Remember the debacle at Al Qaqaa? In 2004, we learned that the administration was given warnings about a massive ammunitions site, which Bush officials decided to ignore. About a dozen U.S. troops guarded the sprawling facility. As a result, Iraqi looters loaded powerful explosives into pickup trucks and drove away with about 380 tons of high-grade explosives. (You might recall that Rudy Giuliani blamed U.S. troops for the fiasco.)
As it happens, this wasn’t just a problem with one ammunitions facility.
The U.S. military’s faulty war plans and insufficient troops in Iraq left thousands and possibly millions of tons of conventional munitions unsecured or in the hands of insurgent groups after the 2003 invasion — allowing widespread looting of weapons and explosives used to make roadside bombs that cause the bulk of U.S. casualties, according to a government report released yesterday.
Some weapons sites remained vulnerable as recently as October 2006, according to the Government Accountability Office report, which said the unguarded sites “will likely continue to support terrorist attacks throughout the region.” For example, it said hundreds of tons of explosives at the Al Qa Qaa facility in Iraq that had been documented by the International Atomic Energy Agency were lost to theft and looting after April 9, 2003. […]
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said yesterday that securing the unexploded munitions in Iraq is “a huge, huge problem.” “The entire country was one big ammo dump,” he said at a Pentagon news conference. “We’re doing our best to try and find them but, given the expanse of the country and all the other tasks that the military is trying to carry out there, it’s a huge task,” he said. Gates has said that roadside bombs cause about 70 percent of U.S. troop casualties.
This is not at all pleasant to think about, but the administration’s negligence and absurd expectations in 2003 have had a variety of tragic consequences — and this might be one of the most offensive. The administration neglected to safeguard weapons and explosives, and now these very munitions are being used to kill U.S. troops.
The GAO report pointed to several critical assumptions underlying U.S. military war plans in 2003 that proved invalid — including expectations that Iraqi resistance was unlikely and that the Iraqi army would capitulate and continue to provide security.
As a result, widespread looting of munitions took place, including at the majority of Iraqi Republican Guard garrisons as well as 401 other sites, according to the GAO.
Pentagon programs have secured or disposed of more than 417,000 tons of munitions, the report said. But it said an unknown quantity — ranging from thousands to millions of tons of conventional munitions — remain unaccounted for.
Asked about the missing explosives in Iraq, Giuliani, speaking on behalf of the president’s campaign in 2004, said: “The president was cautious. The president was prudent…. No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough? Didn’t they search carefully enough?”
There were too few of them, they lacked the necessary support, and their superiors at the Pentagon blew off every possible warning.
And now the troops Giuliani blamed are paying a steep price for administration’s mistakes.