How Did the Weapons Vanish?

In the last days of the race, with both candidates crisscrossing battleground states and trading cable-news sound bites, the first wartime election in a generation was consumed, appropriately, by news out of Iraq: specifically, the revelation that the interim Iraqi government had discovered that roughly 380 tons of highly dangerous explosives and munitions had gone missing since the time of the U.S. invasion in March 2003. The amount of missing matériel was not huge. Before the war, Saddam Hussein was thought to have possessed from 650,000 to 1 million tons of weaponry. The saga of what exactly happened to the explosives at the al-Qaqaa facility, followed by the airing...