignore that it is highly likely that some was moved earlier since ABC says the IAEA already says the RDX was for the most part removed. Also you assume the 3rd didn't do a thorough enough search to at least determine if the seals were there. The vials are prima facia evidence, if they were HMX, that the seals were no longer in place and the store compromised. More importantly is the spin that if the Bush administration cannot account for them then it shows Bush administration incompetence even if they were not there. I don't know that it shows incompetence even if they were looted after the war. However, if our planning called for an assessment of a sites importance then moving on, and if that site did not in fact seem important due to a lack of IAEA seals or evidence of large stocks of said material, then a better use of man power may have been quite wise and even smack of competence. That is a decision the military must make, not Bush. So saying that no matter what it shows Bush's incompetence is pure spin, not constructive criticism.

Posted by: Lance at October 28, 2004 11:18 PM | Permalink to this comment

Lance,

Since this story is still emerging, many details come to light in real time. Thus, could you provide a link to ABC's contention regarding the IAEA and the RDX so I can read that myself? Thanks in advance.

As far as the 3rd and the vials, I'm not sure we have their position on whether seals were in place. Even if they weren't, and that suggests the site was compromised, that doesn't mean that it wasn't further compromised post the 3rd's inspection.

The question of whether there was an assessment of the site's importance is interesting. We knew before the war that the site was important because of the material present. We know that the news reports contains photographic evidence of materials, and we know the 3rd found something there in the form of white powder. We also know that the commander of the 101st did not know the significance of the sight because he was not instructed as to its nature. We know Al Qaqaa has since been picked clean.

We also know that other sites were left unguarded and picked clean of dangerous material, including nuclear sites. This denotes a pattern indicating a shortage of the needed troops to maintain monitoring of important sites. That would be a problem of Bush and Rumsfeld's leadership.

Again, we don't know how this stuff disappeared because we weren't monitoring the situation. That is a breakdown of leadership because these sites needed full, thorough, and total inspection, as well as safeguarding. That should have been arranged beforehand.

Posted by: Eric Martin at October 28, 2004 11:38 PM | Permalink to this comment

In the final analysis, if there was a tatical error or mistake made on the battlefield, it may have happened "on George Bush's watch", but the president of the United States isn't personally responsible for every thing that happens at the combat level, any more that he has a right to personally claim credit for the acts valor and courage by individual soldiers in battle. The fact that Kerry has signed on to this theory, and his failure to admit these simple facts, and his willingness to exploit them for political purposes confirms that he is not ready to assume command, of anything.

Posted by: David A. Crossman at October 29, 2004 12:28 AM | Permalink to this comment

The ABC News story is pretty compelling. You can see a summary of the story here:
http://tinyurl.com/5jwqo

But to view the video you have to belong to some RealNetworks package deal, that I don't have.

But I am amused by the idea that the President is not personally responsible for anything on the battlefield. When did this happen? The incompetence here is that war planning (or aftermath planning) did not even take into account the data we had (locations of known stockpiles) to, you know, not give these weapons to terrorists.

Posted by: cassandra at October 29, 2004 02:35 AM | Permalink to this comment

I do not understand how the Bush adminstration could have overlooked the presence of 480 tons of some extremely powerful explosives (powerful enough that one pound can bring down an entire commercial aircraft). We knew that they existed. Something this powerful SHOULD HAVE been kept under close supervision. Even the possibility that this stuff has been used to kill and attack US soldiers is horrendous.

Whatever the detail flaws in the story, the fact that we did not contains these weapons is a huge huge problem. It indicates a big flaw in the administration's organization, if not directly Bush. None of the arguments I have heard by conservatives have adequately addressed this issue.

Posted by: MFM at October 29, 2004 02:58 AM | Permalink to this comment

I find it amusing that Eric and Casssandra think that A) we've either isolated or destroyed 99.9% of the munitions in Iraq, leaving 240-380 tons of stuff, therefore, B) Bush is incompetent and the mission is a failure.

Typical trolls.

Jimbo

Posted by: JImbo at October 29, 2004 03:07 AM | Permalink to this comment

I think it's rather silly to call Eric Martin's cogent summary of the state of the facts of this case the writings of a "troll." A troll is someone who posts deliberately inflammatory exaggerations that he doesn't really believe in order to provoke a response. Obviously Eric Martin is posting his own sincerely-held views.

The video from KTSP does appear to show the HMX:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/politics/29bomb.html?hp&ex=1099022400&en=3386d85551d694e2&ei=5094&partner=homepage

according to experts, including David Kay.

Of course a commander-in-chief should not be held responsible for every tactical decision made on the battlefield. But this should not have been a tactical decision made on the battlefield. The IAEA had informed the Bush Administration about these sites long in advance of the war, and they specifically identified this site as among the few that really needed to be guarded. But they didn't do it. This isn't just a failing of commanders on the ground --- it is a failing of strategic planning.

Remember, this is not the first or only major IAEA site that has been discovered to be looted:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-10-12-iraq-looting_x.htm

A number of sites have been looted --- not only IAEA sites but others. This is a failure of planning, not of tactical decisions of battlefield commanders. It is an unforgivable lapse.

Posted by: Mitsu at October 29, 2004 04:49 AM | Permalink to this comment

Eric,

Here is the URL:

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=204304

As I said, we don't have the facts and many are jumping to conclusions.

I also disagree with the competence issue. Let us assume a daring group of Iraqi's made like Kelly's Heroes and organized an effort to remove the remaining explosives against all odds from this dump before the May 8th inspection. Unlikely, but unlikely things happen. So what? The enemy is successful sometimes. It wasn't logistically possible to have that many more troops in the area in the early days regardless of the quality of planning, which was not Bush's responsibility, the roads were jammed if you remember. I trust Franks and friends had a better idea of what initially was the best use of men and material. At least a better idea than you, me or any of us back here. While these explosives were more important than many, they were not especially so. Their importance was less because of any use after the invasion than what Saddam might have used them for before the invasion. Given the 10,000 other sites we have to get some perspective here. Had we slowed our advance to lock these down we ran the risk of other deadlier weapons being used. Remember at that time we thought they had actual weapons to capture far more deadly than unprocessed explosives. The "we should have had more troops" argument doesn't wash either. First of all logistics meant that at least early on there were only so many troops we could have deployed. That criticism is more valid for later events. More importantly it shows a lack of appreciation for what it would have taken to lock down all the potential depots at one time.

Do the math: 10,000 sites x 150 men at each=1.5 million men just to garrison and secure ordinance and sensitive weapons sites. I don't know if 150 men is the right number to use, but whatever it was it was far more than under any conceivable scenario we could have devoted to the task. In the end these are high explosives which at the time would have been far down the list of top priorities given the more fearsome weapons we thought we were looking for.

Finally we have destroyed or secured the vast majority of the ordinance and removed the man who was busy stockpiling them.

Posted by: lance at October 29, 2004 05:58 AM | Permalink to this comment

Displaying the combination of breathtaking arrogance and utter ignorance that characterises todays left, mitsu deigns to inform us that it is "an unforgivable lapse" that some of the hundreds of ammuntion dumps which littered Iraq have been looted.

It seems, we are to understand, that anything untoward which happens in Iraq is the result of "poor planning" on the part of the Bush administration.

Mitsu has a touching faith in the ability of government planning to ensure that nothing, anywhere, ever goes even slightly amiss.

Given this mentality, I find the obsession with these explosives peculiar. Surely the deaths of the American soldiers who have died in Iraq are also an example of "poor planning", using this thinking? Surely the deaths of every person who has died in Iraq, period, are a result of "poor planning"?

Of course, like any good leftest, mitsu is utterly convinced that he is a centerist. He even seems to fancy himself something of a libertarian. Although one with supreme confidence in the ability of the state to micromanage every aspect of existance. An odd libertarian, surely?

Thanks anyway, mitsu, but we can decide for ourselves what is and what is not "unforgivable".

That after twelve years of "disarming" under UN "supervision", Iraq was one vast munitions dump; that is unforgivable.

That a flap is being raised about these munitions, which are less powerful than the widely available Semtex, and which have not been used to kill anyone, and whose quantity and whereabouts is unknown; that is unforgivable.

That some so-called "Americans", and I use the term loosely here, would feign outrage over this nonsense issue in a desperate attempt to win an election; that is unforgivable.

The Democratic party has lost it's collective mind. All it has left is hate and resentment and impotent fury.

Well, thats not quite all. They also have money. Lots and lots of money. I see Soros and Lewis have so far chipped in $23 million each to try to buy the presidency for John Kerry.

If we had a working media in America, that would be the major story of this election. Instead, we find ourselves obsessing about a few tons of explosives out of the several hundred thousand tons that were littered across Iraq, and which may not have existed in the first place.

Well, they say that a people gets the leadership they deserve. We will see soon enough if there are enough intellectual and moral eunuchs of mitsu's stripe in America to give Soros and Lewis what they want.

Posted by: flenser at October 29, 2004 06:13 AM | Permalink to this comment

Flenser, let's put this into perspective here. Explosives such as HMX and RDX have been used by terrorists in the past --- Pan Am flight 103, for example. The whole point of the war in Iraq was to prevent Saddam from helping terrorists --- looks like we just helped them a great deal.

HMX and RDX aren't any ordinary explosives. As David Kay put it on Aaron Brown last night, "Al Qaqaa ... was one of the most well-documented explosive sites in all of Iraq. The other 80 or so major ammunition storage points were also well documented." Even had we gone in with sufficient numbers of troops (the army wanted several hundred thousand, and we only went in with 140,000) we still probably couldn't have secured every weapons depot, but we sure as hell could have done a better job of it and secured these sites. Consider this: it's not only that we didn't secure those sites in the first days of the war --- we didn't secure them for months and months, and not just this site, but many others. And now the insurgents have those weapons.

This is not just my opinion. It's the opinion of David Kay, Bush's former chief weapons inspector:

[quote]

And quite frankly, to me the most frightening thing is not only was the seal broken, lock broken, but the soldiers left after opening it up. I mean, to rephrase the so-called pottery barn rule. If you open an arms bunker, you own it. You have to provide security.

AB: I'm -- that raises a number of questions. Let me throw out one. It suggests that maybe they just didn't know what they had?

DK: I think you're quite likely they didn't know they had HMX, which speaks to lack of intelligence given troops moving through that area, but they certainly knew they had explosives. And to put this in context, I think it's important, this loss of 360 tons, but Iraq is awash with tens of thousands of tons of explosives right now in the hands of insurgents because we did not provide the security when we took over the country.

[end quote]

It's really quite amazing that you guys aren't willing to see what is plainly in front of your face: this guy, Bush, has been a disastrously weak president when it comes to national security. We need a stronger man in office.

Posted by: Mitsu at October 29, 2004 06:41 AM | Permalink to this comment

"It is an unforgivable lapse." Mitsu

Yea, whatever you say.

Fact is though we don't know if the material is the infamously well publicized material or not. If it is, is it three (3) tons of it, or is it the much more trumpeted three hundred seventy seven (377) tons?

http://www.abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=204304&page=1

Excerpt:

"But the confidential IAEA documents obtained by ABC News show that on Jan. 14, 2003, the agency's inspectors recorded that just over three tons of RDX were stored at the facility — a considerable discrepancy from what the Iraqis reported."

Then there appears to be a problem with a NYT interview. (Who'd a thunk it, the vaunted NYT?) Specifically the interview with Col David Perkins:

http://powerlineblog.com/archives/008355.php

Read the whole thing, but a somewhat lengthy excerpt:

"The infantry commander whose troops first captured the Iraqi weapons depot where 377 tons of explosives disappeared said Wednesday it is 'very highly improbable' that someone could have trucked out so much material once U.S. forces arrived in the area.

"Two major roads that pass near the Al-Qaqaa installation were filled with U.S. military traffic in the weeks after April 3, 2003, when U.S. troops first reached the area, said Col. David Perkins.

"Perkins' description seemed to point toward the possibility that the explosives were removed before the U.S.-led invasion to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, rather than during the chaos afterward.

"[T]he Pentagon said in a statement, 'The movement of 377 tons of heavy ordnance would have required dozens of heavy trucks and equipment moving along the same roadways as U.S. combat divisions occupied continually for weeks prior to and subsequent to the 3rd I.D.'s arrival at the facility.'"

And as Tommy Franks noted today in Pennsylvania:

"[coalition forces have] destroyed 240,000 tons of munitions in Iraq.... [and] they have under control another 162,000 tons of munitions in Iraq."

Too, all that is on top of the fact that Bill Keller, executive editor of the NYT, admitted he went with the story Monday before they had done their homework:

http://powerlineblog.com/archives/008348.php

Posted by: Michael B at October 29, 2004 06:43 AM | Permalink to this comment

Flenser, I wanted to say ... well what you said.

And you say it so well, I just may link to it from my blog.

Mitsui: "The larger story here is incompetence"
NO THE LARGE STORY IS THAT MIND-NUMBED ROBOTS THINK A 17 MONTH OLD STORY IS A STORY AT ALL!

There is no incompetence AT ALL involved in our victory in April 2003, our ability to do it WITHOUT REFUGEE CRISIS, nor starvation, nor civilian disasters at large level. And to do it in 3 weeks so the regime was toppled. And to quickly follow up with humanitarian aid and assistance. It was difficult but done well.

Defeating Saddam the way we did was the best generalship in war that we have ever seen. IT WAS SUPERB.

But not everything goes perfectly. That is not 'incompetence' nor a failure to plan, that is "life". looting happened and was suppressed over a few weeks time and ended by May 2003 . The US military didnt make anybody do it, and if we cracked down by shooting people on the street it would have made things much much worse. BFD. Move on. 101st made al Qaqaa an HQ for most of April, so I dont even beliieve stuff was taken, but if it was back then, a simple point: Any story on it know is old news, packaged soley as a partisan last-minute poke-in-eye of bush. It is shameless. The breathless reporting of this missed the bigger picture that Saddam himself was a WMD! - and IRAQ as a whole was an ammo dump!

Seriously, we found
- hundreds of killing fields
- thousands of ammo dumps

That tells you a lot about the state Iraq was in before we came.

And justified not just liberating Iraq but how we did it.

Today - What is harming us in Iraq are insurgents and terrorists. They are the problem, not 1 of 1,000s of ammo stores that were (maybe, maybe not) looted 17 months ago.

Posted by: Patrick at October 29, 2004 06:50 AM | Permalink to this comment

>(3) tons or 377 tons

If you'd actually bothered to read to the bottom of that story, it clearly states that regardless of how much RDX might have been stored there, there were at least 194 tons of HMX there which is not in dispute. In any event, the real story isn't merely Al Qaqaa, as I've said, but the whole spectrum of critical sites left unprotected due to insufficient forces on the ground and inadequate planning (see below)

>That is not 'incompetence' nor a failure to plan, that is "life".

I fail to see your reasoning. Many people urged the Bush Administration to plan for the possibility of insurgency, etc. --- they did not do so. They insisted that it would go fine, there would be dancing in the streets, etc. The lack of planning was and is appalling. Even after they were notified that things were going badly, they still didn't shift their strategy enough. And it is not only me, a centrist, who says this --- it is Republicans who supported the war who say it, as Galbraith said (see link in earlier comment):

[quote]

According to an International Atomic Energy Agency report issued earlier this month, there was "widespread and apparently systematic dismantlement that has taken place at sites previously relevant to Iraq's nuclear program." This includes nearly 380 tons of high explosives suitable for detonating nuclear weapons or killing American troops. Some of the looting continued for many months -- possibly into 2004. Using heavy machinery, organized gangs took apart, according to the IAEA, "entire buildings that housed high-precision equipment."

This equipment could be anywhere. But one good bet is Iran, which has had allies and agents in Iraq since shortly after the US-led forces arrived.

This was a preventable disaster. Iraq's nuclear weapons-related materials were stored in only a few locations, and these were known before the war began. As even L. Paul Bremer III, the US administrator in Iraq, now admits, the United States had far too few troops to secure the country following the fall of Saddam Hussein. But even with the troops we had, the United States could have protected the known nuclear sites. It appears that troops did not receive relevant intelligence about Iraq's WMD facilities, nor was there any plan to secure them. Even after my briefing, the Pentagon leaders did nothing to safeguard Iraq's nuclear sites.

[end quote]

I stand by my assessment: Unforgivable.

Yes, we won the initial phase of the war quickly. Sure, I predicted as much at the outset of the war, as did many military thinkers at the time. But most of them, like Thomas White, former Secretary of the Army, knew we would need far more troops to secure the peace than we needed to win the war. This administration didn't listen to those people, and we're now in the situation we're in.

Posted by: Mitsu at October 29, 2004 07:10 AM | Permalink to this comment

I find this whole discussion depressing. All participants appear to be ignorant. First, an explosive does not have to be exceptionally powerful so that one pound of it brings down an airplane. One pound of virtually any exlosive military or industrial would bring an airplane down. Secondly, these were conventional - i.e. not nuclear explosives. What made them unique that their characteristics made them particularly suitable as a building block for a nuclear weapon. This is why they received special attention of the weapon inspectors. By themselves, they are merely necessary, but not sufficient to build a nuclear weapon. Other, far more difficult to obtain components like shaped charges of U235 or plutonium plus precision firing circuitry is needed,to build a nuclear weapon. By themselves they are merely conventional explosives, probably no better or worse than others of the kind. The focus immediately after the war to locate WMD's. These explosives by themselves, even though may be needed for nuclear weapons, cannot be considered WMD's. To fault for the military and political leadership for not providing enough manpower to guard conventional explosive sites immediately after the fighting, especially when they could not even bring the 4thID in a timely manner, is the worst kind of second guessing and Monday morning quarterbacking that I have seen. And I have seen plenty of those recently.

Posted by: Tom at October 29, 2004 07:11 AM | Permalink to this comment

"Flenser, let's put this into perspective here. Explosives such as HMX and RDX have been used by terrorists in the past --- Pan Am flight 103, for example. The whole point of the war in Iraq was to prevent Saddam from helping terrorists --- looks like we just helped them a great deal."

NONSENSE.

There were estimated 600,000 TONS OF ARMAMENTS in Iraq. A HUGE STOCKPILE. Controlled by Saddam.

Saddam was aiding groups like Ansar Al-Islam, paying off Palie suicide bombers, and using his oil-for-corruption money to buy illicit arms and pay off / bribe western politicians to fight against the sanctions.

He had a huge

"HMX and RDX aren't any ordinary explosives. "

VERY MISLEADING STATEMENT. RDX is a raw material, not a complete weapon. they need processing mixing, etc. are only special because they make good 'shaping' charges for implosion devices. no better than the farm fertilizer than Tim mcVeigh used for making a 'boom' (higher density exposive thought)...
There is NO evidence this material was taken let alone used by terrorists. Most of the IEDs that kill US soldiers are based on artillery shells. why? they have the fuses.
t is less useful than simply getting an RPG and firing it, etc.

"the army wanted several hundred thousand, and we only went in with 140,000)"

FALSE. The plan was General Franks' plan - he's ARMY, CentCom cmdr - HIS PLAN. It was a GREAT PLAN ... WE WON. QUICKLY. FEW CASUALTIES. Read his book and get educated and corrected on this point!

"t's really quite amazing that you guys aren't willing to see what is plainly in front of your face: this guy, Bush, has been a disastrously weak president when it comes to national security."

pathetic! He takes out the Taliban, Saddam, gets 3/4 of Al Qaeda, gets the AQ Khan nuclear weapons trading network, gets Libya to quit WMDs, gets S.A. and Pakistan on board fighting terrorists, gets trade pacts passed, stands up to knuckleheads in the UN ... and stays firm when terrorists try to shake us off the path in Iraq, Saudi Arabia and pakistan ... and you call that 'weak'. Pathetic.

We are much safer thanks to president Bush and we dont need the man who missed most of his intelligence commitee meeting to monday-morning QB, when he cant even asnwer for months and months the basic question - would you have gone to war in Iraq .... it took Kerry 9 positions and 18 months to be as decisive as Bush was in March 2003.

"We need a stronger man in office."

A man who met three times with the Vietcong in 1971 and conspired with them? No thanks!

The stonger man by far is President Bush and so I appreciate your endorsement of him.

Posted by: Patrick at October 29, 2004 07:25 AM | Permalink to this comment

Michael B., nice job on your response to mitsu. If we are simply talking about the journalistic professionalism of the New York Times running the story, and portraying it as they did then if, as Mitsu says, we don't know when the explosives went missing, surely the New York Times didn't either when it reported the story. To now be searching for arguments to prove that It might be possible that the weapons were taken after we arrived - as a justification for the Times original story is missing the point. The original Times story expressed no such uncertainty. But then again that doesn't matter to people like Mitsu because it was right in the general sense that Bush is incompetent. Therefore for the Times to claim a certainty about events that were uncertain doesn't matter. After all, it's just one specific fact being sacrificed to prove the more important truth, that Bush is incompetant. If you're uncertain about that then you'll just have to take Mitsu's word on it.

Mitsu also talks about the dual use weapons that were apparantly at that site. Maybe he has not been one of the many to call Bush incompetant for believing Saddam was working on WMD, but if he has been, I wonder if he's softened his position on that.

One final point to all those who are so quick to accuse Bush of the "I" word (incompetance), I wonder if they've ever run a business. This naive idea that a president is somehow directly responsible for every action that occurs under his watch is ridiculous. A head of state is a manager. There is no way he can directly supervise all the things that are being performed throughout the government. Does that mean a president is powerless and unimportant? Not by a long shot, but like any manager, the way he influences things is by chosing good subordinates, having open lines of communication, and being able to step in and have a more direct involvement to correct certain matters under his watch when the time calls for it. Was Bush incompetant because he didn't immediately respond to this story? Unlike Kerry who had no problem responding in short order as if he knew all the facts, Bush made an honest answer, that essentially he didn't know and would look into it. Can you imagine being a High School principal and having a parent ask you what you thought about their kid's progress this year. You could lie and give some kind of answer like "Oh Johnny's doing a great job. He's done really well in art class. I think he may have the potential to be a great painter one day", or you might ask who his teacher is and suggest they make an appointment to come in and meet with you and the teacher to discuss Johnny's progress. If you chose the former option, just hope that Johnny doesn't turn out to be blind.

Posted by: Mike R at October 29, 2004 07:28 AM | Permalink to this comment

" I find this whole discussion depressing. All participants appear to be ignorant. First, an explosive does not have to be exceptionally powerful so that one pound of it brings down an airplane. One pound of virtually any exlosive military or industrial would bring an airplane down."

Well said... I seem to recall that box cutters were enough to cause great damage ... enough to

I stand by my statement that our problem in Iraq is not excess weapons, but insurgents and terrorists.

"econdly, these were conventional - i.e. not nuclear explosives. What made them unique that their characteristics made them particularly suitable as a building block for a nuclear weapon. This is why they received special attention of the weapon inspectors. By themselves, they are merely necessary, but not sufficient to build a nuclear weapon. Other, far more difficult to obtain components like shaped charges of U235 or plutonium plus precision firing circuitry is needed,to build a nuclear weapon. By themselves they are merely conventional explosives, probably no better or worse than others of the kind."

RIGHT. exactly.

Posted by: Patrick at October 29, 2004 07:29 AM | Permalink to this comment

>To fault for the military and political leadership for not providing enough manpower

You seem to be unaware of the history surrounding the deployment. The Army initially wanted to go in with several hundred thousand troops, and take 8 months to build up a force. Rumsfeld initially wanted a lighting strike force of about 50,000 with a quick drive to Baghdad. After a lot of debate, they finally compromised on a force of 140,000.

The quick drive to Baghdad worked --- but Shinseki, White, and others in the Army leadership were proven correct, later. It is not a matter of Monday morning quarterbacking --- these debates were happening on Sunday morning, and this Administration chose wrong, very wrong.

What's worse is that they clearly were slow to change their strategy, later. Yes, they adapted a little (as Greg is fond of pointing out), but to me, it's far too little, way, way too late. I mean come now: they didn't even realize the RDX and HMX was gone until the IAEA told them about it just recently.

I predicted from a very early stage that these guys would screw up the postwar --- and it happened. No Monday morning quarterbacking here. It's just that as time goes on the evidence is simply rolling in that I was right all along, as were many other people.

This is not a case of an unpreventable disaster. Many people predicted it, but this Administration chose to ignore them. Why should we continue to entrust them with our national security?

Posted by: Mitsu at October 29, 2004 07:32 AM | Permalink to this comment

A comment slipped in, above. Regarding "dual use weapons" --- I assume you mean dual-use equipment, and no, they weren't at this site, but at other sites. The point was they were dual-use, i.e., not being used for a nuclear program, but they could be used for one. They were under monitoring by the IAEA, and frequently inspected. Our own government has concluded that Iraq was not using them for a nuclear program. This does not mean that this equipment should not have been guarded. Before the war, we knew where that equipment was and were monitoring it --- now we have no idea where it went.

Posted by: Mitsu at October 29, 2004 07:41 AM | Permalink to this comment

>There is NO evidence this material was taken

I have no idea what you mean by this. There is plenty of evidence it was taken --- it was there when the IAEA last inspected, it is gone now, no one knows for certain where it went. So what are you trying to say? It just flew off by itself into the sun?

>The plan was General Franks' plan

It was not his original plan. Franks initially wanted several hundred thousand, just as Shinseki and White did. Rumsfeld wore him down over a long period, and when he finally caved, one general commented about that, "he's drunk the Kool-Aid." Franks caved in to Rumsfeld's pressure, much to our detriment.

>GREAT PLAN

Great, if you're only talking about the first weeks of the war. And, like I said, I always thought that Rumsfeld was right that the initial war would not require a huge number of troops.

>you call that 'weak'

Absolutely. He's been weak. Did you know that Wolfowitz wanted to attack Iraq first, before Afghanistan, but it was only because Powell argued strenuously against this idea that we in fact hit Afghanistan (a good target) first? Wolfowitz thought Iraq would be a cakewalk and we needed to get in a victory "quickly." Imagine how bad it would have been had Powell not been there!

As I argued in Greg's "Bush endorsement" topic, I believe we should have focused on North Korea and contained Iraq. The strategy we are following will only help the terrorists in the long run, in my view (except in Afghanistan, where we more or less ran things fairly well, with the exception of not enough military and financial support recently).

Posted by: Mitsu at October 29, 2004 07:52 AM | Permalink to this comment

"Yes, we won the initial phase of the war quickly. Sure, I predicted as much at the outset of the war, "

Well, I'll be sure to put you up for a MacAurthur genius grant then! I was off by 5% - I thought 22 days, and it took 21.

The war plan btw, had 125 days as contingent plan. went much better than planned!

"But most of them, like Thomas White, former Secretary of the Army, knew we would need far more troops to secure the peace than we needed to win the war. This administration didn't listen to those people, and we're now in the situation we're in."

Again, this statement is talking-point BS. Franks was running the show, and had the numbers he wanted. This was true in BOTH Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Many people urged the Bush Administration to plan for the possibility of insurgency, etc. "

not that lie again - of course they planned for insurgency - what do you think the 'deck of cards' and the 100,000 troops

"They insisted that it would go fine, there would be dancing in the streets, etc. "

"The lack of planning was and is appalling"

What is appalling is the martinet attitude that any wartime setback is a 'lack of planning' that's idiotic and simply does not comport with the facts... they DID plan, and they DID execute according to those plans, and as I stated, a HOST of ILLS THEY PLANNED FOR DID NOT OCCUR.
They had THOUSANDS OF BODY BAGS that didnt get filled;
They had REFUGEE TENT CITIES that were left empty;
They had tens of thousands of MREs given to Iraqis;
They had fears and planned for hundreds of oil fires, dams being blown up, and chemical attacks (That genl Franks believed based on statements from Egyptians and Jordanians would surely occur) - didn't happen, even thought it was in the plan;
They had water pumped from Kuwait to Basra;
They had (yes) protection of facilities, etc.

They planned governing institutions and set up city councils and elections, had a conference - within 6 weeks of the fall of Saddam. etc.

ALL THIS THEY PLANNED. Dont say they didnt plan. They planned plenty; they worked it through and had a very successful operation.

One thing they didnt have in mid April was the 4th ID already in-country, so they were short on troops for a few weeks post fall of Saddam. You can blame Turkey and not poor planning for that. We had a setback and went ahead and did well anyway.

Now, the claim is that it is 'unfogivable' that despite the US military winning a victory at lost cost in lives in 3 weeks, we should have not let things get out of hand.
We lost much in the looting of schools, hospitals, etc. Looters also took stuff from Saddam's palaces, businesses, hotels, and, yes, ammunition dumps. RPGs, mines, and artillery shells were taken from one of thousands of weapons caches. Part of this was deliberate Saddam policy that turned hospitals and schools into armories, and weapons were in every nook and cranny of the country. The military was wrongly blamed for the fact that fresh out of defeating Saddam with low casualties we didn't end the looting pronto (it took a few weeks to calm things down). What would have ended it would have been if we started shooting looters left and right.

But we did shoot a few rioters in one town in April 2003. In a town called Fallujah. Ten Fallujah citizens were killed while protesting and rioting against U.S. military action in late April 2003; we were taking over a school or some such innocuous but provocative activity. That event set Fallujah on a course that was more unstable than the rest of Iraq. Should we have started shooting looters in Baghdad, Basra, Karbala, and Mosul? While the remnants of fighting remained? Would that have helped? Saddam's security melted away rather than stay on the job, so a populace eager to be "Ali Baba" had no police force and no tyranny to hold them back. This was the heday time when an Iraqi wrote a sign "Sexy Whiskey Freedom" - the breath of freedom. Would it have helped to choke that off that anarchic freedom with brute violence against looters?

I won't convince the hand-wringers, but it is certainly clear to any balanced observer that this is pretty nitpicky problem in a post-totalitarian post-war environment. Far far worse conditions were avoided.

What is remarkable about the 'no planning' myth is how we plan, then hit a target or miss a target, the same lie comes back. E.g. we planned last november the roadmap to elections by January 2005. we hit our first target - interim constitution; we hit the second target, an Interim Government and sovereignty handover by June 30th; we are ontrack to hit the next target, elections in January 2005. Yet throughout, the whining about 'no planning', while the roadmap moves forward.

Another example, we plannedextensively on reconstruction, both pre-war and then post-war Bremer came up with his plans. Due to security, the execution has been slow. but we did plan, and we have executed on the plans as best we can. on electrictiy for example, it took longer to get that up to speed than planned, but today Iraq is generating more than 20% above the pre-war levels and almost double where they were after the war in the summer of 2003. And it is increasing.

There is only one benchmark that in the end matters strategically or not, though, and that is the success of democracy and the defeat of the terrorists and insurgents.
Defeat those enemies and secure democratic rule and freedom in Iraq and the rest become historical footnotes.

Posted by: Patrick at October 29, 2004 07:55 AM | Permalink to this comment

"You seem to be unaware of the history surrounding the deployment. The Army initially wanted to go in with several hundred thousand troops, and take 8 months to build up a force. Rumsfeld initially wanted a lighting strike force of about 50,000 with a quick drive to Baghdad. After a lot of debate, they finally compromised on a force of 140,000.

THIS NONSENSE IS COMPLETELY DEBUNKED BYGENERAL TOMMY FRANKS IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY "AMERICAN SOLDIER".

The plan in Iraq was the Franks plan - HE SOLD RUMSFELD - not the other way round. History proved Franks correct.

Posted by: Patrick at October 29, 2004 07:59 AM | Permalink to this comment

Look, we're simply not going to agree, Patrick. You think 100,000 troops were suffcient --- I don't think so. Our experience in Bosnia and elsewhere meant that we should have had several hundred thousand.

In any event, we can agree on one thing: if we can put Iraq on the path to stable democracy, that will be the best outcome of this affair. I just think there is little evidence Bush can do it. Perhaps Kerry can't, either, but I am willing to go with someone I think has a chance of doing it over someone with a proven record of mistakes.

Posted by: Mitsu at October 29, 2004 08:02 AM | Permalink to this comment

Mitsu, yes I meant dual use equipment not weapons. When you say that this was not an unavoidable disaster I assume you're talking about the postwar problems in general, and not this specific incident which by your own admission, we still don't know when the weapons went missing - before we arrived or after. While you certainly have a right to criticize the administrations handling of the postwar period, those criticisms in themselves don't justify not voting for Bush. It's important to compare him with the alternative. In doing so, it might be worth asking whether Kerry would have even gone into Iraq. Perhaps you would have preferred that he not, but if you think it was wise to topple Sadam, what makes you think that a Kerry handling of the occupation would have been better?

Posted by: Mike R at October 29, 2004 08:10 AM | Permalink to this comment

">The plan was General Franks' plan

UTTER NONSENSE. Again, if you look at Franks' Afghanistan plan and Iraq plan they shared the same them - mobility and battlefield intelligence instead of mass. THIS IS NOT NEW CONCEPTS. This is blitzkrieg for the 21st century. Franks explains in detail in his autobiography how and whiy SINCE THE MID 1990s he believed they could fight a 'gulf war' style war with far far fewer men. Franks put the first plan together in early 2002. It was vetted the the JCoS, but he didnt appreciate their intrusions and felt the Army was the WORST at trying to think more about their silo than thinking "jointness" . The final plan ended up larger than HIS original plan.

Franks was looking at new technologies for DoD in an earlier post, and realized how much it could change battlefield speed and awareness. He believes as Patton did that a mobile division on the move has far more power than one not moving or moving slowly. Speed can defeat mass. That is what Operation Iraqi Freedom was about... they went around cities and mopped them up later. They managed to brilliantly create tactical surprise CONSTANTLY despite having a war telegraphed prior for 6 months.

All this was how Franks planned it from the get go.
Except for one thing: They we to have TWO fronts, north
and south. But the one front was a contingency and they had a plan to bring in via Peshmerge/Kurdish territory some forces.

.. Anyway, the nonsense that Rumsfeld made Franks do anything is thoroughly and totally debunked in his book. It was telling that Franks believed in his Afghanistan plan, which relied on Special Ops (Kerry's critique on Tora Bora - a total lie - is in fact a critique of our special ops and their ability to be effective at calling in air strikes and work with local allies), and Rumsfeld was getting nervous and kept asking 'where are the results' 3 weeks into the war about it.

You are mistaken if you think Rumsfeld pushed CentCom. the opposite. Franks pushed the CentCom envelope.

This has little to do with long-term post-war ops, but much to do with why Rumsfeld is on the RIGHT side on transformation of DoD.

Final question: Do you think we should have 'planned' in our diplomacy for France to stab us in the back like they did?

Posted by: Patrick at October 29, 2004 08:14 AM | Permalink to this comment

All right, Patrick, I will accept your point there since I haven't read that book. In any event, I agree with Shinseki and White, and not with Franks, if Franks is the one who came up with that plan.

I argued at great length about my feelings regarding the overall strategy elsewhere, and I don't really want to get into that here. In short I think, as I said above, that we should have focused on North Korea. I felt that we should have used Afghanistan as our democratic experiment. I also felt that if we were going to go into Iraq (which I thought would be more costly than it was worth) we should have gone in with overwhelming force.

In any event others have argued these points, including many pro-war bloggers and publications that Greg has referenced, I will let them argue these matters further and stop here for now and go to bed.

Posted by: Mitsu at October 29, 2004 08:21 AM | Permalink to this comment

"Look, we're simply not going to agree, Patrick. You think 100,000 troops were suffcient "

I think only this - General Tommy Franks and our fine military proved that we had enough troops in his plan to liberate Iraq from Saddam..... BECAUSE WE DID IT. In 3 weeks.

"In any event, we can agree on one thing: if we can put Iraq on the path to stable democracy, that will be the best outcome of this affair. I just think there is little evidence Bush can do it."

Well, we are already winning in Iraq in many ways. Not just the reduction in losses in October compared with previous 2 months, but the direction is right:

Victory is in our grasp

"Perhaps Kerry can't, either,"

Kerry will almost certainly abandon Iraq, for the simple reason that his core of supporter are 'anti-war' people who will NOT TOLERATE THE COST of our perseverence - the terrorists will test him and will HAVE TO FOLD or prove his whole campaign is a lie. ("I can get troops home.") He has NO clue of what he'll do differently, this is proven by his own plan, which flattered Bush by PLAGARIZING FROM BUSH'S PLANS.

Frankly, Kerry's is grasping at whatever will get him elected, and the transition will kill off the hope for Iraq, because it will embolden the terrorists. Kerry has the poor instincts of a Jimmy Carter on these matters, and is indecisive to boot.

HE WOULDNT EVEN ANSWER WOODWARD"S 22 QUESTIONS ON IRAQ!

"but I am willing to go with someone I think has a chance of doing it over someone with a proven record of mistakes."

Oh please. Kerry has a proven record of mistakes!!!
He was against everything Ronald Reagan did to win the Cold War. He voted againt the first Gulf War, he wants a 'global test' yet when we had allies to kick Saddam out of Kuwait we punted, he voted against the $87 billion for the most craven of political reasons, he tried to cut intelligence spending in the mid-1990s after the first WTC attack, he wants to GIVE nuclear fuel to Iran (shades of the mistake we made with RPNK in 1994) and bilaterally talk to RPNK (wny? whats wrong with multilateral front to get RPNK to disarm?) ... Kerry has been "weak, wobbly and wrong" on national defense and national security, as Zell Miller said.

Bush's record: We got Khalid Sheik Muhammed, and 100s more like him. We got the Taliban. we got Saddam and most of his minions (more TBD). we got Libya off of WMDs.

What Kerry did in his 20 years in the Senate for this country ... nothing good.

Posted by: Patrick at October 29, 2004 08:32 AM | Permalink to this comment

Ah, links dont work ...

More of my commentary on conditions for victory in Iraq are here:

http://freedomstruth.blogspot.com

http://freedomstruth.blogspot.com/2004/10/victory-in-iraq-is-in-our-grasp.html

I have comments on the exploding Qaqaa story as well.

Posted by: Patrick at October 29, 2004 08:35 AM | Permalink to this comment

"All right, Patrick, I will accept your point there since I haven't read that book. In any event, I agree with Shinseki and White, and not with Franks, if Franks is the one who came up with that plan."

See my above point. yes, Franks though the Army brats were wrong.

"I felt that we should have used Afghanistan as our democratic experiment. "

More than an experiment now. democracy is advancing there and elsewhere (next up, Iraq).

"I also felt that if we were going to go into Iraq (which I thought would be more costly than it was worth) we should have gone in with overwhelming force."

Again, history has decisively proven Franks right. We decisvely defeated an army and a regime in 3 weeks with about 200,000 troops in theatre.
Franks was right.

There's really not an argument for us to have on it, as long as we separate out your point and narrow it to OCCUPATION. The post-war occupation issue can be treated separately from the Army's false belief that invasions themselves required far more troops than we had in the plan.

You cant argue with Frank's 21 day Thunder Run.

"I argued at great length about my feelings regarding the overall strategy elsewhere, and I don't really want to get into that here. In short I think, as I said above, that we should have focused on North Korea. "

OOH, A LEFT HOOK. That is at a different level and very off the wall ... "focussed" ... hmmm ... so you think we should have invaded North Korea? Sent in a B2? or just sat in a panelled conference room and "focussed" by gabbing with diplomats? (hint: we are already doing the latter)

Since we have applied every pressure short of invasion, we had the proliferation security initiative, we had the talks with China and 5 -power talks and attempt to get RPNK to the table, and interdicted WMDs shipments, etc. ... or do you advocate that we should have bombed their nuke plant?

I find that "focussed" argument really curious because it imagines that our State Dept of tens of thousands of people and our DoD of 1 million + cant walk and chew gum at the same time. We have to focus on one threat at a time in a presidential term or in a year? We have deftly handled diplomacy there while managing other theatres and issues. Short of an invasion force, we have all the tools we need 'on the table' even with our occupation/liberation of Iraq ongoing.

Nevertheless, Saddam Hussein offered Osama Bin laden safe haven in 1998, according to the 9/11 report, so IMHO that tips the balance towards Iraq, the country we already had under nofly zones, sanctions and who was on our terrorist sponsoring list for 20+ years. Deposing the man responsible for the genocide of 100,000 kurds and killing hundreds of thousands of his own people didnt hurt either. I still despise RPNK's dictator too, but the whiners who talk about 'we should have dealt with North Korea' rarely propose the kind of operation that would really do any good (one's involving JDAMs, B2s, snipers, or SEAL teams :-) ). Just more gabbing, is there usual answer (eg Kerry's typical useless answer) as if talking to lying murdering communist creeps like Kim Jung Il will do any good.

Posted by: Patrick at October 29, 2004 08:55 AM | Permalink to this comment

"Did you know that Wolfowitz wanted to attack Iraq first, before Afghanistan, "

I am SHOCKED to find bold thinking and differences of opinion in an administration!!

Um, did you know that Bush and his advisors made the decision within 10 days of 9/11 that target #1 was the Taliban?

Did it occur to you that maybe it was *appropriate* to put different options on the table at that critical time? And at least consider them?

Did it also occur to you that your example, far from showing Bush as weak, shows him as a good executive, who takes input, but then takes the OTHER inputs - like from Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld and others - all good advisors - and ended up making his final decision, the correct one?

Wolfowitz did his job by putting the idea out there.
Bush did his job by shooting it down and focussing on Afghanistan and the Taliban and OBL's training camps first ... (ah, that FOCUS thing).

Good for both of them.

"Imagine how bad it would have been had Powell not been there!"

Um, YOU WANT POWELL, VOTE BUSH!

Posted by: Patrick at October 29, 2004 09:02 AM | Permalink to this comment

Patrick:

Dang it, just about to go to bed and I couldn't resist reading here again. Suffice it to say that I've had lots of discussions of North Korea already with others, and I believe there was another strategy we could have pursued with North Korea other than the one Bush pursued (which in my mind amounts to basically doing almost nothing).

http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/movabletype/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=4095

Read it there if you wish to --- I don't have time to discuss it yet again right now.

Posted by: Mitsu at October 29, 2004 09:11 AM | Permalink to this comment

You guys Mitsu and Patrick are the best debaters I have come across the web. You put together very good arguments, you listen to ( or rather read ) one another and I find you are making more sense than most people.
This is why I raise the a point to you that both of you take it for granted - no shame as it represents conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom that we would have avoided post-war problem by having more troops on the ground. I maintain that we would have been worse off with more troops. First, defeting insurgents in face to face fight, we never had a problem. We always had enough people to defeat them in direct confrontation. So from that point of view, they were not needed. What we missed for a long time and still do is good intelligence and arabic speaking intelligence officers. More troops do not help here. Secondly, most of our casualties were suffered by roadside bombs targeting travelling U.S. troops. More troops, more need for logistical support, more travel on the road, more casualties. Thirdly, and this may be the most important, more troops, more occupiers, the Iraqis would have just sit and watch us do the heavy lifting. If there was trouble, they would bitch and would have never taken ownership of running their own country. Now that they have some, almost if not total ownership in running the country and being the prime target of insurgency, maybe they realize that if they do not put their shit together, they will never have a chance for decent peaceful life.
Tom

Posted by: Tom at October 29, 2004 09:32 AM | Permalink to this comment

Great post, Greg. I have linked to it at my blog.

It is incredible that the IAEA would stand around pretending that Saddam had some right to possess these types of explosives. If one of their applications was for use in a nuclear bomb, why did he have them, why did Blix and el-Baradei even think he should have them, and what is the effective difference between such materials and the weapons of mass murder that Saddam supposedly didn't have?

It's like all the chem suits we came across early on in the war. Did Saddam have them around because he thought we were going to use chemical weapons with the world's media riding along with the troops? Nonsense. Saddam had every hope of resuming his weapons programs. That's why he had the yellowcake and the special explosives and the people to put them to use.

Posted by: Toby Petzold at October 29, 2004 10:32 AM | Permalink to this comment

Mitsu:

Here's an exam question for you.

HMX, RDX, and PETN are ordinary military high explosives, nearly unusable in their raw form. They are far less useful then the shaped and fused explosives in bombs and shells. From any terrorist's point of view, they are at best no more useful than any of the other 600,000 to 1,000,000 tons of high explosives loose in the country. Of course you should know this, since you're a military demolitions expert. At most, 380 tons of high explosives may have went missing after the start of hostilities on March 20, 2003, although this seems unlikely. Regardless, your requirement for the success of Operation Iraqi Freedom is that greater than 99.95% of Iraq's conventional munitions stores be captured and secured within 14 days of the initiation of hostilities, say, by the time the 3 Infantry Division arrives at the site on D+14. That this is your requirement is not debatable; it is the inescapable, logical conclusion to your argument.

Please explain how many troops are necessary to accomplish such a task. You may round to the nearest division. Provide your operational plan showing objectives, timetables, and deployments for this 14-day period. Since you seem to know at least as much as any graduate of the Army Command and General Staff College, this should be a breeze for you.

Go!

Posted by: Armin Tamzarian at October 29, 2004 11:27 AM | Permalink to this comment

>At most, 380 tons of high explosives

First of all, as David Kay and the IAEA and others have pointed out, this site was a high-value site that the IAEA specifically warned the Bush Administration about; it was not one of tens of thousands, but perhaps one of 80 or so major, well-documented sites, according to David Kay. The issue here isn't perfection, it is at least safeguarding the most important sites within a reasonable timeframe. And, as I keep saying, the issue isn't merely Al Qaqaa, but the combination of numerous high-value sites that were left unguarded for many months, even a year or more.

With respect to Toby's point --- the reason you want overwhelming force is to prevent a large-scale insurgency from getting off the ground in the first place --- it's preventive. By leaving so many gaps in our deployment, we allowed insurgents to gain access to a vast supply of weapons, which means they have weapons and ammunition which could last them a hell of a long time.

Posted by: Mitsu at October 29, 2004 12:26 PM | Permalink to this comment

Incorrect response.

The issue is the explosives, or at least, it was your issue originally. You complained about 0.05% of Iraq's high explosives being unaccounted for. Therefore, your demand is that greater than 99.95% of the high explosives in Iraq be accounted for and secured within some short period following D-Day - 14 days, 21 days, or something in that range.

You did not answer the question. You did not provide your operational plan.

Zero credit.

Posted by: Armin Tamzarian at October 29, 2004 12:30 PM | Permalink to this comment

Let's hypothetically assume that all the most extreme, unfounded, asinine assumptions are correct. Let's say the Russians took it. Hell, let's say it was never there, that the miserable UN girlie-men were in cahoots with Saddam all along, and they helped Saddam hide the stuff ages ago, long before the war. Let's assume that all our dandy satellites, which, we were told before the war, supposedly even had the ability to tell us that a truck was no ordinary truck, but rather a "mobile decontamination unit," nevertheless were blind when it came to spotting Saddam moving all this stuff.

Let's also say that our Iraqi allies, the hand-picked people who we currently trust to help us run the country, are all fools and liars (since they are the first to testify that the joint was intact until we showed up, and then it got thoroughly ripped apart only after we unlocked the door, literally, and walked away, literally; see http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/iraq_us_explosives). In connection with this, let's also put aside the way Kerry got castigated after he dared to criticize Allawi. Let's assume it's now open season as far as smearing our allies. If it's OK for Guiliani to now try to blame it all on the troops, then surely it's OK to also try to pin the blame on the current Iraqi government, which we recently installed. Whatever it takes. Time is short.

Let's also put aside the named eyewitnesses who said "employees asked the Americans to protect the site but were told this was not the soldiers' responsibility" and that "it took the looters about two weeks to disassemble heavy machinery at the site and carry that off after the smaller items were gone." Let's put aside eyewitness reports of "an orgy of theft so extensive that enterprising residents rented their trucks to looters." (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/28/international/middleeast/28bomb.html)

Let's also dismiss the KSTP video showing an IAEA seal on a bunker at Al Qaqaa (http://kstp.com/article/stories/S3741.html?cat=64). Let's also dismiss the words of various experts, including David Kay, our former chief weapons inspector, who all assert that the KSTP video shows our troops entering one or more bunkers containing large stockpiles of HMX, and then walking away without even so much as closing the door behind them (David Kay recently speaking with Aaron Brown, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0410/28/asb.01.html).

Let's also dismiss the multiple eyewitness accounts that "make clear that what set