The Left Suddenly Finds Explosives an Imminent Danger

I've been getting a kick out of the excitement the lefty blogs have been enjoying over the rather old news that a cache of high explosives is missing and we are all in terrible danger.

Kerry is criticizing Bush today for "gross incompetence" in not securing the facility.

The Kerry campaign and its water carriers always surprise me with the lameness of their criticisms. First the totally idiotic criticism on Tora Bora and now an unfathomable focus on a single bunker with missing explosives. Let me state the obvious--the entire country of Iraq is just one big ammo dump. The quantity of explosives, ammunition, rifles, grenades and other materials was and is of an unimaginable magnitude. Coalition forces have been discovering weapons caches and destroying munitions on a daily basis since the invasion and there is no end in sight. While the American media's focus has been on WMD, the extent of Iraqi conventional weapons caches has slipped under the radar unless you're a military wonk (guilty as charged)

"Every school, every hospital we go in we find weapons," says Col. Steven Boltz of the US Army's V Corps. There are over 2,000 such sites across the country, officials say.

In Baghdad alone, the 3rd Infantry Division has removed 2.6 million small-arms rounds, nearly 50,000 heavy machine-gun rounds, 13,700 grenades, 50,000 RPG rounds, 7,700 artillery rounds, and nearly 19,000 mines. In addition, they have found more than 20,000 rifles, 4,200 pistols, 995 RPG launchers, 286 mortar tubes, 26 tanks, and one missile launcher.

Another comment on this from the most excellent National Review - The Corner

RE: DISAPPEARANCE & BLAME [Andy McCarthy]
Just thinking out loud, but: If what the Times says is right, isn’t that implicitly an indictment of UNSCOM and further proof that the President was right to remove the monstrous Saddam regime?

The Times reports that the missing materiel includes “380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons.” It also asserts that “United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years.” The undertone is obvious: the inspections were working--as the Kerry campaign claims (at least sometimes), and Bush, in addition to losing weapons, was bull-headed to invade in the first place.

But not so fast. Let’s take a look at Security Council Resolution 687 (April 3, 1991), which imposed the terms that ended the Gulf War. (All italics are mine.) As I read it, Iraq was required, among other things, to “unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of . . . [a]ll ballistic missiles with a range greater than 150 kilometres and related major parts, and repair and production facilities[.]” One might think that what the Times describes as “powerful conventional explosives--used to … make missile warheads” were a fairly “related major part” of ballistic missiles.

In addition, with respect specifically to nukes, Iraq was required “not to acquire or develop nuclear weapons or nuclear-weapons-usable material or any subsystems or components[,]” and, to the extent it had such items, present them for “urgent on-site inspection and the destruction, removal or rendering harmless as appropriate of all items specified above.” Again, a detonator would seem to be a fairly important component of a nuclear bomb.

The Times’s suggestion here is obvious: it invokes the image of missing powerful explosive components for missile warheads and detonation of nukes to portray Bush as incompetent, as if he were supposed to have stood guard over them himself. But, if the weaponry is as frightening as the Times suggests and Saddam actually had it--that is, if it had not been destroyed, removed or rendered inert in the decade or so during which the inspectors were “monitoring” it--how effective were the inspections?

Deep into its story, the Times lamely reports that “None of the explosives were destroyed, arms experts familiar with the decision recalled, because Iraq argued that it should be allowed to keep them for eventual use in mining and civilian construction.” Great monitoring, huh? Is that what they would take us back to: a process that would have left this kind of weaponry in the control of someone like Saddam (despite the apparently not very effective “monitoring”of inspectors) had we not acted?

That may be part of the explanation why Joe Lockhart, in the letter K-Lo posted earlier this afternoon, contented himself with mentioning “deadly explosives” and wisely avoided the Times-like hyperbole of missile warheads and nukes. Naturally, in dwelling on the one-pound of explosive used in the Pan Am 103 bombing during the Reagan administration, Lockhart also deftly resisted reminding voters of, for example, the 1400 pound explosive detonated in New York City at the World Trade Center in 1993, as well as any toting up of poundage in the bombs detonated at Khobar Towers, the U.S. embassy in Kenya, the U.S. embassy in Tanzania, and the harbor of Aden at the hull of the U.S.S. Cole--all during the Clinton years.

It is never a good thing to lose track of munitions--although, as Mark Levin notes, these are the kinds of things that happen in a war. Still, the Times plainly wants to have it both ways, and it shouldn’t be able to. So which is it: was Saddam a threat who needed to be removed, or is the Times’s story this morning an overblown account of the seriousness of the lost weaponry, which editors transparently placed on page one to help the Kerry campaign?

I have posted elsewhere on this issue. But once again.
The camplaint of 380 tons of RXD and other high explosives not being accounted for at said site, Al Qaqaa, located in the town of Al Iskandiriya, some 25 miles SWW of Baggy Dad,
is a total "Drop in the bucket". US Intel reports for at least a year have been made public and say that it is estimated that Iraq had at least 1.6 million metric tons of ammuntion and explosive materials. Now lets do some basic math:
multiply .0002 (that represents 0.02%) by 1.6 million.
Answer:
320 tons.
As you can see, it is an insignificant figure. Our Army and Marines have been finding huge caches of French 155 mm. Artillery shells that are amoung the most used shells to create Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) use to injure and kill our guys, since a month after the war mission was accomplised last year. I know this to be true because my first cousin's son (Army 4DIV Artillery) was in and around the city of Balad, north of Baggy Dad, south of Tikrik months after major hostilities ended, and told me it was the primary type ammo they where finding in huge stock piles! And my nephew who is a Marine in 2/2 who just got back from Iraq. Nephew was in 2/2 Intel company and responsible for decerning what type of IED's are used in every explosion in the Al Mahmudiya AOR, 20 miles south of Baggy Dad, gives me some rather honest reports of the type ammunitions being used for IED's. And anyone that has read for the past year and a half articles authored by military and newspapers that where embedded in our military units, all point to a list of ammunitions (artillery shells, mortor shells etc) being the main way to kill our troops.

So this 380 ton cache that is supposedly missing is just bullshit, purdon my French folks.....hmmmmmm, as far as the over all picture we know to be true regarding IED manufacture etc.. NOW...............
Just one more pile of crap being used against GWB. Kerry should at best be grabed by a special ops team, put on a C130, flown over Fallujah, then given a parachute,instruct him how to pull the cord, then kicked out of the plane when the light goes on, and the aircraft is over the Julian district of Fallujah! It really is that simple.

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