Everyone Feel Safe and Secure With Bush at the Helm?


What a perfect example of Bushco's cultural and national security savvy - 38 tons of super explosives left unguarded while the oil depots are kept well protected in a war touted as one of liberation and "self-defense" - this all pretty much reads like the work of an author with a great and truly ironic imagination. Every war has unintended consequences - the hunch I shared with many other opponents of this war before it started was that we were unnecessarily opening up a Pandora's box that would lead to greater risks to our security than then existed. Arms inspectors and the IAEA were on site at the time and planning to stay, and the arms problem was under surveillance in a manner that was, as is now clearly apparent, more effective than what was to follow.

The "Al Qa Qaa" affair, however, goes well beyond what I had conceived of as possible even for this administration. OK, it really shouldn't have required an advanced rocket science degree to realize that invading Iraq would be a recruiting bonanza for terrorists across the Middle East, and put us in an untenable position as Western occupiers of an Arab land where religious, cultural and economic dissimilarities would grate and very likely ignite. Anyone who has looked at historical cases of terrorism would have some idea that even in cases where outsiders have gone in for "good" and supposedly "humanitarian" reasons, the situation often backfires. In Northern Ireland, for example, the British troops were originally sent to protect Catholics from the Pro British Unionists, but it didn't take long before they became targets for the IRA. And in the French attempts to preserve their imperial aspirations in Algeria, the elimination of terror was never accomplished despite the elimination of the leaders of the underground. New leaders emerged like mushrooms in response to their occupation.

Still, I have to admit I never expected the degree of arrogance and recklessness that led our government, in the face of warnings of the IAEA that dangerous dual use explosive detonators were under seal at Al QaQaa, to simply ignore the warnings, disregard the information, and in fact, to prevent the UN people from continuing their task of keeping track of Iraqi weapons. And then, just leave these materials unguarded? Bush never ceases to surprise. Or to pass blame. The attempt to spin criticism of a policy that led to losing track of materials used by terrorists and pass it all off as some sort of an attack on the armed forces is simple demagoguery. The buck stops where the policy was made, not with the guys who were following their orders.

Unfortunately, this is a level of arrogance that could come back to haunt. Have American service people have been killed or wounded with the help of these explosives? Will they be used in future terrorist attacks? These are questions we as Americans should ask, and deserve to have answered.