Sorry to burst the bubble here folks.CNN Article
Sorry, didn’t realize there wa a page 2 & others have brought up the story already.
Or, alternatively, they didn’t have the knowledge because they never thought it very important to inventory what was at these sites in comparison to what the IAEA knew to be there (despite IAEA pleas that all this stuff needed to be kept track of). Hey, what’s a few hundred tons of advanced explosives between friends?
Ok, these are pretty strong explosives, but is there any reason to believe that there were not already stuff like this and worse out there already. In which case the military should already have been prepared for this (and worse) regardless?
Are you referring to the small cut that Kerry proposed back in 1994 or the much bigger cut that Bush’s new CIA director supported back in 1995? At any rate, neither one passed. Oh, I suppose what you must be talking about is the Republican-proposed cut similar to Kerry’s which did pass. From factcheck.org:
Bush has said many times that he listened to his generals, who said they didn’t need more troops (or at least he listened to the ones who would tell him that). Let’s pretend that it was the generals in the field who decided what level of troops we would use. Now we see that those generals were clearly wrong. Have any of them been reprimanded? As citizens, we are unable to reprimand them directly. If their Commander in Chief won’t do it, we’ll have to fire him. Why is that so hard to understand? Even if the Bush Administration itself was not making the collossal mistakes, they should be held accountable for mistakes which they refuse to hold others accountable for.
Any reasonably well-managed military, yes. But we’re talking about George Bush’s watch. The neocons have about as much foresight and self-awareness as a slew of rutting monkeys.
Ah, then you must have a cite of when the So-Called Liberal Media (SCLM) initially had access to this story.
Like Daniel’s already pointed out, many of us buy into the idea of a “The Buck Stops Here” sign on the President’s desk.
But more significantly, the war plan - and especially the troop strength, or rather the lack thereof - was Rumsfeld’s creation from beginning to end. Rumsfeld reports directly to the President. And some heavy-hitting generals who report directly to Rumsfeld were pretty emphatic that far more troops would be needed. This was public knowledge.
If I’m a boss, and my subordinate comes to me with a plan for our biggest project, and I know that his subordinates have serious concerns about his plan, you know what? I’m going to be asking my guy all sorts of questions about what their objections are, and whether his plan addresses those objections. I might even get his key people in the room, so that I can see whether my guy really is addressing their concerns, before I sign off on the plan. This is what a boss does. Sure, he lets his people do the heavy lifting, and asks few if any questions about their decisions with routine stuff. But when something’s a big deal, he asks enough questions to make sure his people are doing the right things, because in the end, it’s his responsibility.
And if the boss isn’t smart or knowledgeable to even figure out which questions are the right ones to ask, then he’s been promoted beyond his level of competence. One of these days, I’m gonna quote Machiavelli on the subject.
As you’ve already mentioned, some explosives are more powerful than others, and these are about as kick-ass a conventional explosive as there is. Some explosives are also more risky to work with than others; this stuff is very easy to work with: it needs a blasting cap to set it off; it’s not gonna just blow up in your face. A lot of the explosives in Iraq were in inconvenient forms to work with, such as in artillery shells. Apparently it’s pretty damned dangerous for amateurs to take the explosives out of artillery shells and fashion them into homemade bombs; news reports in the summer of 2003 indicated that the occasional Iraqi was blowing himself up doing this sort of thing. So if you’re an amateur revolutionary, this stuff is unquestionably the stuff you want to work with.
At any rate, there are two things to point out here:
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If there really wasn’t much of this stuff floating around Iraq, and most of the other available explosives were difficult and risky to work with, then failing to control this stuff was a serious mistake. After all, we’re talking enough stuff for maybe a quarter of a million roadside bombs, or (according to Phil Carter of Intel Dump) between 2500 and 8500 Oklahoma City-level bombs.
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If the type and quantity of uncontrolled explosives lying loose in Iraq after the invasion was so great that this was a drop in the bucket, then what the Sam Hill were our planners thinking?? To have a workable country, you need a state monopoly on violence over a certain level. Failing to control all these Iraqi munitions dumps from the time we pushed Saddam’s troops back from them pretty much doomed our nation-building designs from the outset.
Of course they can’t be traced back; it’s not like we had a chemical fingerprint of this stuff up front. But as cited in the OP, there are Administration officials who strongly believe this stuff has been used extensively against us.
Ummmmm… OK:
6, 8, 12, 31, 46; 45; 4
If I’m right, I want a piece of that 20 million.
I have a question about the pronounciation of Al QaQaa:
is it pronounced the same as a well-known euphemism for poop? Because I could see some great headlines. Like:
Bush Administration in Deep QaQaa
Kerry Tells Bush to Eat QaQaa
The QaQaa Hits the Fan
Hey Brutus, are you still pitching BP? I want my turn at these big fat pitches!
Shouldn’t have attacked at all. (Duh!)
If we were going to invade, going in with enough troops to secure both suspected WMD sites and major conventional weapons dumps on the way in, would have been the preferred option.
But no, Rumsfeld had a theory.
Here’s one thing that hasn’t gotten enough play, IMHO: the wingers used to ridicule us lefties as ivory-tower theoreticians, head-in-the-clouds types with lots of ideas about how the world should work, but no practical experience at running things.
Hel-lo, neocons!
If it makes you feel better to believe this, then go ahead and believe it. As for me, it made me sick to think of all those soldiers killed or maimed in explosions, whose deaths and injuries we could have so easily prevented. Getting blown up has to be a horrible way to die, and is surely a horrible thing to survive.
So yeah, I’m livid at Bush. I don’t think he planned for young men to die this way; he didn’t plan at all, AFAICT, except for the grand photo op as the victorious leader. And American troops have paid the price for his lack of planning, over and over and over again.
I don’t have to “pin this on Dubya”; it’s his. This wasn’t just some fall-through-the-cracks deal; this was major both by itself, and as part of the general let’s-do-this-with-too-few-troops plan.
Regarding that NBC crew, one of the embedded reporters who was there that day spoke to MSNBC today.
Bolding mine. Transcript taken from http://www.democraticunderground.com, admittedly a partisan website, and I didn’t watch the original interview, since I have a job.
From my ultra-conservative, Bush apologist friend:
“Iraq moved them to another country before we even moved them. Probably Syria. It is a non-issue.”
Er, before we invaded…
If your about to be invaded, moving all your good explosives to a neighbouring country is the obvious thing to do…
RX: I have a question about the pronounciation of Al QaQaa:
is it pronounced the same as a well-known euphemism for poop? Because I could see some great headlines. Like:
Bush Administration in Deep QaQaa
Kerry Tells Bush to Eat QaQaa
The QaQaa Hits the Fan
Good to see that somebody is focusing on the important issues here!
I found a related story on al-Jazira online (in Arabic). As far as I can tell, the Arabic spelling is qaf-ayin-qaf-ayin (with fatha voweling), the pronunciation of which is not easy to describe in English!
I haven’t heard the word pronounced, but according to the spelling it ought to be something like “al-QUH-uh-QUH-uh”, if you can get those gutturals going. I suppose it does sound a little like “caca”.
The use of propaganda by the “Democratic Machine” would make “Uncle Joe Stalin” proud.
“Democratic Machine” doesn’t mean “Republican Operatives,” old buddy. Read the transcript of the MSNBC interview, just a few posts above yours, before you spin yourself into the ground.
Daniel
They didn’t find it, because they weren’t looking. I’ll quote part of it again for the betterment of those with poor reading skills.
They conducted no organized search. They were there no more than ~24 hours, which was insufficient time to fully search the place even if they had begun one. So this report by NBC does nothing to establish that those explosives were gone before April 9. Of course it doesn’t verify they were there either. At best, the NBC report is totally irrelevant; but on the other hand it shows there was no effort to secure the site from looting what munitions they did see which were described as a “vast amount”.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
They didn’t look for the stuff.
I notoce that Drudge has taken his bullshit “18 months ago” story down from his site. It looks like this is going to be yet another confirmed fuck up by Bush.