The most foolhardy comment one can make about the mess in Iraq is that
it can't get any worse. The weekend brought the massacre of 50 freshly
minted Iraqi soldiers and news that nearly 400 tons of explosives had
simply vanished from a former Iraq military installation.
These events -- one horrific, the other potentially catastrophic -- are
more evidence of the Bush administration's gross miscalculations in a
war that was unnecessary.
Allowing hundreds of tons of munitions to disappear from a well-known
stockpile is again the result of having insufficient military forces to
secure a hostile nation the size of California. One of the cited
justifications for the war was the threat posed by an Iraqi nuclear
weapons program. The site at issue, Al Qaqaav, was widely known to
contain explosives capable of detonating nuclear weapons, yet it was
not secured.
The U.S. decision to dissolve the Iraqi army, dismiss its command
structure and rebuild from the ground up haunts the ambush site where
the 50 unarmed, unescorted new Iraq army soldiers were slaughtered.
But the growing crisis on the ground in Iraq demands that we focus
attention away from mistakes behind us and toward the frightening
challenges ahead.
Where might those pilfered explosives show up again -- as car bombs, or
as triggers for nuclear devices assembled by a rogue state or terrorist
group?
The massacre throws even greater doubt on prospects for bringing Iraqi
military forces to the point where they might secure remaining weapons
caches, let alone find those that are missing. Photos of the 50
bloodied bodies in the sand makes a lousy Iraqi army recruiting poster.
Sen. John Kerry, who has made the compelling argument that as president
he would have more success enlisting international help for Iraq, cited
the missing munitions as evidence of "incredible incompetence."
President Bush offered little more than the familiar hustings hooey:
"My opponent has the wrong strategy for the wrong country at the wrong
time."
Election Day is one week from today.
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