Don’t let the obvious — and deadly — failures become triumphs.

(Hawkwisdom! @6:15 – promoted by buhdydharma )

I just frontpaged a short piece over on ePluribus Media called “About that weapons cache…” — Good News and Bad News, but it’s important enough to repeat in full here…

Great news, folks! This just in from Reuters:

19 tons of explosives found in Iraq

BAGHDAD (Reuters) – U.S. forces in Iraq discovered nearly 19 tons of explosives in a weapons cache north of Baghdad this week, one of the biggest finds of its kind, the U.S. military said on Saturday.

[…snip…] More at link in title

Isn’t that wonderful? 19 tons!

Of course, if the Bush Administration hadn’t lost 380 tons of explosives just over three years ago, we might have something more significant to crow over. (Make the jump…)

Ah, yes…wasn’t there something about that? Nearly 400 tons of unsecured weapons and explosives…?  Why, yes — there was!

Remember this?

Looting spree gutted ammo dump
Witnesses say Iraqis blitzed Al Qaqaa after U.S. troops came, left

James Glanz, Jim Dwyer, New York Times
Thursday, October 28, 2004

(10-28) 04:00 PDT Baghdad — Looters stormed the weapons site at Al Qaqaa in the days after American troops swept through the area in early April 2003 on their way to Baghdad, gutting office buildings, carrying off munitions and even dismantling heavy machinery, three Iraqi witnesses and a regional security chief said Wednesday.

The Iraqis described an orgy of theft so extensive that enterprising residents rented their trucks to looters. But some looting was clearly indiscriminate, with people grabbing anything they could find and later heaving unwanted items off the trucks.

Two witnesses were employees of Al Qaqaa — one a chemical engineer and the other a mechanic — and the third was a former employee, a chemist, who had come back to retrieve his records, determined to keep them out of U.S. hands. The mechanic, Ahmed Saleh Mezher, said employees asked the Americans to protect the site, but were told this was not the soldiers’ responsibility.

The accounts do not directly address the question of when nearly 400 tons of powerful conventional explosives vanished from the site sometime after early March, the last time international inspectors checked the seals on the bunkers where the material was stored. It is possible that Iraqi forces removed some explosives before the invasion.

Article continues at link in headlines

Now, we have just 361 tons of explosives unaccounted for, except what’s already been used in the surging number of IED attacks against our troops.

While it’s great that we’ve recovered 19 tons of the missing ordnance, let’s not delude ourselves into thinking this is evidence of the “surge” actually working, or — perhaps even worse, and even more to be expected — let’s ensure that this isn’t used to further the cause of accusing Iran, Syria, Turkey or whoever pisses off BushCo as “helping” the insurgency.  I fully expect to hear that Bush supporters spin this find as more than it is.  I’m not diminishing the significance — that’s 19 tons of explosives that can’t be used to kill our troops — but it’s 19 tons of explosives that we originally had control over and we’re missing most of what we’d had.  Over 360 tons of explosives are still missing, and it’s not the fault of our soldiers that it’s out there — it’s the fault of their leaders at the uppermost levels.

And it’s been missing for over just two years.

Finding 19 tons of it on the two-year anniversary does ~not~ give me any kind of a warm and fuzzy feeling. There’s plenty left out there for causing all sorts of mayhem, and much of that is likely to be with the blood of American troops who sought only to support their nation. They, and most Americans, were lied to and manipulated into a war of choice by a fearless, feckless and foolish leadership; we are engaged in an illegal war, run by an incompetent CiC and his top-level cronies.

And our troops are paying the price in blood which runs in the streets alongside the blood of innocent men, women and children as our national integrity is shredded further and further still.

It’s time to end the war. It’s time to remove the Myopic, Misanthropic Executive and his phalanx of enabling supporters and future co-defendants.

You go to war with the army you have, but having an army is no reason to go to war. And if you do find yourself in a war, at least get into it for the right reasons, or get the hell out before the butcher’s bill comes due in full.

Unless, of course, you plan to engage in warfare for a very long period of time, and are trying to ensure that even if the people who follow you into office want to end the war, they’ll be stuck for years before they can get out…