al qaqaa

okay so my promise of a post-nyc post never quite materialized. i'm underwater at work. actually, our office has been in emergency mode for over a month now. there have been a lot of long hours and frantic days. it has been getting harder and harder to keep up with work and all the other crap i like to do in my free time, like blogging, fer'instance.

meanwhile, i seem to be missing a particularly good time for political rants. just in the past few days this al qaqaa thing broke. it's hard to imagine a worse story to emerge at this point in the campaign for the bush administration. it nicely echoes many of the themes the democrats have been hitting him with over the past month or so: the lack of sufficient troops in iraq, the screwed-up priorities in guarding the oil ministries rather than the weapons sites we were allegedly there to secure, and the fact that invading iraq has endangered americans, not made us safer.

but bush's attempts to defend himself against the effects of this story are really quite ridiculous. "we don't know all the facts" doesn't cut it, because the facts we know are already pretty on point and damaging. bush's hints that maybe the explosives were removed by saddam hussein's forces before the u.s. invasion is also pretty weak for two reasons:

(1) it doesn't absolve him from responsibility even if true. as clearly articulated by Ted Linden in a letter to the nytimes published this morning:

To the Editor:

The International Atomic Energy Agency was successfully monitoring the 380 tons of explosives at Al Qaqaa.

Then the inspectors pulled out because the United States was about to invade Iraq to prevent dangerous weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists.

Now terrorists have or can easily buy all the high-grade explosives they could ever want.

Why does President Bush seem to think that he is absolved from responsibility if the thefts occurred before United States troops arrived at Al Qaqaa?

Wars have multiple consequences. Saddam Hussein is no longer running Iraq, and that is a good result, but how can Mr. Bush and a near majority of the American people still feel that the overall effects of this war have been positive?

(2) the second reason bush's it-could-have-been-gone-before-we-got-there defense doesn't hold water is because it's not true. a minneapolis news crew embedded with the 101st airborne division passed through the site and captured the now-missing explosives on film on april 18, 2003, after that part of iraq fell out of control of the hussein government. the videotape closely matches earlier photos of the site taken by UN and american weapons inspectors:

"The photographs are consistent with what I know of Al Qaqaa," said David A. Kay, a former American official who led the recent hunt in Iraq for unconventional weapons and visited the vast site. "The damning thing is the seals. The Iraqis didn't use seals on anything. So I'm absolutely sure that's an I.A.E.A. seal."

One weapons expert said the videotape and some of the agency's photographs of the HMX stockpiles "were such good matches it looked like they were taken by the same camera on the same day."

i simply don't see how the bush administration can defend itself from this one. if it were earlier in the election cycle, they could try to ride it out. but there simply is no time now. no wonder they're resorting to desperate measures like blaming american troops.

the excitement never stops in this campaign. i just wish i had time to rant about it more.