Tell me if I've got this right. [View All]

[Tom Rinaldo]

Let's see, we invaded Iraq to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of terrorists after pulling the plug on U.N. inspectors who were successfully monitoring Hussein's weapons programs. Didn't we accuse the U.N. of letting Iraqis move stuff around to hide it from their inspectors? I think so. Anyway, of course we had to go there ourselves to get the job done right.

By my rough calculations it would take a convoy of roughly 200 pickup trucks to "loot" that size stockpile of explosives. Or maybe about 5,000 people loading 75 pounds each into backpacks. Something like that could be easy to miss. Someone yells out, "Hey look at that big bird over there", our sentries turn their heads to look for the bird, and "poof!" the explosives are whisked away. Oh yeah I forgot, there were no sentries.

I'm sure Iraq must have a maze of busy highways that the looters were able to blend onto inconspicuously. Either that or lots of outdoor enthusiast backpackers that terrorists could co-mingle with. Something like a gazillion tons of explosives might be hard to steal, move, and hide without being caught of course, but a mere 380 tons? You can't expect the U.S. to plan for every evil act by every evil doer.

Now had we somehow known that terrorists might possibly get their hands on those 380 tons of Saddam's deadliest explosives (just one pound equals one downed plane, very efficient) we might have come up with a plan to seal Iraq's suddenly American opened borders so that terrorists from around the world couldn't flow on into Iraq to pick up a ton or two to take home as souvenirs. And in that case maybe we would have prevented terrorists from setting up handy meet and greet centers in the Sunni triangle where they could trade plastic explosives for Camel Cigarettes, or whatever they do their when they aren't firing rocket propelled grenades at American troops.

But in the immortal words of Condi Rice, No one could possibly have foreseen something like that happening.