Saddam's Weapons Were Not Even A Priority

Juan Cole on the missing 308 tons of high explosive:

"The disappearance of these explosives is yet one more disaster caused by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's mania to send a small military force into Iraq. Rumsfeld over-ruled the officers in the Pentagon, who wanted hundreds of thousands of troops and knew that many would be needed to secure the country after the war. Why hasn't Rumsfeld been fired? He ran Iraq for most of the last 18 months and it is beginning to be as cratered as the dark side of the moon...

How bad a job Bush is doing is clear when we consider that we might well be relieved to know that this equipment went to Iran, since that means Bin Laden doesn't have it."

Cole also reminds us that this is not the first such case - in the wake of the invasion, radioactive materials disappeared from Tuwaitha, a site that was specifically targetted by the US as one of Saddam's "weapons factories".

So Bush not only failed to have al-Qaqaa guarded against theft of HMX and RDX, not only failed to guard against theft of dual-use equipment from a long-defunct nuclear program site, but also failed to do the elementary work of ensuring that the notorious al-Tuwaitha facility was secured against the theft of radiocative materials!

Since Tuwaitha was the great bugaboo impelling the Iraq war in the first place, you would imagine that Bush would have sent out a unit to secure and search it immediately. But no, he politely let the looters have a look-around first, waiting in line.

I know someone is going to write me asking whether the existence of all this equipment and dangerous explosives doesn't prove that Saddam still had an active weapons program. The answer is a categorical "no." A lot of this stuff was left over from the 1980s when there had been such active programs, but which were abandoned after the Gulf War. Ironically, the bits and pieces Saddam still had were useless to a major state. But they could be stolen and cobbled together by a small band of terrorists to deadly effect.

I just don't feel any safer with Bush in the White House. Maybe it is just me.