Making Things Worse

President Bush's misbegotten invasion of Iraq appears to have achieved
what Saddam Hussein did not: putting dangerous weapons in the hands of
terrorists and creating an offshoot of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

The murder of dozens of Iraqi Army recruits over the weekend is being
attributed to the forces of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who has been
identified by the Bush administration as a leading terrorist and a
supposed link between Iraq and Al Qaeda. That was not true before the
war - as multiple investigations have shown. But the breakdown of order
since the invasion has changed all that. This terrorist, who has
claimed many attacks on occupation forces and the barbaric murder of
hostages, recently swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden and renamed his
group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

The hideous murder of the recruits was a reminder of the Bush
administration's dangerously inflated claims about training an Iraqi
security force. The officials responsible for these inexperienced young
men sent them home for leave without weapons or guards, at a time when
police and army recruits are constantly attacked. The men who killed
them wore Iraqi National Guard uniforms.

A particularly horrific case of irony involves weapons of mass
destruction. It's been obvious for months that American forces were not
going to find the chemical or biological armaments that Mr. Bush said
were stockpiled in Iraq. What we didn't know is that while they were
looking for weapons that did not exist, they lost weapons that did.

James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger reported in The Times
yesterday that some 380 tons of the kinds of powerful explosives used
to destroy airplanes, demolish buildings, make missile warheads and
trigger nuclear weapons have disappeared from one of the many places in
Iraq that the United States failed to secure. The United Nations
inspectors disdained by the Bush administration had managed to monitor
the explosives for years. But they vanished soon after the United
States took over the job. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was so bent
on proving his theory of lightning warfare that he ignored the generals
who said an understaffed and underarmed invasion force could rush to
Baghdad, but couldn't hold the rest of the country, much less guard
things like the ammunition dump.

Iraqi and American officials cannot explain how some 760,000 pounds of
explosives were spirited away from a well-known site just 30 miles from
Baghdad. But they were warned. Within weeks of the invasion,
international weapons inspectors told Washington that the explosives
depot was in danger and that terrorists could help themselves "to the
greatest explosives bonanza in history."

The disastrous theft was revealed in a recent letter to an
international agency in Vienna. It was signed by the general director
of Iraq's Planning and Following Up Directorate. It's too bad the Bush
administration doesn't have one of those.

© New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/26/opinion/26edt2.html

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