The Kerry campaign knows a calamitous gift when it sees one.
Democrat John Kerry is seizing on the Bush administration’s failure to secure hundreds of tons of explosives now missing in Iraq.
President Bush “must answer for what may be the most grave and catastrophic mistake in a tragic series of blunders in Iraq,” Kerry adviser Joe Lockhart said Monday in a statement.
“How did they fail to secure … tons of known, deadly explosives despite clear warnings from the International Atomic Energy Agency to do so?” Lockhart said.
Democrat John Kerry said Monday that failure to secure hundreds of tons of explosives now missing in Iraq was “one of the great blunders” of the war by the Bush administration.
“Terrorists could use this material to kill our troops, our people, blow up airplanes and level buildings,” said Sen. Kerry, who is challenging President Bush for the presidency.
“The unbelievable blindness, stubbornness, arrogance of this administration to do the basics have now allowed this president to once again fail the test of being the commander in chief,” Kerry said at a morning rally.
“This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of this administration,” Kerry said.
President Bush, presenting himself as the best candidate to keep America safe, was accused by John Kerry on Monday of “unbelievable incompetence” in the disappearance of hundreds of tons of powerful explosives in Iraq.
“Every step of the way, this administration has miscalculated,” Kerry said in Dover, N.H. He spoke shortly before traveling to Philadelphia for a rally with former President Clinton, who was making his first political appearance since heart surgery nearly seven weeks ago.
Kerry said the Bush administration had “miscalculated about how to go to war, miscalculated about the numbers of troops that we would need, miscalculated about sending young Americans to war without the armor they needed, without the Humvees they needed that were armored.”
“And the incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk and put this country at greater risk than we ought to be,” Kerry said.
Running mate John Edwards, campaigning in Ohio, added, “After today, it’s hard to imagine that even they’ll continue believing things are going well.”
This one will not go away quietly. Some of this morning’s reports, particularly CNN’s, focus on the fact that these 377 tons of explosives are missing. These same reports, however, do not emphasize the fact that the Bush administration knew about the Al Qaqaa facility, did not secure it, and appears to have covered up the problem for a year.
If “the munitions are missing” is just phase one of the media’s coverage of this catastrophe, fine. But phase two has to start applying some semblance of accountability.