NEWS: More on the Missing

POLITICS: More on the Missing

The story of the missing explosives in Iraq has been a major headline this week and it was only a matter of time before it became a campaign issue. Of course, both sides are spinning it different ways...

It shouldn't be too hard to deduce what the Kerry camp has to say about it:

Whether one agrees with the charges, one thing is clear: a blunder was made at some point. It seems like an illogical defense to claim the explosives were missing before the invasion, seeing as how the IAEA knew where they were for years before hand, but logic went out the window long ago in this campaign.

One of the scariest things about this new report is that it claims President Bush only found out about the disappearance ten days ago. If it's true that the stuff came up missing a year ago, shouldn't someone have informed him? Just the latest in a blatant disregard for the facts concerning the war in Iraq.

Thanks Rotten! Ive been hanging out here looking for something on this.

It seems every news source has conflicting versions of this. CBS and The Times say this stuff went missing during the looting and whatnot in the aftermath of the invasion. NBC maintains that their reporters, embedded with the 101st airborn, found no evidence of the HMX RDX in april 03 and contend that it was either moved or stolen prior to the invasion. CNN seems to be just reporting on the conflicting stories.

However, in my Daily Mis-Lead there is a write up that refrences an AP report from April 03 that quotes one Col. John Peabody of the 3rd Infantry as saying the troops had "found thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder," which was determined to be explosives.

So what is the deal? Was it there, or wasnt it?

I heard in some chatter online that one of the reporters embedded with the 101st apparently said in an interview on MSNBC that while they were there they only had time for a cursory search. Still...im confused.

[Edited on Oct 26, 2004 by punkadixon]

[Edited on Oct 26, 2004 by punkadixon]

this is the kind shit that keeps pissing me off. Do any one you think for one second that nothing happens in Iraq without consulting Bush first?!?! So why act like he's personally responsible for every fucking thing that happens over there?

"This is General Poopy Pants in Iraq, I need to speak to the President."

"What is this concerning?"

"We've located a assload of explosives and I was wondering what we should do with them."

"I'm sorry, the President is having his weekly ass waxing, I'll have him call you back."

the rest is political spin...

That is really an irrelevant question. The point of the story is that prior to going to war there should have been a strategy for securing sites like this.

The contention is 'it isnt our fault'.

as near as I can verify:

March 15 IAEA checked and seals on bunker doors were intact
March 20 beginning of war
April 4th 3rd infantry arrival
April 10th 101st airborn arrival
May 27th discovery that HMX RDX is missing

So,
when did it disappear?

oops, sorry.

How about because as Commander in Chief, he's responsible for having a plan and conducting an intelligent war with strict provisions for keeping secure what needs to be secure. Oh, i'll agree that he's not necessarily personally responsible for writing line by line a detailed plan with all those provisions in it. But i would like to think that he's assigned and given the highest priority to proetecting and securing the things that could be the greatest danger to us in a post-war, highly unstable situation.

Ding ding ding ding!

The in-bed reporter with the 101st got there a day after the liberation and said it was all ready gone. They never had a chance to secure it. Sadam likely had it removed long before we ever invaded.

I take it that Senators Kerry and Edwards now believe that we should have invaded sooner in order to secure the explosives?

And why could these high explosives have been hidden or looted and not weapons of mass destruction?

if this stuff was so bad why didn't the UN destroy it during the 90's when they destroyed tons of stuff...

"Now Saddam we put these seals on those bunkers, now don't remove them, and move all that explosives" IAEA inspector...

they stuff was moved before we got there and either given or sold to terrorist would be my best guess or sent to syria even. It would have been next to impossible to move that much tonnage after the invasion and more so after the area had been visted by the 3rd ID and 101st...

Yes, there should have been a strategy, but it isn't the President's responsibility to formulate that strategy. That is why the military exists. The President makes a decision to use military force, and the branch of the armed forces most capable of handling that objective does it's best to plan an operation to achieve the goals set out by the Commander-in-Chief. He doesn't bother telling people HOW to do it, just 'what' and 'when'.

The question isn't irrelevant, it's just being directed to the wrong person.

and we call the president the....um...something-in-chief, right? what was that again?

Would you deny the administration any culpability?

I think the issue most people have with this is that Bush and his military advisors have a reputation (well earned, substantiated by facts on the public record) of ignoring the things that people tell them when those things conflict with their view of the world.

It would be better if they were to review those things and ultimately reject them for some good reason, but they have a tendency to simply dismiss them, and sometimes make life hard for the people that were trying to report to them.

For example, the position of the Bush administration was that Iraq had or was close to having WMD, despite the fact that Blix said otherwise. The response was to attempt to discredit Blix.

With a reputation like that, the tendency is to blame the Bush administration for consequences that "should" have been forseeable. Whether or not this specific case was preventable, there are plenty of other preventable things that have happened (eg, the theft of radioactive materials that could be used in dirty bombs). When stuff like this happens on such a regular basis, the obvious conclusion is that bad policy is at fault.

no, I wouldn't... but securing any weapon stockpiles seems so basic... we'd have to have some really retarded military planners to forget something like that. And I would hope the Administration has very little to do with the day to day running of the war... that's how we fucked up Viet Nam, letting the politicians run the war...

That's not what they reported. The embed crew stated that the 101st didn't have orders to do a thorough search, did not do a thorough search, and did not have the time to do a thorough search even if they had planned to do one.

Source

Furthermore, AP articles on the subject state the following (noted by a source in punkadixon's post):

Source

Source


[Edited on Oct 27, 2004 by Infra]

Yeah, these explosives aren't specifically designed for combat use, though they can be easily misused.

To follow up on the previous quote of the NBC embed reporter: the unit spokesman for the 101st just confirmed to the AP that the unit had no orders to check for the explosives, and did not do so, at al-Qaqaa.

Not enough troops to do the job

This is what we mean by "securing the peace"

War "on the cheap", remember that phrase? Well, remember that phrase.

War on the cheap is first a misnomer, but more importantly is is a huge wager of American lives.

Seriously, just read this, it pretty much removes all doubt at who is responsible--and it isn't our military.

[Edited on Oct 27, 2004 5:15AM]

Edited to note: Meh, tenmile beat me to the punch and pretty much just said the same thing that I wrote here, except he was more concise. The last source that he cites is a short piece by the same author as "Chain of Command", which is where I'd gotten most of this info, so this'll mostly be redundant if you read that...

In my opinion the reason that it is reasonable to hold the administration accountable for how the war has been implemented is that this group of politicians has been too involved in running the war.

Personally, this particular issue is only one small item in a long list of problems that can reasonably be tied to civilian/political considerations overriding military judgement.

1. Military on three occassions sought permission to strike Zarqawi and his training camp in 2002 but were denied because Bush thought it would hurt his case against Saddam. Now Zarqawi is considered the most dangerous man in Iraq, and he has been responsible for many American and Iraqi deaths.

2. On at least six occassions when Rumsfeld was presented with the operational plan, designated Plan 1003, he insisted that ground troops needed to be sharply reduced. Rumsfeld wanted to use Iraq to prove his concept that the military leadership is far too cautious and are out of touch. He consistently whittled down the number of troops and resources to deploy to a smaller and smaller number. Many of the problems that have occurred can be traced to the limited troops (the people of Iraq were initially much more welcoming of America and this has deteriorated dramatically over time, largely because of the lack of security; weapons caches going unsecured; open borders allowing Iranian insurgents to join the fray, etc).

Plan 1003 was repeatedly knocked down by Rumsfeld, who derided the military planners, telling them that they were way off. That we could do it much smaller, faster, cheaper, that the military leadership had "the slows" and just weren't getting it.

3. In the fall of 2002, Rumsfeld decided that this war would not be guided by the time-phased forces deployment list (TPFDL), the Pentagon's most sophisticated war-planning document, which the military has been using for decades to drive military planning. This is what the military has experience in and does well. Implementing plans based on a practiced and reasoned approach that is based on military experience. They have a procedure for military planning that starts with the TPFDL and elaborates downward, in a step-basis, to the more detailed plans. Here's a quote from a senior officer: "When you kill the tip-fiddle (TPFDL), you kill centralized military planning. The military is not like a corporation that can be streamlined. It is the most inefficient machine known to man. It's the redundancy that saves lives."

Well, the original military plans, as derived through the TPFDL and military planners was absolutely nothing like what we've seen. Nothing we've done is similar to what the military planners put forth as the wise path to this war. Rumsfeld rejected the military plans, and told the Joint Staff that he would personally control the timing and flow of Army and Marine troops to the combat zone. He, and not the generals, would decide which unit would go when and where.

The administration is responsible for the things that have gone wrong in this war and the reconstruction of Iraq, not the military planners nor the soldiers.

[Edited on Oct 27, 2004 by BadYeti]

it's funny you should mention that...

A smart bomb knows what to hit.
A smarter bomb, it seems, knows how to hide.

well.
Considering that
the military is supposedly 100,000 troops short
the first building secured in Bagdad was the oil minestry (which i doubt was a military decision)

i think the problem is that the Administration is interfering and the military is being allowed to do it's job properly.

The buck has top stop somewhere and i think it should stop with the people who started this mess