Interesting that Joe Lockhart is the primary "news" source quoted by the AP......
Democrats setting up their "see I told you so!".
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SO, COULDN'T SADDAM HAVE ROUNDED IT UP AND SENT IT TO SYRIA BEFORE THE US GOT THERE?
I don't see the IAEA 'holding the fort' until the last second, and moving 3/4 of a million pounds of explosives isn't going to be done in a lone truck. It would require some logistics-- isn't it more likely that the Regime got the stuff out before the US could come in and find it?
This reminds me a lot of the so-called looting of that Baghdad museum.
"Weapons of "semi" mass destruction" [WSMD] have gone missing.
Did they disappear soon after the invasion began... After Chirac told Saddam he was sorry he couldn't stop the US, but before the US got control of the country?
There is a long thread on this that has sunk off to page two. It was started last night at 10:21 EDT. Well over 200 posts.
Look over on the right bar and you'll see it.
Lockharts new "vote for sKerry/Leftwards" ad campaign is revealed (I prefer reviled, but the dems don't care what I think....I'm just a peasant in their fiefdom.)
"...Composition C4: 91% RDX, 9% non-explosive plasticizers. This compound is used in mines and hand grenades..."
The material missing is not esoteric material. These are common military explosives.
Why they did not destroy the bunker in the first place is another question, but not one on a Presidential level.
And all this time the left and the partisan media have insisted there were NO WMD. I guess they CAN have it both ways.
I suppose the US was working with the Iraqis to guard the site, and it is always necessary to work with native personnel to help liberate a country - if you are truly liberating it, which the US is, and not conquering it. My suspicion is that the theft, to the degree it occurred, was facilitated by Iraqi inside help.
Now here comes the position Kerry always takes and the media never calls him on: he will say the US should not have "outsourced" part of the effort of guarding the site to Iraqis, just like he said we should not have "outsourced" part of our effort at Tora Bora. Well, if we had gone it alone, he would have accused the US of imperialism and not building a coalition.
To grant a country liberty, you have to give them the opportunity to succedd or fail through their own efforts. I am sorry this has made Iraq more dangerous, but it is a necessary step if they are not to be simply a US colony in the Middle East.
The media should ask Kerry how many men he would have drafted to provide a 100% US effort, or what he would have given to France and Russia, above and beyond Oil-for-Food graft money, to get them to send troops. He has no answer, and if he did, France and Russia would immediately rebut it.
There's more to this story, I'm sure we'll hear the rest of it from Rush today. LIMBAUGH/HANNITY '08
I like this headline better.
"Tons Of US Explosives Missing In Iraq"
Nice article. Two questions:
1. When did the first American soldier drive up to the gates of that ammo dump?
2. Was it empty when he got there?
Err....George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are in in charge of this particular fiasco, not Hans Blix
After reading several versions of this story about missing explosives, it is not at all clear how much of the HMX material was even there in the days leading up to the war.
Also, the HMX (or whatever) was under Iraqi-UN control and could very well have disappeared before the April 2003 US liberation. It could also be a case of bad record keeping.
The NYSlimes is portraying this story as the US losing explosive material that WE brought to Iraq to fight the war on terror.
That is false. This HMX was bought by Saddam Hussein from France, China and Yugoslavia, and was being stored for some nefarious purpose. It's unclear how much was even left prior to the US liberation in April 2003.
There were, and are, so many tons of explosives and ordnance all over Iraq that we will never know the extent of it all. This is obviously a last-ditch Kerry team effort to bolster "the mess in Iraq" as a Bush failure. Unfortunately 350 tons of explosives is probably just the tip of Saddam's iceberg. The bad guys have enough bang stuff to keep making car bombs until the cows come home, or until we kill them all.