al-QaQaaa: Not so bad, yet worse

Bush’s reality-defying road show not withstanding, we can move on from the possibility that the explosives were removed before the war. Here’s the video, showing GIs arriving at al-QaQaaa in April 2003 and opening storage bunkers that, like in some cartoon, are filled with crates labeled “explosives.” The GIs broke the locks, showed the explosives to the embedded camera crew, and then took off, doors ajar. They had orders to get to Baghdad.

Anyway, prompted by Jack Shafer, I started wondering how unique al-Qaqaa is. And are the chemicals stored there, RDX and HMX, really super-explosives?

As the NYT trotted out, less than one pound of the stuff is what downed Pan Am Flight 103. Except that doesn’t mean anything. As somebody pointed out on the Web—I can’t remember where—airplanes have thin skin. It doesn’t take much to pierce it and then you have a fatal zipper effect.

So I called John Pike (insiders, don’t laugh), a kind of know-it-all military expert who founded globalsecurity.org. I asked if RDX and HMX are orders of magnitude more powerful than standard TNT. “Oh no!” he said. “It might have the 140 percent the equivalence of TNT, certainly not more than that.”
“These are common garden variety high explosives,” said Pike. “They were under IAEA seal because the facility was associated” Saddam’s nukes program.

(Pike says the misperception about the explosives is understandable: “Part of it is due to origin of story— from the IAEA, so people associate it with nukes. And in part is because nobody had any sense what RDX. I didn’t either. It took two days of power-burn non-stop research for until i really felt like I had an idea what i was talking about.)

But just because the explosives at al-QaaQaaa are essentially run-of-the-mill, doesn’t make the U.S.’s screw-up less gargantuan. “There about 900 ammo dumps around the country and a bunch of these places still aren’t guarded.”

“To my mind the core element of the story is: The U.S. concept of operations did not account for the possibility of an insurgency and did not encompass a need to secure ammo dumps as they went through,” says Pike. “You probably wouldn’t need that many GIs to protect the depots, just a deterrence presence, say 20 soldiers per dump. That’s a total of one extra division. It wouldn’t have broken the bank.

“The government’s negligence here is just bewildering. You almost think the enemy has infiltrated our decision making process. It’s the only explanation.”

Next question: How many of the 900 dumps have been secured?

Comments

[Johnny Nemo]

It seems the American government actually swallowed the neo-cons' argument that the invaders would be welcomed with open arms by the Iraqis, so they didn't bother to secure arms depots. Our friends wouldn't use those against us, right?

No nation has welcomed a conquering and occupying force, no matter how benevolent. And the Americans seem to have wasted no time in proving to the average Iraqi-in-the-street that they're not the Good Guys, they're just the New Guys.

[Amilius]

The thing that stands out is that nowhere along the line were the troops alerted to a specific site that the UN and IAEA had warned the administration to secure. This tragic breakdown in communication and planning is probably why Gen. Tommy Franks showed up stumping, suggesting prior removal of munitions, for his former boss. Apparently, even Franks has a post-war reputation that he feels threatened by such revelations and analysis. Do you suppose now Swiftboatvets will still come out and say they support administration? Chauvinism should never be confused with patriotism.

[Amilius]

The thing that stands out is that nowhere along the line were the troops alerted to a specific site that the UN and IAEA had warned the administration to secure. This tragic breakdown in communication and planning is probably why Gen. Tommy Franks showed up stumping, suggesting prior removal of munitions, for his former boss. Apparently, even Franks has a post-war reputation that he feels threatened by such revelations and analysis. Do you suppose now Swiftboatvets will still come out and say they support administration? Chauvinism should never be confused with patriotism.

[Tom Maguire]

The NY Times was for the theory that munitions had been dispersed before they were against it.

From the Oct. 20 Times:

"In a major misreading of Iraq's strategy, the C.I.A. failed to predict the role played by Saddam Hussein's paramilitary forces, which mounted the main attacks on American troops in southern Iraq and surprised them in bloody battles.

The agency was aware that Iraq was awash in arms but failed to identify the huge caches of weapons that were hidden in mosques and schools to supply enemy fighters."

A week later, all the explosives that mattered were at Al QaQaa. Next week, who knows.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/20/international/20war.html?ex=1255924800&en=57acdac4dc595f07&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

[dbt]

Eric -- the enemy DID penetrate our decision making process. the CIA's list of sites to secure, which included the IAEA's greatest hits parade, was shelved in favor of "one suggested by Iraqi exiles". See Political Animal (the washingtonmonthly.com blog).

I simply cannot get over the sense that we were simply penetrated and conned, with such thoroughness, by the Iranians.

[Bruce Moomaw]

The really fascinating thing about the Bush defense -- that Saddam made off with the Al Qaqaa explosives before we got there, so no one could have expected us to prevent this or know where they were taken -- is that Al Qaqaa was also regarded from the start as one of the biggest likely depots for Saddam's WMDs. What the Bushites are saying, therefore, is that the US either wouldn't or couldn't prevent Saddam from handing over his WMDs en masse to unknown terrorists before we invaded -- although that was the very reason given for the war in the first place! (And although the CIA had warned Bush about just this possibility, at length, in October 2002.)

In this connection, see also Peter Galbraith's bloodcurdling piece on how he repeatedly witnessed US soldiers standing around idly during the wholesale looting of other likely WMD sites, reluctantly explaining to him that they had received no orders to guard those sites: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/10/27/eyewitness_to_a_failure_in_iraq/ . And this is hardly news; the Washington Post did a piece on the subject within a few weeks of the invasion, which was elaborated on by a professor at the US Naval War College 13 months ago: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2003-10-05-wagner_x.htm . (It's little things like this that drive reluctant Kerry Republicans like Dan Drezner to use such rude phrases as "Mongoloid cluster-fucks" when they describe Bush's Iraq strategy.)

[Bruce Moomaw]

Additional note: As Brad DeLong has been saying for at least 15 months, thank God Saddam DIDN'T have WMDs. If he had, the US would now be considerably farther up Shit Creek than we actually are, thanks to the Bushites' criminal incompetence.

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