How Did the Weapons Vanish?

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The Kerry campaign seized on the 2003 chronology as a chance to hammer the Administration for its biggest mistake in prosecuting the war: its decision to use an invasion force that proved too small to secure critical sites in the aftermath of the war. The Bush team's explanations failed to solve the riddle. First, Pentagon officials produced a satellite photo from March 17, 2003, showing two Iraqi trucks lingering outside an al-Qaqaa bunker. The photo proves that there was activity by the former regime at the site sometime between the final IAEA inspection and the arrival of U.S. troops. But a Pentagon spokesman admitted he had no idea what kind of activity took place or even if the trucks were in an area where HMX, RDX and PETN were stored. Then a Deputy Under Secretary of Defense suggested that Russian units may have removed the weapons shortly before the invasion, but other Administration officials quickly slapped down the notion that Moscow had anything to do with it. Finally, the Pentagon introduced Army Major Austin Pearson, who said his unit, the 24th Ordnance Company, removed and destroyed between 200 and 250 tons of ammunition from al-Qaqaa on April 13, 2003, five days before the 101st arrived. Pearson said he didn't see any IAEA seals.

The biggest problem for U.S. forces in Iraq is that al-Qaqaa is actually only a small part of the problem. The 377 tons of missing explosives represents no more than 0.06% of the overall tonnage of munitions believed to have existed in Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies. Pentagon figures show that the U.S. has secured or destroyed 402,000 tons of the 650,000 tons of explosives Saddam is believed to have possessed — meaning that there are still 248,000 tons of unaccounted-for explosives. While much of that is in the form of artillery shells that make ideal roadside bombs, little of it is as powerful as the IAEA-sealed stockpile at al-Qaqaa.

Everyone agrees that the sheer amount of explosives available in Iraq is a chief reason why the U.S. has failed to contain the insurgency. A group called al-Islam's Army Brigades last week said it had obtained many of the al-Qaqaa explosives; military leaders have long suspected that U.S. troops were being attacked with weapons they had failed to secure in the rush to Baghdad. Although that suggests there were insufficient U.S. forces on the ground, some military leaders believe that even 100,000 more troops would not have made a difference. In October 2003, Lieut. General Ricardo Sanchez, then commander of the ground forces in Iraq, said, "You have ammo dumps [in Iraq] that are 15 km by 15 km. To physically guard every single bunker is impossible." But as the Administration learned last week, it takes only one to set off damaging charges.