What are all you guys doing on here, with the Red Sox (hopefully) about to sweep?
Anyway:
The Russian story is a joke, don’t get your hopes up.
And if you actually read the damn thing, you’ll see it doesn’t even have anything to do with al Qaqqaa.
No. I think we were responsible beginning at the time the 101st showed up which was our first presence after the fall of Baghdad. April 9, 2003
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“Thousands of vials of white powder, three to a box” is not 384 tons of explosive. I can put a thousand vials of whatever into the trunk of my compact sedan and still have room for luggage for a weekend getaway for my kids and I.
I also take these reports from during the war with a grain of salt. Lots of things were found that later simply did not pan out, nerve agents, WMDS, nuclear material. You recall the false alarms as well as I.
THousands of vials and 384 tons are different things in any event.
Are you suggesting the explosives at Al Qaqaa never existed? The IAEA did certify their existence, and put seals on them, before the war started.
Ok guys… lets see the positive side. Bush says seeing only the negative is bad:
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At least now we know where the hell did the Iraqis get enough material to produce so many IEDs and car bombs…
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Those insurgents haven’t been smuggling explosives into the country after all… the borders are “sealed”.
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US satelite surveillance services obviously needs a budget increase… since they couldn’t find the “WMD” trucks… or the trucks wisking away tons of explosives.
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The invasion of Iraq was in record time… so fast they didn’t notice those trucks going to Syria or other convenient locations.
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The UN got it right… especially when they say there weren’t WMD… and when they say there were explosives
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Finally… if Iraqis are using high grade explosives to blow up soldiers… they aren’t using them to build nukes !
No. I’m simply saying that if you want to argue that the explosives disapeared under Bush’s watch you need to demonstrate that they were in there at a time when it can reasonably be shown that we were responsible for them.
I don’t beleive that such a time can be reasonably argued to occur before the fall of Baghdad.
Therefore, to have any argument whatsoever, the presence of this 384 tons of explosives must be conclusively demonstrated to have been on site after the fall of Baghdad.
There is no such proof.
To make the argument without such proof is to engage in a willful deception. A lie.
If we are going to be rational about this (God forbid) than we have to realize that in a war torn country which we conquer in a couple of weeks, there is going to be a mopping up period and an evaluation period in which we determine what is located where, prioritize it, categorize it, inventory it and then protect it.
It is not as if we just magically take over the country and are in control of it in a moment, and that anything that happens thereafter is our fault.
Even with such a site as this one, I don’t think we can be expected to be on top of it instantaneously. It’s going to take a couple of weeks to a month… which, it so happens is what it appears to have taken.
Not at all. This is an election, not a trial. There is no “burden of proof,” only a “burden of persuasion.” And it is perfectly legitimate, indeed perfectly honorable, to argue that, based on the cirumstances as we see them, it is more likely than not that the explosives were present when the U.S. troops arrived on the scene and could have been secured if the leadership had been more attentive.
What is more, there is proof to that effect – at least four witnesses who saw the explosives being looted right under the noses of the U.S. troops after Baghdad fell. See RTFirefly’s post above, linking to an article from the New York Times.
There seems to be a lot of noting each mistake made in Iraq and the immediate pointing the blame directly on Bush. I do believe he has ultimate responsibility over what happens in Iraq and Afganistan. However I do think that Bush, and any other president in wartime, should be judged by what happens in aggregate. War is messy. Pointing at each bad thing that happens and asking why the president hasn’t been impeached yet is silly. The president does not control all action on the ground and cannot. Conversely, I don’t think he deserves credit for every little good thing that happens, either.
I believe the majority of contributors to this thread are holding the president to a much higher level of responsibility than any previous president, including the only president I know of who actually had a “The buck stops here” sign on his desk.
Though Truman had his “the buck stops here” sign, do any of you really believe he meant it in the way you think that standard should be applied to Bush? Reading the history of WWII (and really, all wars before Gulf I) is in part a list of avoidable tragedies (battlefield tragedies, I mean, not the greater tragedy of war) that could have been avoided with better intelligence, forsight, planning, simple communication, or less hubris. Some of these individual tragedies cost the lives of more soldiers than have been killed in the entire Iraq conflict.
Had Truman, the one who claimed that the buck stopped there, been truly held to this level of scrutiny, according to you, he should have been coated with Alpo and thrown to the wolves for his wartime ineptness. As should have FDR, Johnson, maybe Kennedy, Nixon, Lincoln, and whoever-was-president-during-the-war-of-1812.
While they may not have checked all of the explosives in March (I don’t know), they had checked all of them a few months earlier…In January, I believe, to the point where they even knew that Iraq had removed a relatively small fraction (I seem to recall 30 tons) from the amount that IAEA had originally tagged several years earlier. I believe Iraq claimed they had used this for civilian construction purposes and later provided some documentation for (although not conclusive proof) of that.
From this story that you linked to in another thread:
(bolding added)
You seem to have conveniently forgotten that the whole thing was raised by a letter sent from the Iraqi government (Ministry of Science and Technology) to the IAEA. You can a copy of the actual letter at the link with the N.Y. Time article. The letter is dated 10/10/2004 and says:
So, if you have a complaint about when they actually vanished and when it became known, the complaint you have appears to be with the Iraqi interim government. [Note that it is clear from other dates in the letter that “9 - 4 ~ 2003” means April 9, 2003 not September 4, 2003…i.e., they are using the European not the American dating convention.]
Bush didn’t have to invade Iraq. There was no good reason for him to do it. That one decision makes him responsible for absolutely everything that has stemmed from it. Any apology for Bush based on how difficult it is to be a wartime president fails immediately in the face of the fact that he chose to start this war without any justification.
Would that you and George Bush would have required anything near the same standard of proof to back up claims before launching a war! That would have saved us all a lot of trouble.
glilly: I am a bit confused at what you are saying. Do you think that it is a minor thing that a war that was sold to us as being necessary to keep WMDs out of the hands of terrorists actually almost surely made it much more likely that these WMDs would have ended up in the hands of terrorists if we were not lucky enough that they did not exist in the first place? And, that some very dangerous weapons that are not WMDs but are the explosives of choice in providing the trigger for nuclear weapons did indeed fall into God-knows-whos hands?
To me, this is not a minor error. And, it was an error that flowed from a whole course of action that was ill-advised, to put it mildly.
The first US presence on the scene was April 3 or 4, and the unit was the Third Infantry Division. Cite.
From the same cite as above:
Not to nitpick, but we are talking about thousands of boxes here, not thousands of vials. Perhaps each of these boxes contains a couple of kilograms, and so we’re already getting up to the tons range, though not up to the 384 tons point, certainly. They saw these large quantities of what they thought were explosives, in a white powdered form like HMX.
But we haven’t made any mistakes in Iraq, glilly. The whole mess now is fallout from Bush’s ‘catastrophic success.’ By complaining, and pointing at Bush, people are just giving the president credit where credit is due. That much of that credit is catastrophic merely reflects the nature of the victory we’ve achieved.
No.
Before the war, we supposedly were doing satellite recon, Humint, Special Forces recon, and so forth, to determine what we believed was located where, and prioritize the targets.
In the case of al Qaqaa, we knew what was there. Plus we apparently believed evidence of a WMD program, and possibly actual WMDs, might be there.
Should we have committed enough troops to minimize any interval when nobody - neither Saddam’s troops nor our own - controlled the major arms depots we knew about? Well, duh. Did we? Well, no. The infantry arrived on April 3, and left the next day. The cavalry arrived on April 9, and left the next day. Neither one had inventorying or securing the site as part of its mission. And nobody else whose mission it was seemed to be available. That’s because the ivory-tower theorist who calls himself Secretary of Defense thought he knew better than the generals, and decided we didn’t really need 300K or so troops there after all.
And the BushCo story of when we knew what about al Qaqaa, once things settled down, has changed enough times that I can’t keep up with it. What’s clear is that they knew a lot of bad shit was there before the invasion, but they were in no hurry to see whether it was still there afterwards.
My frickin’ point exactly, just as much now as it was in February of 2003.
How many of us were yelling, “if you invade, it makes it more likely that terrorists will grab Saddam’s weapons, in the chaos of war.” And while there were no WMDs for them to grab, the insurgents-to-be did apparently make off with 760,000 pounds of the most serious non-nuclear bang in existence.
Then maybe we should have just bombed the hell out of that place on March 19, y’know? Or maybe if we just realized that the can of worms we’d open up by going to war might be a bit bigger than the problems we had with Saddam if we kept on patrolling the no-fly zones, and then thought better of the whole idea.
If you read my posts, I have in fact been tying the particular events under discussion here to the grand policy of invading with a much smaller force than the generals believed necessary. And I have discussed the issue of what the President’s role should be, when the generals who reported to the SecDef strongly disagreed with the SecDef about this matter. The President did not exercise due diligence: he clearly did not ask the obvious questions like, “how are you going to both guard the WMD sites and conquer Baghdad? How many troops do you need to do each of these, and do you have enough to do both at once?” Let alone “about this stupid arms dump the IAEA keeps bugging us about, what’s this all about? What happens if the terrorists get their hands on this stuff? How do we keep that from happening?”
He fucked up.
I have been in organizations. I’ve watched my bosses and my bosses’ bosses in action. I know the sorts of questions that get asked. Right now, I’m a boss, too, so I’ve had a chance to measure Bush’s bossness against how I handle much less important situations as a boss.
And that’s the standard that I’m measuring Bush against: GS-13s and 14s and 15s in the Federal government, that supposedly dysfunctional workplace. And you know what? It’s Bush who doesn’t measure up.
Apparently you are confused. I didn’t say anything about the overall necessity or frivolousness of the war. I’m not sure how you divined that out of my post.
My jist and my subtext (for those not paying attention) was that nasty, nasty, yet avoidable, things happen in every war. That people attribute those things directly to the president in this case, yet look back longingly at Truman and his piece of carved wood on his desk and the needless dead Allies under his command, make those people seem unaware of the history and complexity of war. This also makes their arguments seem more partisan and foolish and hypocritical than if they’d simply said what they really meant: “I think this war was a bad idea, and I think we should vote against Bush.” Yes, it is possible to say this and believe it and yet not fault Bush for not personally, superhumanly, stopping every bad thing that happened in Iraq.
(And for the record, I find it highly implausible that someone will find themselves with the means to produce or secure a detonateable nuclear core and the designs for a detonator, yet be in want of some explosives
.)