No More Excuses

The final pillar in the administration's case for war---the need to keep weapons out of the hands of terrorists---just collapsed. It turns out that at the very beginning of the occupation, the US let a 350 ton stockpile of conventional arms at a weapons site called al Qa Qaa [Arabic for, "the kaka"--ed.] go unguarded. It had previusly been monitored by the IAEA. And then, after the invasion...the materials there just went missing. (You knew that the weapons the jihadists are using to kill our soldiers came from somewhere, didn't you?) Faced with an early setback, but not wishing to put a damper on the national mood---remember, this is Mission Accomplished time---the administration concealed the disappearance of the al Qa Qaa [I'm going to keep using that name--ed.] weapons from the IAEA, from the broader non-proliferation community, and natch, from the American people.

In other words, we went to war precisely so that the sort of thing we allowed to happen wouldn't happen. Even in the New York Times account, which as Josh Marshall notes, is already fairly unacceptably deferential to administration spin, neverthless includes a healthy dose of memory holing:

"Administration officials say they cannot explain why the explosives were not safeguarded, beyond the fact that the occupation force was overwhelmed by the amount of munitions they found throughout the country."

Gee golly shucks, I wonder what happened to those weapons. Is this another consequence of catastrophic success (and if so, can we aim to have fewer catastrophic successes in the future)?

Andrew Sullivan took the proper descriptive term right out of my mouth: criminal negligence.