I think, as a people, we Americans have become too ready to look for someone to blame when something goes wrong. We can’t accept that some things are accidents or have no one at fault. We just have to find someone at whom we can point our fingers.
I’d really like to see this trend reversed. Even so, there are times when the accusatory finger needs to do a little pointing, and I think today is one of those days!
The lead article in today’s New York Times reports that roughly 380 tons of explosives are missing from a site in Iraq.
To put this in perspective, this type of explosive was used to blow up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. That took less than a pound, and we’ve let someone spirit away roughly 760,000 pounds of this stuff!
I’m not saying I blame the President. There are lots of things for which I blame Mr. Bush, and I'm certainly no fan of his, but I don't think this lands specifically at his feet (except in the way that anything under the Executive Branch theoretically does).
What I am saying is that somewhere along the way someone made a decision, or decisions, that gave securing these explosives insufficient priority. If the answer is that we didn’t have enough troops to do the job, then that does fall at the feet of Mr. Rumsfeld and may well incriminate the President as well.
What's truly sickening is that the Pentagon already had a statement out for this article, saying that Hussein hid explosives everywhere and, besides, there are lots of places where these things can be bought. Maybe so, but we let a huge quantity (a huge quantity about which we knew--we knew where to find it and that it was there for the taking) simply get spirited away. I think the focus needs to be on controlling such things wherever they are, not saying, well, ya know, this stuff is everywhere, so what are we supposed to do about it?
If that's the attitude at the Pentagon and/or the White House, then a lot of heads really do need to roll!
How many people will die for this colossal error? How many American troops, Iraqis and other poor innocents who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time will lose their lives because we let something happen that the IAEA warned about well before it happened? (The IAEA was on the case because these potent explosives are also used for triggering the initial detonation of a nuclear device.)
Another thought is that the Times article on the explosives might just as well have been titled, "Coming Soon to a Theater [or shopping mall, airplane, etc.] Near You!"
Saddam Hussein was a butcher. He tortured and murdered thousands of innocent people. There's nothing horrible that could happen to him that he wouldn’t richly deserve. Even so, he had these things under control. If we were going to go in, that was one thing we needed to maintain: control.
My fellow Americans (and any overseas guests visiting here at SITG), let’s pay attention this time...please! For anyone who still hasn't gotten the message, Saddam Hussein did not have a hand in the September 11, 2001, attacks. As far as anyone can tell, he was not supplying any support to Al Qaeda. We, however, have turned Iraq into an Al Qaeda funhouse, and now it appears that we may have unleashed a supply of explosives on the world the likes of which the terrorists previously could only have dreamed of obtaining.
You know, I said I wasn't necessarily blaming the President, but I've been thinking about it as I've been typing this—-if it’s not specifically his fault, it's the fault of a direct appointee of his. So I guess it does land at his feet. Not only was the war a stupid thing to start, but we didn’t send enough troops to get the job done right. There were Generals who said so, but Rumsfeld thought he knew better!
What a disaster! Our poor military is stretched so thin in Iraq that they won’t be able to hunt this stuff down, if it’s even in the country anymore. Maybe the Mossad can track down these explosives before they’re used to kill schoolchildren. It sure doesn’t look like we can get it right.
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