1115.org

In the months leading up to the US Invasion of Iraq, one of the biggest concerns was Saddam Hussein’s stockpiles of conventional weapons, the boring-yet-lethal counterpart to all the Weapons of Mass Destruction that everyone liked to speculate about. One such stockpile was sealed by the The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1991, a seal which stayed intact until March 2003, right before the war started.

And then 380 tons of lethal high explosive, called HMX and RDX, disappeared like magic. How lethal, exacty? Well, a single pound of it brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Scotland. And despite the IAEA’s requests to have the site protected, someone went in and grabbed it all. Since then, there have been numerous bombings in Iraq and elsewhere using the same kind of explosives, with casualty rates numbering in the hundreds, if not thousands. Coincidence? Not likely.

Now, the specifics of this story seem to change every few minutes, so if you’re looking for the latest details, I would recommend checking out Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo, which seems to have taken the initiative in following all the various twists and turns. Needless to say, the revelation that the explosives are missing is causing the Bush Administration to go into battle positions, since this is exactly the kind of story they don’t want to see a week before the election. Their response so far has been pinballing between “it’s not our fault”, “it’s really not a big deal, anyway” and “this is a another of John Kerry’s baseless attacks.”

From an e-mail sent out yesterday by Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman:

John Kerry will say anything he believes will help him politically, and today he is grasping at headlines to obscure his record of weakness and indecision in the War on Terror.� These are the tactics of a candidate who has no message for the future and no positive record to run on.

The entire country of Iraq was a weapons stockpile.�So far, 243,000 tons of weapons and explosives have been secured and destroyed.� In addition, 163,000 tons of weapons and explosives have been secured and are awaiting destruction.� All the Monday morning-quarterbacking and armchair-generaling in the world by John Kerry won’t make up for the fact that he does not have a vision, a strategy or a plan to fight and win the War on Terror.

Translation: “Since the entire country was a weapons stockpile, these missing explosives are no big deal. Really. And Kerry is reaching at straws.” But regardless of how many weapons have been destroyed, 380 missing tons of RDX/HMX is a very big deal. And, going beyond the numbers game, this stockpile wasn’t a secret�we were specifically warned by the IAEA to watch it, but it didn’t seem to be on our priorities list.

In several sessions with reporters, the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, alternately insisted that Mr. Bush “wants to make sure that we get to the bottom of this” and tried to distance the president from knowledge of the issue, saying Mr. Bush was informed of the disappearance only within the last 10 days. White House officials said they could not explain why warnings from the international agency in May 2003 about the stockpile’s vulnerability to looting never resulted in action. At one point, Mr. McClellan pointed out that “there were a number of priorities at the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

It’s interesting that the President only found out about this within the last ten days, when, by all accounts, the explosives had disappeared sometime between March and April of 2003. Do we actually tell this guy anything?

Does this misplaced priorities thing sound a bit familiar? It should. Before the start of the war, the administration was presented on three seperate occasions with plans to assassinate terrorist mastermind Abu Musab Zarqawi. It chose not to. Why?

Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi�s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.

Since that decision, Zarqawi has gone on to kill hundreds of people in a series of brutal attacks…attacks that may very well have used explosives stolen from the IAEA stockpile. Can anyone, with a straight face, say that this is how a nation gets tough on terrorism? Where in George Bush’s vaunted vision/strategy/plan does it say that such mistakes are acceptable?

Remember this the next time another attack sends flag-draped coffins back across the Atlantic.