Bush is Making us Safer?
The complete lack of
interest of the Bush administration in actually securing dangerous materials
connected to the old, abandoned Iraqi nuclear program has long belied Bush's
stated concern with Iraq's alleged weapons as a pretext for the war.
James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger with Khalid
al-Ansary reveal in the New York Times today that the Bush
administration allowed 380 tons of super-powerful explosives to disappear from
al-Qaqaa, one of Iraq's sensitive military installations, after the war in
spring of 2003. These are not ordinary bombs. This explosive material, HMX and
RDX, can be used to detonate atomic bombs, collapse buildings, and form warheads
for missiles. A pound of it brought down a passenger jet over Lockerbie,
Scotland.
A lot of the roadside bombs that have killed hundreds of US
troops and maimed thousands have been made of HMX and RDX, as suggested by how
infrequently the guerrillas have blown themselves up in planting them. HMX and
RDX are favored by terrorists because they are stable and will only explode via
a blasting cap.
Incredibly, the International Atomic Energy Commission
and European Union officials warned Bush before the war that these explosives
needed to be safeguarded.
Josh
Marshall is suspicious that this major screw-up has been
known to the Bush administration for some time, and that it may have pressured
the Iraqi government not to mention it.
If Bush cannot even protect our
troops from explosives at a sensitive facility in a country he had conquered,
how is he going to protect the American public from terrorists who have not even
yet been identified?
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.
Only two weeks ago, The International Atomic Energy Commission reported that not only
had dual-use equipment been stripped from an old Iraq
nuclear weapons facility, but even the buildings had been stripped and
dismantled. Muhammad al-Baradei said that some of the nuclear material stolen
from facilities in Iraq has already begun showing up in other countries. But the
dual-use equipment, which has applications in nuclear weapons construction, has
disappeared. (Hmm. I wonder which neighbor of Iraq might be desperately at work
on a nuclear bomb and might be willing to pay top dollar for such equipment?)
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.
So let me ask this again. Bush is making us safer? The
American public trusts him to fight terror more effectively than Kerry? On what
record? Bush appears to have all but just called up Usamah and Khamenei and told
them where Saddam's old stuff was in case they needed it for their programs. And
he politely made sure that no pesky US troops would be around to impede their
access.
Bush administration spokesmen are being careful to say that the
hundreds of tons of explosives stolen from al-Qaqaa are not themselves useful as
fissile material, i.e. they are not enriched uranium or plutonium.
But the fact is that one of the first such
"missing deadly weapons" scandals to break in Iraq had to do with the
disappearance of radioactive materials from Tuwaitha. This theft was known
already in the summer of 2003, and worries were expressed that that material
could be used to make a dirty bomb.
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.
Reuters has the main stories of mayhem in Iraq
on Sunday. The big one is of the cold-blooded murder of nearly 50 Iraqi army
recruits in Diyala province. They were killed mafia-style, a bullet in the back
of the head. They were unarmed and being trucked back from their training. This
was obviously an inside job, since the guerrillas knew where they were and that
they were unarmed. Iraqi al-Qaeda claimed responsibility, which is plausible
since Monotheism and Holy War does hate Shiites, and the troops were poor
Shiites from the south.
I googled Ed Seitz, the State Department security
official killed by a mortar shell on Sunday. The story of
his death at the hands of nativist Iraqi guerrillas is even more complicated and
poignant if it is true that he was a crusader against the anti-globalization
movement who tried to keep Canadian anarchists out of the US and used to ask
them where Bin Laden is. The contrast of the demand for open borders for
corporate purposes and for closed borders with regard to ideas is striking. In
some ways, Iraq is proving highly resistant to the distinction, and is if
anything turning it on its head. Companies are being chased out of Iraq, but all
sorts of ideas are swirling in from Iraq's nieghbors and from the United States
and Europe.