THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

revel wrote:

... If we had not put so many troops gaurding oil wells maybe we would have had some to spare to watch weapons disapearing.

There you go! Redistribute the troops to guard amo dumps. If that leaves Iraqi citizens unguarded, so what. If that leaves Iraqi oil wells unguarded, so what. If that leaves other Iraqi infrastructure unguarded, so what. We can live without Iraqi citizens, Iraqi oil and Iraqi infrastructure. But we cannot live if we don't guard those amo dumps.

Holbrooke: "I Don't Know the Truth"
Even his campaign's senior foreign policy adviser can't vouch for the New York Times's "explosive" explosives story. But that isn't stopping John Kerry from using it as a political prop.
by William Kristol
10/26/2004 11:00:00 PM

IT SEEMS THAT Monday's groundbreaking New York Times story on missing explosives in Iraq was certainly not groundbreaking and may not even be true. The allegations that nearly 400 tons of "high explosives" were missing from the al Qaqaa arms dump are based on charges leveled by Mohamed al Baradei, chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The claims are old and increasingly suspect. But that hasn't kept John Kerry's presidential campaign from using the story in a new television ad and in virtually every stump speech and media appearance over the past two days.

Now, however, the Kerry campaign admits that the information that is the basis of Senator Kerry's statements and his campaign advertisement may not even be true. Pressed on Tuesday afternoon about the accuracy of the allegations on Fox's Big Story with John Gibson, Richard Holbrooke, a senior adviser to the Kerry campaign, said: "You don't know the truth and I don't know the truth." He later underscored this point: "I don't know the truth."

That minor issue hasn't kept the Kerry campaign from creating a television ad based on what may well be untruthful claims.

The ad, called "Obligation" shows John Kerry speaking solemnly about the responsibilities of a president.

The obligation of a Commander in Chief is to keep our country safe. In Iraq, George Bush has overextended our troops and now failed to secure 380 tons of deadly explosives. The kind used for attacks in Iraq, and for terrorist bombings. His Iraq misjudgments put our soldiers at

risk, and make our country less secure. And all he offers is more of the same. As President, I'll bring a fresh start to protect our troops and our nation. I'm John Kerry and I approved this message.

The claim is, well, explosive. John Kerry says the Bush administration's incompetence is killing U.S. soldiers. Reporting from a variety of news sources suggests that the explosives may have been gone before the U.S. troops arrived. In any case, Kerry's top advisers have conceded that their claims may prove false.

Yet, Kerry has leveled an extraordinarily harsh wartime charge against President Bush.

Shouldn't he at least make sure that such a charge is true?

It also now turns out that CBS 60 Minutes was planning to echo the New York Times story two days before Election Day. So what we have is an attempt by the New York Times, CBS, and a U.N. agency to work together to promote a very likely false story to damage President Bush's reelection prospects. Perhaps no one should be surprised that the liberal media and the United Nations are willing to go to quite extraordinary lengths to promote Kerry's prospects against Bush, but their behavior is not the issue. The issue is Kerry's willingness to advance allegations that his own campaign acknowledges may not be true.

link

They should have just Nuked the area and then the fall-out could have guarded the area.

-it don't matter if it is true or not.

Where is Ross Perot these days anyway?

If those supposed war hawks would have planed better and had more troops on the ground they would not have had to make such a decision as to whether to guard a site with a vast amount of weapons or guard the Iraqi citizens. (Btw-they did a lousy job of guarding the Iraqi citizens, so all the troops must have been sent to guard the oil wells)

Revel writes

Quote:

If those supposed war hawks would have planed better and had more troops on the ground they would not have had to make such a decision as to whether to guard a site with a vast amount of weapons or guard the Iraqi citizens. (Btw-they did a lousy job of guarding the Iraqi citizens, so all the troops must have been sent to guard the oil wells)

I don't know where you live Revel but you must not have ever ventured out of one county in Rhode Island.

The State of California has a land mass slightly less than 156,000 square miles. It takes all day of hard travel to drive the length of California. And that covers a strip of land the width of a highwy.

Texas has 261,914 square miles and plenty of deserts. It takes all day of hard travel to drive the length of Texas. And that covers a strip of land the width of a highway.

Iraq has a population of 24 million people and 437,072 square miles of land and water. Besides oil, the fresh water in Iraq is a crucial factor. You could put California and Texas together and you still wouldn't have as much land mass as Iraq. Intelligence knew of a few hundred munition dumps at the time of the invasion. Duelfer estimates that in fact at least 8300 munition dumps existed in Iraq at the time of the invasion. This wasn't known until we got in there and could see for outselves.

We could have put every uniformed soldier, every reservist, every national guardsman, and called up every able bodied fully retired military and we could not have secured all that. And don't forget in the first weeks we were still hunting for Saddam Hussein and his henchmen and the troops were still being shot at.

We have located and destroyed many hundred tons of munitions to date. Our military is quite proud of the job they have done and highly resent those who are suggesting they haven't done enough.

I'm sure you have a brilliant military mind and could have solved all these problems in advance of the invasion. Or perhaps you would have opted for no invasion and left Saddam Hussein in power with 8300 munition dumps in his arsenal. Or like Kerry, you would have secured the apparently not-so-ominous arsenal at Al-qaqaa prior to the invasion.

Missing and Explosive

Thursday, October 28, 2004; Page A24

LESS THAN A POUND of the high explosive known as HMX was enough to destroy a Pan Am jumbo jet over Scotland in 1988 in one of the worst terrorist attacks against Americans before Sept. 11, 2001. So it can only be dismaying to learn that nearly 215 tons of the substance -- enough for hundreds of thousands of such bombs -- disappeared from an Iraqi weapons facility sometime after March 2003, when it was last seen by international inspectors. An additional 162 tons of the explosives RDX and PETN also are missing, according to a report to the International Atomic Energy Agency this month by the Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology, which blamed a "lack of security" for the loss.

It's not clear whether the explosives vanished before or after invading U.S. forces reached the Qaqaa facility near Baghdad in April 2003, though it appears likely that the materiel was gone by May of last year, when the weapons-hunting Iraq Survey Group first visited the site. Nor is it evident that any of the explosives have since been used against U.S. forces in Iraq or any other target. It's possible that some or all of the HMX was destroyed by U.S. bombing. Nonetheless, the disappearance of the substance, which was sealed by the International Atomic Energy Agency because of its potential use as a nuclear bomb trigger, must be counted as a potentially deadly cost incurred by the invasion of Iraq.

It may not be fair to claim, as Sen. John F. Kerry did on Monday, that the loss represents "one of the greatest blunders of this administration." Apart from the doubts about whether the explosives disappeared before or after U.S. troops reached the site, Iraq was covered with some 10,000 weapons sites under Saddam Hussein; Qaqaa was not among those given highest priority by U.S. intelligence. Unfortunately, high explosives are not in short supply in the world's black markets, and HMX is far from the most valuable material needed for a nuclear bomb. We have said repeatedly, however, that President Bush erred in not dispatching enough troops to Iraq to secure the country after the war. We'll never know if a larger invasion force might have been able to prevent this looting, but the chances of avoiding this and other terrible reverses surely would have been much higher.

It's worth noting, meanwhile, that the sensation over the missing explosives emanates from the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose director, the Egyptian Mohamed ElBaradei, has been an adversary of the Bush administration on Iraq since well before the war. This month Mr. ElBaradei delivered a report to the U.N. Security Council complaining of "widespread and apparently systematic dismantlement" of dual-use equipment at sites once related to Iraq's nuclear program -- at least some of which apparently was done by the U.S. mission itself. News of the missing explosives then leaked to the U.S. media within days of its receipt by his agency. On the same day that it appeared in the New York Times, Mr. ElBaradei took the unusual step of submitting a second letter to the Security Council confirming the report. The fact that he was providing easy fodder for Mr. Kerry's campaign just eight days before the presidential election evidently did not deter this U.N. civil servant.

Foxy
There is no comparison between WW2 and preemptive attack upon another nation. ....