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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (149631)	10/28/2004 2:40:15 PM
From: Michael Watkins	Respond to of 281500

Thanks for the link. FYI in the comment for that blog I posted the BREAKING NEWS that bunkers and bunkers of explosives were in fact observed by American soldiers and reporters after the fall of Iraq. ;-) Sure, maybe the NY Times got lucky; but that doesn't make the story any less important. Again the key issue is: There was no plan to secure these materials quickly, period. That is a failure, pure and simple.

To: carranza2 who wrote (149631)	10/28/2004 4:33:30 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Carranza, Kerry is right on the explosives story, even if they were gone when our army got there. Let me make an analogy. Assume you have a duty to care for a child. Assume that you go to the home but don't check to make sure the child is in her room. Assume that you then leave without making arrangements for someone else to take care of the child. Assume the child turns out to have been kidnapped and your defense is that you never checked and therefore the child may have been kidnapped before you got there. I think most of us would be outraged at the fact that you never planned nor executed your caretaking duties properly. We wouldn't be impressed with your "excuse" that since you never checked no one could say that your negligence caused the kidnapping. After all, if you'd have checked and done your duty we'd have either known in time to do something about it or it wouldn't have happened. That's what Kerry is saying when he says that this is another example of the lack of competent planning and of the Bush decision to do this war on the cheap. And he's clearly right. The FACT that Bush's people didn't even check, much less secure, the weapons is criminally negligent and shows incompetence in planning and execution. It's the direct result of too few men to take care of a complicated occupation where the military and police functions of a chaotic society are destroyed. Did it cause harm? We know that these were obscenely dangerous, high grade, military quality explosives. We know that they had tremendous value to insurgents and that looters knew this. We know that in Iraq the insurgents have hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. We know that our soldiers are being killed by IED devices and that the amount of bang in those devices is directly related to their killing effectiveness. Don't anyone tell us that this isn't important to the kids we've sent in harm's way.