THE US, UN AND IRAQ V

D, we don't have enough personnel to blow them up. Or guard them. This would have been easier if we had thought out the after-war.

D, we don't have enough personnel to blow them up. Or guard them. This would have been easier if we had thought out the after-war.

Dozens of rockets outfitted with so-called dirty bombs ?- warheads designed to scatter deadly radioactive material ?- appear to be missing in a breakaway region of Moldova, an expert said Monday.

Oazu Nantoi, a political analyst who works at the non-governmental Institute for Policy Studies in Chisinau, said he had seen photocopies of Russian military documents showing that the dirty bomb warheads ?- 24 ready to use, 14 dismantled ?- were missing from a storage depot near the Trans-Dniester Tiraspol military airport.

(Nantoi is a respected expert on the region of Trans-Dniester, which is populated by ethnic Slavs and has been policed by thousands of Russian troops since the region's fight for independence from Moldova 12 years ago. Moldova has strong ethnic and cultural links to neighboring Romania.)

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The possibility of terrorists acquiring dirty bombs is a main concern of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria. IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei said last week that his agency, which tries to cap the spread of nuclear weapons, is now "spending a great deal of time working on this threat."

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and other agencies have expressed repeated concern about reports that the Trans-Dniester region is a major weapons smuggling center.

Moldova is a former Soviet republic and thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition remain stored in Trans-Dniester after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. The region has a robust arms industry.

Nantoi said reports first reached him in 1998 that Alazan rockets ?- normally used in the former Soviet Union for weather experiments ?- had been fitted with warheads modified to carry radioactive material.

Since then, the rockets and warheads appear to have disappeared from their storage area, and "I could not discover what had happened to them," he told the AP.

"We tried to work with Moldovan officials, but there wasn't a clear investigation, because the territory is not controlled by Moldova," he said by telephone.

Trans-Dniester does not see itself as part of Moldova. It is not recognized internationally.

The military has been hitting hard lately in Iraq, using overwhelming firepower to kill the enemy in operations with videogame names like Iron Hammer and Ivy Cyclone II. But behind the scenes, some military experts, including high-ranking officers in U.S. Special Forces (Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs and the like), are beginning to complain that America's strategy in Iraq is wrongheaded.

"This is what Westmoreland was doing in Vietnam," says a top Special Forces commander, referring to the firepower-heavy tactics favored by the military's senior commander in Vietnam, Gen. William Westmoreland, who lost sight of America's essential mission in that lost war: winning the hearts and minds of the people.

One center of private concerns with America's Iraq strategy is the Defense Policy Board, a collection of outside experts?-mostly heavyweight conservatives?-who regularly consult with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Disquiet in this quarter is particularly significant, since the DPB pushed from the outset for the invasion of Iraq. Last week one of the more colorful and outspoken members of the group, former House speaker Newt Gingrich, went public with his worries and ideas in an interview with NEWSWEEK. He was careful to say that he does not speak about the board's deliberations "on or off the record," but he proceeded to hold forth in his insightful, if mildly bombastic, way about the shortcomings of administration policy in Iraq.

Sitting in his office in downtown Washington, Gingrich searched on his computer for the Web site of the Coalition Provisional Authority, set up in Baghdad to oversee the reconstruction and democratization of Iraq. "I'm told over there that CPA stands for ?'Can't Produce Anything'," says Gingrich. "Home page of the New Iraq," he quotes. Then: "The opening quote is, of course, by [CPA chief Paul] Bremer. Next quote is by Bush. Next quote is by U.S. Ambassador Steve Mann." He scrolls down. "Now this is a big breakthrough. They do have the new Iraqi ambassador to the U.S. On the front page. That is a breakthrough," he repeats, adding, sotto voce, "I have been beating the crap out of them for two weeks on this." His basic point: where are the Iraqi faces in the New Iraq? "Americans can't win in Iraq," he says. "Only Iraqis can win in Iraq."

We have the capability to take out a porta-potty from 20000 feet ..... instead of homes for retribution why not an ammo dump or two or three or more?

I agree not enough attention is being paid to the matter, but just "taking them out" is not an option.

Gelisgesti wrote:

We have the capability to take out a porta-potty from 20000 feet ..... instead of homes for retribution why not an ammo dump or two or three or more?

Not a real wise thing to do , given that the contents of most of the weapons dumps have not been surveyed for content or Country-of-Origin/Date-of-Manufacture of that content, apart from the fact that many of them are in or near inhabited areas. A few hundred tons of conventional munitions detonating more or less simultaneously has an effect on the surrounding area not unsimilar to that of a small nuke ... walls blown down, roofs collapsed, windows violently imploded, fires started, massive toxic fume and particulate dispersion, soft-tissue damage, and other nasty ill effects over hundreds, if not thousands, of acres. Some of the known dumps contain thousands, not hundreds, of tons. Then, just suppose one of those dumps contains not just conventional munitions ... a very scary thought. More manpower needs to be devoted to securing and surveying known sites, and every day, previously unknown caches of varying size, some quite substantial, are discovered. I agree not enough attention is being paid to the matter, but just "taking them out" is not an option which would occur to anyone who had a grasp of the consequences.

I ain't all that happy with Bremmer, either, for lots of reasons, but then, I can't off the top of my head come up with a better choice ... Lee Iacoca, maybe, if he wasn't too old ...Jack Welch, retired GE CEO, might be a good one ... I dunno. Bremmer's what we got at the moment, and I really think he's doing a reasonable job given his handicaps. As far as "Next Summer" goes, I really expect a clearly more autonomous and effective indiginous authority in place of the current CPA, along with a hugely expanded indiginous constabulary, backed with support from a nascen reconstituted Iraqi military and US heavy weapons/lAirpower/Logistic support will pretty much have rendered the insurgency moot.

Gel, I don't expect you to give my objective appraisal credence over the emotional rabble-rousing pandering to which you subscribe. Its a matter of substance, not ranting. War is the ugliest of human experiences. Its really very good that it is so ugly and repulsive to civilized folk; otherwise there would be far more of it. As it is, Iraq is but a chapter in an ongoing, far-reaching, and likely very long-lasting war. Iraq is not the main event; it is a small, integral part of the big picture. There will of course be tragedies, errors, oversights, ommissions, and errors. There also will be victory, peace and prosperity, as the failings are the exception, not the rule; they get press, they arouse emotion, they have little other real effect. That seems cold, I know. It is. One cannot fight effectively if one allows emotion to overule reason. That is precisely why the insurgents are doomed, and why Iraq, and the region, have at last a brighter future.

They came, they saw the conquerors
750,000 Fill Trafalgar Square
The Times | December 9, 2003 | Simon Barnes

IT WAS like being Moses, save that the sea parted more reluctantly. Not the Red Sea, but the Red and White Sea: an ocean of flag-waving humanity with a single purpose in mind.

They were there to rejoice ?- three quarters of a million of them ?- and at times they flowed so thick that they brought the buses to a halt and the police horses had to march ahead and part them, so that once more the England team might go forward.

This was the day the England rugby union team paraded through the West End of London, bearing with them the trophy they won two brief, lifelong weeks back. The World Cup: England, champions of the world. And if you think that means nothing, you should have travelled with me in that three-bus cavalcade (of course there were three ?- you know how it is with buses) ...

Emotions run high in Trafalgar Square[/size]
By John Inverdale | Telegraph.com
(Filed: 09/12/2003)

Nelson was facing the wrong way. Big Ben was showing 1.20pm. There was a man standing in the fountain threatening to take his shirt off and then mercifully thinking better of it. As Robbie Williams was saying to me only the other day, you notice little things like that when you're standing in front of about 750,000 people ...

Thousands hail rugby heroes
Tue 9 December, 2003 06:00

By Paul Majendie and Gideon Long

LONDON (Reuters) - London has staged the biggest sporting celebration in its history as three quarters of a million people poured into the capital to see the nation's rugby union heroes parade the World Cup through the city centre ...

REUTERS: Explosion Hits Baghdad Mosque

December 9, 2003 - 7:23PM

An explosion has rocked a Sunni mosque in the Iraqi capital Baghdad today, killing several people, according to nearby residents.

US Lieutenant Colonel Frank German said from the scene that the explosion occurred shortly after dawn and appeared to have been inside the Ahbab al-Mustafa mosque in central Baghdad.

He had no details about casualties.

Local residents said several people had died, although that could not be immediately confirmed.

"An explosion rocked the mosque around 6.45am . . . I went to the roof of my house and after three minutes I heard a second explosion," said Ahmed Abdullah, a local resident.

There was blood on the ground inside the mosque, he said.

"When we arrived the flames had been extinguished, we set up a security zone and began the investigations," Colonel German said.

"As far as we can tell there was an internal explosion inside the mosque."

Earlier today, 31 US soldiers were injured today in a car bomb attack on their barracks near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

The US military confirmed the attack, saying the soldiers' injuries were mostly caused by flying debris, and were not life threatening.

The attack happened about 5am, local time, when a car drove to the entrance of the base used by the 3rd Brigade of 101 Airborne division in the town of Talafar, 50km west of Mosul.

Spokesman Major Trey Cate said guards opened fire on the vehicle and it blew up.

A total of 31 soldiers were wounded, mostly by debris and flying glass. None of the injuries were said to have been life-threatening.

"Whether it was a suicide attack or not, I don't know," Cate said.