Eric Umansky: al-QaQaaa: Not so bad, yet worse

October 28, 2004

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?

October 28, 2004 at 06:55 PM | Permalink

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» A drop in the bucket... or the tip of the iceberg? from INTEL DUMP
Tom Ricks and Bradley Graham provide some analysis in Friday's Washington Post of the Al Qaqaa story which has taken a life of its own since Monday's initial NY Times repo... [Read More]

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