A few pounds here, a few pounds there...

...and pretty soon you get an idea of just how monumentally inept, unfocused and uncaring this administration is with regard to small things like the lives of the troops they "support," and amazingly, the sustainablilty of the political missions they fabricate and sell us.

Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq

NYT: The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year. [More]

In poker they call these slips of focus or intent "tells." Usually, after tells like outing CIA spy Valerie Plame, Tora Bora, the firing of Jay Garner, the disbanding of the Iraqi military, the "unexpected" looting, Abu Ghraib, the advance and retreat from Falujah, Ahmed Chalabi's intel leaks to Iran... well, lets just say the sharks would be circling your table waiting to get their bite out of "the Rube." But, on to the point.

350+ tons? Of what? Military.com:

On a battlefield, nothing has the efficiency and destructive power of explosives. Combining the right compounds and combinations, the military has a few recipies up their sleeve to reap death and destruction on the enemy.

Don't buy any of the bullshit you hear about this being a "field" decision or that they disappeared pre-, mid, or immediately post-war. This was a strategic screw up of tragic proportions.

RDX and HMX High Explosive (HE) is nasty stuff, as any car bomb witness from Belfast to Athens to Baghdad will tell you. The problem with this particular batch of HE was.... well, it wasn't considered WMD-worthy. (Very surprising, since HMX is a dual-use HE; good for cutting steel in construction, or, as the primary explosive for the very nukes Bush told us to worry about.)

Not WMD. Sure, it's a weapon. 350 tons is a massive amount. And it's damn destructive. But it wasn't the "sexy reveal"; it didn't have the marquee value this Public Relations administration wanted. No voila! No Press Bang.

But, like budget figures, it just damn hard for us average folk to get our heads around what we're talking about here. So, let's do the math.

350+ tons of High Explosive (RDX, HMX) = 700,000+ lbs.

Do you remember the Bali bombing that killed 191 Australians, Europeans and Balinese, injured scores more and decimated a city block last year? That was 200 lbs of an HE and homebrew explosive mix in a Toyota. Boom.

The Madrid Train Bombing? A few hundred-weight. Boom.

Pan Am 107 that exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland? Supposedly, 1-2 lbs of C4 high explosive. Smaller boom, but 259 dead.

The Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) that are taking out US Humvees and convoys and, oh yeah, Coalition troops at 2 a day, are estimated to range between 5 and 50 lbs; some are just looted artillery shells hooked up to a celluar phone and detonated remotely by a simple phone call. Some IEDs are more sophisticated, consisting of anywhere from 5 to 50 lbs of brick or sheet HE, or explosive scooped out of artillery rounds. Boom. Boom.

The Murrah Building in Oklahoma City? That was about 1000 pounds of ANFO--essentially, fertilizer and fuel oil packed in drums. ANFO is much more cumbersome, less brisant (rapidly burning) and about 40-50% weaker, pound for pound, than the missing Iraqi High Explosives. 1/2 Boom, 168 dead, counting dozens of kids.

So, 350 tons of HE, or 700,000 lbs equals:

3,500 Bali nightclub bombings.

or 1,400 Oklahoma City Bombings

or 35,000 IED attacks on American troops and convoys in Iraq.

Massive amounts of "mid-level" destruction? This stuff is the seed capital of terrorism. And it held no interest for the guys in the basement at the White House, or in the E-ring of the Pentagon?

Scott Mclellan and DoD press flacks for Rummy and Wolfowitz say the ammo dump at Al Qa Qaa, where this stuff disappeared under our noses, was mid-level priority. The things that were top line were the Oil Ministry and Oil fields (their characterization, not mine.) Note: there are estimates of 20-30 ammo dumps across Iraq, many of which recieved little or no attention in the months after the war. In similarly sensitive facilities outside Falujah and Basra (and well-known to the coalition intel and commanders), reports immediately following the invasion had civilians literaly pouring out barrels of toxic effluent stored, still under IAEA seal, from after Gulf War One. Was anybody watching the joint? Besides a few Iraqis slipped a few bucks to keep the gates locked, no. Why were the people dumping barrels of munitions processing waste out into the dirt? They wanted to use them to store drinking water. No doubt, birth defects and cancer will soon be another legacy of Iraq to replace rape rooms. Must be the Price of Freedom we hear so many talking about.

Still, 700,000+ pounds of boom-boom. Still too abstract? Wonder what it feels like? Since my physics sucks, I googled up this Comparative Energies Table and edited it a bit for clarity.

Energy (Joules - NewtonMeters)	Example	Power (Watts)
1 Nm	An apple falling from 1 meter hitting table	40W
230 Nm	Fastball @ 100 mi/hr caught in mitt	2300 W
450 Nm	.357 Mag Handgun (150 gr @ 1000 fps) (impact into steel plate)	12.5 Megawatts
5000 Nm	Hit from 220 lb tackle running 40 yd in 4 sec	20 kW (assuming .25 second hit)
490 KiloJoules	3000 lb Automobile crashing into concrete wall @ 60 mi/hr	2.1 Megawatt
2 MegaJoules	1 Lb High Explosive (detonation velocity 6000 meter/sec)	240 Gigawatt

So, a linebacker tackling you equals 20,000 watts (20 kW) of power spread over a quarter of a second -- a long time in explosive terms.

1 lb of High Explosive equals 240,000,000,000 watts (240 gW) of power. In thousandths of a second.

240 *billion* watts of boom. Very quick. In other words, standing next to 1 lb of detonating RDX HE is like getting hit by 12 million linebackers. Or, if you prefer, being shot by 19,200 .357 magnums. Stand a hundred feet away from 20 lbs and it's only like a few houses falling on you. Either way, you're dead, and in lots of pieces to boot. That's the kind of mass destruction we all take personally.

It's a cliche, sure, but War is serious business. Ironically, this is a war about cliches. About nations, motives, religions, political parties and voters. And about reflexive ignorance, arrogance and vengeance. These people in offfice, many of whom haven't heard a shot fired in anger, never mind served, these people are not serious about this war, nor about weapons of mass destruction, and neither, obviously, are they pure in their aims. The tells are everywhere, and have been since before 9/11. They just like the idea of war. The stagecraft of it, the impression of decisiveness. And yet, they have none of the critical and ideology-free decision-making skills neccessary to execute with forethought. War makes them feel manly, it makes them feel needed.

It makes them feel necessary and wise. In theory.

In practice, they are none of the above. And I wouldn't rehire them to lifeguard my pool.

8 days to go. Many years of remediation, realignment and capable reengagement to come.

[UPDATE 3:36 : Drudge says: An NBCNEWS crew embedded with troops moved in to secure the Al-Qaqaa weapons facility on April 10, 2003, one day after the liberation of Iraq. According to NBCNEWS, the HMX and RDX explosives were already missing when the American troops arrived. "The U.S. Army was at the site one day after the liberation and the weapons were already gone," a top Republican blasted from Washington late Monday.

Sorry, that dog won't hunt, as Josh Marshall seems to have noted a few minutes ahead of me here. He rightfully points out that moving that amount of junk, 40 trucks worth, in the lengthy run-up to the invasion would have been nigh impossible given our control of the skies and recon overflights that were ubiquitous 24/7. It's been established by AP, sourced to a Pentagon intelligence official on he ground in Baghdad that the explosives were there, as linked above: "US-led coalition troops had searched Al-Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives, which had been under IAEA seal since 1991, were intact."

The muddying and administration faux-anger has begun full-force, but this one will work itself out. Too many previously dismissed, and ultimately vindicated, players in this mess--IAEA, The Survey Group, et al--say Larry DiRita and his crew at the Pentagon are spinning furiously because they *don't* know the exact status of Al Qaa Qa, post invasion. And that's the problem. If it were a family home, it would have a porch stacked with unread newspapers and bottles of rancid milk.

One thing Marshall doesn't note is this: For at least 4 months prior to the March 8 invasion-proper, US and British Special Forces teams were covertly wandering the countryside of Iraq ID-ing and sighting targets and pre-positioning materiel. Some were disabling and blowing stuff up where possible. And that's key, following on the point above about this being a mother-lode of terrorist booty: They could, should, and would have torched it prior to it becoming an enemy asset. If ground forces hadn't 86'd it, it should, would or could have been on the A-list of preemptive, or at least, initial aerial bombardment targets once the invasion commenced March 8.

That is, if these guys were truly serious, about real targets of opportunity. But al Qa Qaa was 'boring.' Instead, it seems they had a hard-on for their new rootin-tootin' piece d'resistance: Shock and Awe. Too bad it consisted of bombing the neighborhoods of Baghdad, instead of a lowly cluster of bunkers 30 miles south of town. No cameras there, I guess.]