Pentagon steps in deep QaQaa

From a press gaggle today:

CNN QUESTION: Major, could you please better describe the explosives that were removed? Were they primarily assembled weapons? Were they raw material like the granular HMX or RDX? And could you, sort of, give us a ratio out of that 250 tons how much were assembled weapons and how much were raw material?

PEARSON: As a conventional ammunition ordnance officer, I deal with ammunition logistics management. I am not a technical specialist. I am not explosive ordnance disposal or technical intelligence. My role and what I've been trained on is to manage ammunition facilities and mitigate the risk and exposure to U.S. forces and civilians.

The specifics of what we talked about that we pulled out of there, from my recollection, is some TNT, plastic explosives; I can't further define other than that, plastic explosives. Detonation cords, initiators, and white phosphorous rounds, which were a higher priority for us to go in there.

QUESTION: So you don't know...

QUESTION: But do you believe there was HMX?

QUESTION: Yes. You don't know if there was HMX?

DI RITA: Let me handle that.

QUESTION: Did it look like those barrels -- you know this video that ABC had.

DI RITA: We've described what we know. And as we learn more, we'll describe that. The major has...

QUESTION: Why doesn't the major talk about that?

(CROSSTALK)

DI RITA: Excuse me for one moment.

The major had -- we had units that had responsibility for identifying and understanding what IAEA seals were. The major's unit had the responsibility to go in and clear conventional ordnance.

QUESTION: But, Larry, you've told us that you believe part of the 250 tons represents the material under question. You have said that.

DI RITA: Represents some portion of the material.

QUESTION: The major has not said that. So we would like to hear from him...

QUESTION: Do you believe you had RDX in there? . . .

[all emphasis mine]

What follows is a pathetic Who's On First routine of incompetence and irresponsibility by the political appointee, and security/terrorism amateur, Asst. SecDef. Larry DiRita. Of course, the fact that they are scramblng, can't pull a hefty file of removal protocols, advance plans and inventoried results of steps taken tells us all we need to know. That DiRita doesn't KNOW that RDX is not HMX (mega-mondo dual use nuke detonation explosive and kick ass conventional bang) only shows how completely their knowledge of the situation is hooey and backfill. The major didn't help much in this hash of a press conerence. Whatever he took (primacord, lower graded plastique and munitions) isn't what everyone's so exercised about. DiRita was hoping for an Ole! and ends up wrestling a goat.

HMX is stored in relatively innocuous and stable powder form. It's only when a plasticizer or binding agent is added to them that they become major boom-boom. If there were a serious effort to nail down threatening resources available to be flipped against US forces as an offensive insurgent threat, officers from Captain on up would have been briefed on what to look for and how to handle it. This particular 380 tons was thoughtfully and very conspicuously sealed and labelled by the International Atomic Energy Agency. It is just one cache of many.

The Pentagon is right: Iraq was chock full of nasty conventional weapons and material. But so is Iran. And Pakistan, Syria, Sudan and Indonesia. And, for that matter, so is America. Turn any of those countries into a rudderless chaotic mess by decapitating and disbanding their security and public safety forces and you would get the same result: A terrorist's smorgasbord of free all-you-can-carry doom and destruction, with, as it seems happened in A Qa Qaa and Tuwaitha, obliging Iraqi locals charging budding Bin ladens and Zuwahiris top dollar to rent them the trucks to cart it off. This stuff is what killed 289 marines in Lebonon under Reagan. It blew a hole in the USS Cole in Yemen. It obliterated the UN Mission in Baghdad last year, and did the same to an American compound in Saudi Arabia. Ditto our Embassies in Kenya and Nigeria. The stuff, it's power, and the damage it's already done is not news.

As Bush has noted ad infinitum, the Terrorists only need to be right once, we need to be right 100% of the time. This single, but certainly not solitary, instance of being wrong now mutates into a hundred or a 1000 more opportunities for a terrorist to "get it right." Our long odds just got longer. I feel much safer.

So, this is how the 'grown-ups' do it?

The tragic thing is, this gang of decision-makers who so took pleasure in saying only they had the cojones and the knowledge of how to really fight, how to treat troops, how to make us safer, really don't know what they're doing. Now, as the vortex of misjudgement and inexperience gains speed, they are forced to denigrate troops, deny reality, and define down what "a safer America" really means.

And it will only get worse: Post-election, however it turns out, they will be faced with the now solidfying and factually supported figures of 100,000 Iraqis estimated dead as a result of our "Gift of Freedom" to Mesopotamia. The independent numbers from Lancet, Britain's equivalent to the New England Journal of Medicine, say an alarmingly high percentage of those dead are women and children. Middle East expert Juan Cole has more:

The Lancet, a respected British medical journal, reports that the US and coalition forces (but mainly the US Air Force) has killed 100,000 Iraqi civilians since the fall of Saddam on April 9, 2003. Previous estimates for civilian deaths since the beginning of the war ranged up to 16,000, with the number of Iraqi troops killed during the war itself put at about 6,000.

The troubling thing about these results is that they suggest that the US may soon catch up with Saddam Hussein in the number of civilians killed. How many deaths to blame on Saddam is controversial. He did after all start both the Iran-Iraq War and the Gulf War. But he also started suing for peace in the Iran-Iraq war after only a couple of years, and it was Khomeini who dragged the war out until 1988. But if we exclude deaths of soldiers, it is often alleged that Saddam killed 300,000 civilians. This allegation seems increasingly suspect. So far only 5000 or so persons have been found in mass graves. But if Roberts and Burnham are right, the US has already killed a third as many Iraqi civilians in 18 months as Saddam killed... [More]

Who knows? But, what we do know: Just as 400,000 Iraqi soldiers disbanded and sent home toting their weapons was a bad idea, so too is flipping open a conventional weapons bazaar like Iraq. In for a dime, in for a dollar. This week, Bush asked for another 75 Billion, making Kerry's claims of a 200 Billion cost for Iraq an underestimate. Keep counting. This will be known as the one-trillion dollar hunch by the end of the decade. To paraphrase Colin Powell, we own it.

If I was George Bush, I wouldn't want a second term. It will destroy the viability of a Republican President, and possibly his party, for 20 years. Too bad. And ironic. In running away from his daddy's shadow, he severed contact with the one man who perhaps could have saved him from himself.