COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

It appears that the missing 370 tons of explosives -- made much of by Senator Kerry and other Administration critics as evidence of Bush's incompetence -- was missing before US troops even rolled in.

Drudge is reporting that an NBC News crew was embedded with the unit that rolled up on the Al Qaqa'a weapons facility on April 10th, and found that the expected weapons stores had already been looted.

Now, I never thought that this story was a huge deal to begin with. Yes, insurgents could use the material to make IEDs with. But every tribe in Iraq has huge weapons stores of its own, which they used to hedge against other tribes in the event of a collapse of the Hussein regime. Members of my own battalion dug up mortar shells by the hundreds, and artillery shells by the dozens, the whole time we were there. Digging up another weapons cache was almost a daily occurance at times in Ramadi.

And every few days, we'd get a notice that 30 or 40 or 50 tons of explosives were about to be detonated out in the desert south of Ramadi or west of Fallujah (so we wouldn't get spooked by the huge explosion and the mushroom cloud in the distance.)

370 tons of ordnance sounds like a lot. And it is. But if you know Iraq, it's really a drop in the bucket.

Here's the other reason it was a dumb idea for Democrats to use the missing ordnance as evidence of Bush's incompetence:

It's not the President's job to look at a map and tell the Secretary of Defense what sites he wants secured. It's not even the SecDef's job to do that. The identification and securing of the weapons site was entirely the purview of the military commander on the ground at the time, CENTCOM commander General Tommy Franks.

A Clinton appointee.

Funny how Kerry never calls Franks' competence into question.

I know I don't.

And it turns out that Franks is vindicated. He did what he was supposed to do - US troops were on the scene before the dust even cleared. Now, it is true that he could have dispatched special operations troops to secure the site even earlier. But these troops would have been isolated, and too light to last long on the desert floor, unsupported, in a static defense. On a literal powder keg. It would have been foolish to commit them; the Iraqis obviously showed up in enough strength to move 370 tons pretty quickly.

Special ops troops don't exactly grow on trees, either. A good portion of the available SPECOPS troops were committed to protecting the Iraqi oil infrastructure, as well as the dam at Hadithah.

Had sabateurs gotten to Hadithah or the oil fields before our own guys, Bush would have been raked through the coals for neglecting to secure Iraq's industry, and for allowing the prime power generator for the Euphrates River Valley to go unprotected, and for allowing insurgents to plunge the entire valley into darkness.

You never have enough troops or resources to do everything you want to do. Ever.

So jumping the gun and securing Al Qaqa'a early was not a real option, either, when you adjust the likely outcome against the risk of having an American detachment overwhelmed.

Maybe that wasn't a big deal for Clinton at Mogadishu. But soldiers tend to resent being hung out on a fishhook like that.

Kudos to Captain Ed for being one of the first to call "BS" on the original NY Times story. And to the NBC News crew for showing up.

I can't say the New York Times reporters were inept, though. The White House seemed to confirm the notion that the explosives went missing sometime AFTER the arrival of US troops.

That was clearly an error on the White House's part. The New York Times did what they were supposed to do: try to build a detailed timeline, and write the story from that.

So a good part of the blame has to fall on the White House press office themselves.

We'll see how the New York Times corrects the error, though.

Splash, out

Jason