October Surprise
Democrats and progressives across the country have been sweating the past couple of weeks, fully confident that BC04 would pull some kind of a wild hare out of the hat--a Bin Laden or Zarqawi capture, pictures of John Kerry windsurfing over the bodies of dead children, etc. Well, there is a surprise today and it's more than just a bit of blowback on the BC04 folks--seems that some 350 tons of high-grade explosives are missing from a military installation in Iraq.

But it's not just this fact that's making this story worthy of top-page headlines. These munitions have been missing for a year or more. Here are the lead paras from the NYTimes:

The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

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.

The White House said President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was informed within the past month that the explosives were missing. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed. American officials have never publicly announced the disappearance, but beginning last week they answered questions about it posed by The New York Times and the CBS News program "60 Minutes."

Administration officials said Sunday that the Iraq Survey Group, the C.I.A. task force that searched for unconventional weapons, has been ordered to investigate the disappearance of the explosives.

American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings.

Here are the key points:

• Looting from this munitions facility have been ongoing since the spring of 2003
  
• It was never properly secured by US forces
  
• The IAEA was not informed
  
• Jerry Bremer was informed of this in May of 2004, but it did not get to the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) until this month
  
• Condi Rice, supposedly, was only informed of this information this month
  

Now, the administration is doing its best to put some spin on this knuckler:

A senior administration official told CNN that national security adviser Condoleezza Rice was notified about the missing weapons about a month ago. Iraq Survey Group inspectors are investigating, the official said.

The discovery was not made public sooner because standard intelligence practice is not to let the enemy know such information, the official said.

[...]

"In the grand scheme -- and on a grand scale -- there are hundreds of tons of weapons, munitions, artillery, explosives that are unaccounted for in Iraq," the official said. "And like the Pentagon has said, there is really no way the U.S. military could safeguard all of these weapons depots or find all of these missing materials."

I see. We went into Iraq to dismantle Iraq's WMD stocks and capabilities--remember, that was the thrust back in 2003; it just seems so long ago and many changes in excuse since then--and yet a senior administration official is whining that we just couldn't handle all this safeguarding.

As our President might say, it's hard work.

Here's the thing. This is gross incompetence, and it's a telling story about the focus of American forces that such a large depot of munitions was so lacking oversight. If a Democratic administration had been in charge of such a fiasco, I'd be crying foul, too. This is not a partisan, he said/she said story. It's the story of the leadership of the globe's lone superpower that is either a) incompetent, b) competent, but in way over their heads and unable to admit it, c) not telling the truth about its true intentions for the Iraq war (thus letting the focus on WMD to ebb), or d) all of the above.