I too’ve been at near the maximum level of pissed offedness that I can maintain for an extended length of time for quite a while now.
Re thread title, how 'bout
“US Accidentally Releases 760,000 lbs of High Explosives to Help Fuel Bloodshed in Iraq”?
I almost shit myself reading Left Hand’s post.
How about “How many fuck-ups does it take before you people get it !”
The answer, apparently, is (N+1). A truly irrational number.
Sorry; I hate to ruin anyone’s trousers.
The answer, my friend,
is blowing in the wind
Err…sorry. Having a Dylan moment.
Daniel
I find myself wondering – maybe the Bush Admin believed its own propaganda about the Iraqis welcoming the Coalition forces as liberators. Maybe they did not bother to secure these explosives because they did not expect the insurgency to happen. Any chance of that?
Not that that would be an excuse, of course. It would still be a massive failure of judgment – both not expecting the insurgency, and not guarding the explosives just in case.
This is what you get when the administration’s first priority was to safeguard the oil wells, damn the nuclear facilities, damn the weapon stockpiles.
We are all in danger.
translation:
Yeah, calm down, dude! it’s not like we let them get nukes!
Translation:
Yeah, dude! It’s not like we let them get 100 thousand tons of explosives! It was only 380 tons! It’s spilled milk! We can’t close the barn door now, the horse already left! It’s water under the dam! Stop being so negative! At least we did something right! It’s not like we screwed up every single thing we ever set out to do!
I hate to ruin the party–but may I ask a question?
Why do I detect a feeling of smug satistfaction behind so many of the posts in this thread?
Are you enjoying the way that more American soldiers are going to die?(Is somebody thinking "serves 'em right–they deserve to get blown up ")
Or do you actually believe that Bush intentionally ordered the army to ignore these explosives?
Suggesting that the US army “gave” these weapons to the enemy is tin-foil hat territory. (I hope I am being whooshed here, and those suggestions were meant as satire–but I’m not sure…)
What happened was a terrible,terrible mistake by the army.It was either a failure of intelligence (not knowing the weapons site existed), or a failure of combat operations, (not placing that site on the list of high-priority missions). The relevant officers responsible for those decisions should pay the price.
But it is a mistake of tactics, of day-to-day operations. Not a mistake of strategy or leadership by Bush.
Unless somebody can prove that the White House knew of the existence of this specific weapons depot and deliberately ignored it, then let’s leave the blame where it belongs—on the intell officers, the aerial photo interpreters, the officers in the field,etc.
There are plenty of good reasons to vote for Kerry next week–but there’s no need to celebrate when Islamic fanatics get their hands on 100 truckloads of explosives.
Because your telepathic abilities are on the fritz? I am seriously appalled by this, not the least bit satisfied, and I’ll thank you not to accuse me of such hideous motive.
It is a failure of strategy, in three ways:
Daniel
It may have been a failure of intelligence, but not of the CIA variety:
I am not celebrating this news. It is absolutely horrible. Based on this (which amazingly manages to dwarf all of the other incompetence), I don’t think Bush deserves a single vote, let alone the 50% or so of the voting public that he’s likely to get. This administration is the most incompetent bunch of morons to ever sully the White House corridors, and should be impeached today, let alone being voted out in a week.
I assumed it was obvious that the fact Team Bush did not directly advise the military to dispense the explosives to the insurgency does little to ameliorate the situation. I didn’t realize that some would see the fact that this was an accident makes it okay.
While things would indeed be worse if Team Bush had in fact intended to arm the insurgency, I’ve assumed all along that this was a fuck-up rather than a plan. However, it is a fuck-up that happened because of a bad plan. Team Bush is responsible for the plan.
Consider that these high-explosives were looted from former Iraqi military facility that played a key role in Hussein’s efforts to build a nuclear bomb. The explosives went missing in April of last year. This is yet another unsecured nuclear weapon related facility that was looted on a massive scale.
There were not enough boots on the ground to secure what we went in to secure.
Doesn’t it upset you that the plan Team Bush picked failed to achieve basic and primary goals of the invasion and thus (most likely) led to more dead GIs?
Well since it had been monitored by IAEA, and a matter of publicly available knowledge it’d take some truly criminally incompetent planning not to’ve looked up the nuclear facilities in Iraq. I have my dioubts that Team Bush is so tragically incompetent in this instance. I see that you find the indea of Team Bush’s incredible incompetence a plausible theory.
Or perhaps the US military did plendidly with what they had available to them, but just weren’t given the resources that they needed to get all of the jobs done.
Field officers were discussing how they did not have enough troops to secure the weapons sites more than a year ago.
Can’t prove that hey knew of it, but the info was publicly available. Any party who engaged in the diligence due to a life and death situation such as war and securing potential nuclear site would’ve known about it.
If Team Bush was ignorant that only makes things so much the worse.
There’s reason to believe that rather than Islamist fanatics, the explosives are in the hands of Iraqi nationalists.
I have no idea.
Your detector should instead be registering outrage.
Take it to the shop or buy a new one.
From that link: “John Kerry has no vision for fighting and winning the war on terror, so he is basing his attack on the headlines he wakes up to each day,” said Bush-Cheney campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt.
How does one even respond to shit like this? Here are a few possibilities I came up with:
(1) Well, I suppose basing his attack on factual headlines is kind of silly when he should just be doing what Bush is doing and basing his attack on stuff he makes up.
(2) Well, if the Administration’s vision of fighting and winning the war on terror is to allow the terrorists free access to some of the most powerful explosives known to man, I’d take “no vision” as an alternative any day.
Come now, don’t you think you’re overstating the danger a bit here.
Take this response from Scott McClellan this morning:
And the first priority, from our standpoint, was to make sure that this wasn’t a nuclear proliferation risk, which it is not.
Man, that’s a relief.
From the NY Times article in the OP:
What do they need to “know” something, a personal communication from the Archangel Gabriel? The explosives depot was tagged and sealed by the UN. Of course Bush et. al. knew it was there.
“Every day when I wake up the headlines give me something new to attack Bush with”?
You know, I actually predicted to myself months ago that this sort of defense would be waged by Bush defenders…Having absolutely no way to defend the Administration’s handling of Iraq, they would start accusing those of us who want to see this Administration gone of “thinking bad thoughts” and “hoping bad things” in regards to Iraq.
Well, let me tell this to you once very clearly: Even if we were “thinking bad thoughts,” we are not magical thinkers. Our thoughts do not make things happen in Iraq. What makes things happen is the administration’s disastrous policy and any attempt to blame us for that just shows how freakin’ desperate you are.
So, frankly, you can take your nasty implications about what we are thinking and … [editted because this is not the Pit].
Bull shit! If you are going to invade a country to keep things out of the hands of terrorists, wouldn’t a big part of your strategy be to make sure you accomplish that objective? If I were President and we were discussing invading Iraq to keep WMDs out of the hands of terrorists, my first question would be: “How do we know that this action won’t actually make it more likely the weapons will end up in the hands of terrorists, particularly since I have the CIA telling me that Saddam himself is unlikely to give them to terrorists?” As it turns out, it seems we were lucky as hell that Saddam didn’t have WMD or some of those would likely be in terrorist hands too.
From the New York Times article:
There were articles about this lack of care in guarding these sites, there were those of us on this message board that harped on this point time and again. Hell, I think I just posted the links to the problem of these sites not being adequately guarded in another thread last night.
I am just so pissed right now that I can hardly think straight.
What I mean is that maybe they were too busy to read the memos that contained this cort of vital info. Wouldn’t be the first time ignorance was a Team Bush defense against an accusation of mendacity.
does anyone know how these high explosives compare to TNT? i’m just used to hearing such things in tons of TNT. how high is high explosives
“It is stable in storage and is considered the most powerful and brisant of the military high explosives.”