Truth - Al Franken [102]
The soldiers said about a dozen U.S. troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft of the explosives because they were outnumbered by looters.
The only consolation was that while al Qaqaa did contain massive quantities of materials suitable for nuclear detonators, Iraq didn’t have a nuclear weapon to detonate. Nor, it would turn out, did it have a program to develop such a weapon. But presumably Donald Rumsfeld hadn’t known that. And that’s just one of the reasons why it was so infuriating that he didn’t give the military the resources it needed to secure the site. As one weapons expert said of al Qaqaa:
This is not just any old warehouse in Iraq that happened to have explosives in it; this was a leading location for developing nuclear weapons before the first Gulf War. The fact that it had been left unsecured is very, very discouraging. It would be like invading the U.S. in order to get rid of WMD and not securing Los Alamos.
The Bush administration took special pains to cover up this particular failure. When The New York Times broke the story on October 25, 2004, the Pentagon tried to push the line that the explosives had been removed before American troops had arrived. The right-wing press jumped on board immediately, and by October 27 Sean Hannity was saying that “the story has been totally and completely and utterly debunked.”
Hannity never apologized after a Minnesota news crew dug up some video they had shot in Iraq on April 18, 2003, of box after box clearly marked “explosives” and “al Qaqaa.” After seeing the tape, Bush’s weapons inspector David Kaye said it was “game, set, match” that the explosives had still been there when American forces came through.
As a former federal prosecutor, Rudy Giuliani knew who was guilty of negligence in the case of al Qaqaa:
No matter how you try to blame it on the President, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn’t they search carefully enough?
Call me crazy, but I don’t blame the troops. Here’s former secretary of the Army Thomas White:
I think from an Army perspective, the concern was the troop levels after the war. Our concern—Shinseki’s concern, my concern—was if you were to look at the postwar tasks that had to be accomplished, the fact that this was a country as large as the state of California with a population of 25 million people, we were very concerned that there wouldn’t be sufficient boots on the ground after the operation to provide for security and get on with the stabilization activities.
A large majority of the 1,833 U.S. troops who have died in Iraq as of this writing—not to mention the 13,000+ wounded—were hit by IEDs and suicide bombers. It’s hard to believe that none of these bombs were made with explosives looted from al Qaqaa. In President Bush’s war movie, nobody wasted time on details like calculating the number of soldiers needed to secure ammunition dumps. No, I don’t blame the troops. I blame their commander in chief, who was serving the military even less as president than he had as an Alabama National Guard pilot in 1972.
Considering how well not reading had worked for him, it is probably not surprising that Bush fostered a culture of illiteracy, demanding that his advisers also not read certain key documents. It was sort of like a book club in reverse: “This month, we’re all going to be not reading the final report of the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project.”
Lieutenant General Jay Garner was a reluctant member of the Bush nonreading group. Appointed by Rumsfeld to run postwar Iraq, Garner thought the conclusions of the seventeen-agency Future of Iraq Project might be something he should take a look at, if, for no other reason, than to get their point of view. But for a voracious nonreader like George Bush, even this modest notion proved threatening.
One month after Garner arrived in Baghdad, he received some unwelcome news. He was out—a scapegoat for the lawless chaos that the Bush administration