Centerfield

Rick,

I appreciate you putting all comments on this issue in one thread. I believe it gives all of us a chance to watch the progress of this story from several vantage points.

You wrote earlier and again in this entry that commanders on the ground were responsible for those and other facilities not being guarded. You also wrote that because the commanders erred this was not Bush's fault.

I strongly disagree with this statement/sentiment. Your military/army experience and your interpretation of military history may be different. But, I assure you that troops and units follow a battle plan. There is no way a fighting unit would dilute their manpower and loose the element known as mass for any reason.

The big deal is not the amount of explosives. The big deal is what this issue illustrates about our execution of this war and the outright lies we were told by the administration and its' minions when asked a simple question. Here we agree.

In a purely nonpartisan manner, I look at people and authority figures in terms of integrity. I may not always agree. But, I should be able to trust and respect them. The knee-jerk reaction to this issue and the prison scandal was denial, derision, and dismissal. Is it too much to ask that this administration have an honest dialogue with us about how their actions to protect us are going? No one is perfect. When you start to insist that you are, there's a problem.

No one on this blog has been so silly as to say I support X because Y is a [insert your childish name here]. We have had thoughtful discussions about serious issues. As a member of the electorate, I want to be treated like a thinking human and not a rube.

For me, framing is a not tangential, it's essential. I have no problem with reporting facts, but from the beginning this story was on an explosive subject (no pun intended) and was being reported in the most sensitive of time frames, the week before a presidential election. Given this, I find the initial failure of the media to stress the big picture of the overall issue of risk assessment of total munitions on the ground to be simply inexcusable.

I also think Kerry's frontrunning demagoguery was shamelessly opportunistic and maximally unstatesmanlike. And entirely unsurprising behavior for a presidential candidate. I also have no doubt that if the shoe were on the other foot, very very few politicians would have eschewed taking a similar swipe.

But this time, instead of getting the press to back down, conservative media helped keep the story alive for a week -- to the delight of the Kerry campaign -- and ultimately ended up on the wrong side of the facts.

I see Salon still wants to have their own "facts." The facts of the story did indeed show it to be a non-story, except for the "last minute hit piece" angle. For example, unless there's a lot more video that hasn't been shown to the public, there's no video of soldiers breaking IAEA seals as Salon alleges--there is video of a seal on one bunker, and the word of the news crew themselves that they didn't enter that bunker. And the "high-powered explosives" barrels that were shown in the video weren't the missing IAEA-inventoried explosives, but nitrostarch, which is actually less powerful than TNT and can be made in any garage (though not safely--don't go getting any anarchist ideas). But hey, why let the facts get in the way of a good hit piece?

All I've seen anyone prove so far is that there were (and are) a lot of munitions in Iraq when we went in.

The Kerry campaign has joined the conservative media? They did the most work to keep the story alive, after all. CBS, robbed of their election-eve hit piece, is now recycling the armor story.

Salon's finger-pointing at "the conservative media" impresses me just as little as CNS' finger-pointing at the "liberal media."

Yeah, no doubt. I don't find that paragraph credible either. Why is there no mention by salon of the very salient point that when Kerry jumped way ahead of what was known, HE ended up way on the wrong side of the facts too?

Because it's an attempt to get more mileage out of a hit piece, Brian, while vaguely and nonsensically blaming the other side for it being a hit piece to begin with.

Jaime,

I have no military experience whatever. When I say commanders, I did not mean the people on the ground, grunts or officers. I meant Tommy Franks and his staff. I don't know to what extent civilian leadership at DoD would be involved in this.

Tully,

Clearly, this story would be more a ratings getter before the election than after. No proof that the media hype is liberal bias instead of ratings bias. Hey, we've gotten pretty good traffic out of it at Centerfield.

And clearly the story would be more honest journalism and less hit piece if they actually sourced and vetted it before running it. How far back do we have to go with the Times and CBS to find them breaking any stories critical of Kerry? Any at all in the last week? Last month? And how well sourced did they have to be before CBS and the Times led with them?

In my last post on Al-Qaqaa (and I do mean my LAST), I quoted an IAEA document as follows: "the sealing of the bunkers was only partially effective because each bunker had ventilation shafts . . . These shafts were not sealed and could provide removal routes for the HMX while leaving the front door locked."

While the argument over when and by whom the HMX was removed goes on and on, everyone seems to be ignoring this singular FACT: the bunkers were NOT sealed, and the IAEA knew it. To me, this is scandalous. I can't understand why I seem to be the only one who thinks this is important. It reflects very badly on the UN (the IAEA's parent organization). This is scandal number 2 (number 1 is the oil-for-food scandal).

If you think that I'm making much ado about nothing, please add a comment explaining why.

Rick, the military is an arm of our government. The executive branch gives the mission to the military and they execute. Franks had a finite amount of resources and an objective. I believe he and his forces performed exactly as they were instructed. Iraq is a referendum on the Rumsfeld Doctrine/Theory of a lean, high-tech, fast moving force. President Bush weighed the arguments of two of his advisors, Rumsfeld and Powell, and chose Rumsfeld. We know for a fact that he chose Rumsfeld because we saw and celebrated the Powell Doctrine in the Gulf War.

When the explosives issue first hit Centerfield, Marc referenced a newspaper article that was very old. It got scant notice at the time. The print media tried to engage the public in a debate before Iraq and has tried to inform us about the progress of the war. This week they ran with this story in an effort to get the information out, again. I don't see it as a negative or a knock if you acknowledge a mistake and make an effort to correct it. The mistake: We didn't plan for the peace. The fix: More money, more troops, more Arab PR/diplomacy.

In between the Russians/Saddam took it before hand and the sacrificial major destroying tons of something or other after the invasion, it should be pretty clear that the administration's first instinct was to slap the story down by any means necessary rather than address it.

I think it's a sad fact of reality that this has been politicized and criticisms are flying. Many Americans who support Bush say they want to see changes in his next term to show that he is willing to fix the problems that have surfaced. The question we have to answer is "Has President Bush given me any indication that he acknowledges missteps and that he will fix them?"

Was it morally wrong to torture those prisoners or was it wrong to get caught?

Marc, I don't think your points are overstated. I have written before that my only televised source of information for the oil for food scandal is Fox. I'm following it as often as it comes up.

I'm not naive enough to believe that every organization/country in the world is our friend. We need to hold them accountable. But, we don't get a free pass, either.

While the vents may have negated the effect of the seals, it shouldn't be up to you and me as regular citizens to have to pick through all of this stuff, attach our beliefs to it, and draw some sort of conclusion. That brings us back to the need for a complete intelligence overhaul in my opinion. We need facts, follow up, and appropriate action. As Americans, we have to demand it.

One of the issues surrounding the Al QaQaa story is the lack of adequate troops to properly perform the mission. It is quite likely that the U. S. could have used additional troops, but most people making this point treat the military estimates as the Holy Grail, something not to be questioned by anyone. The problem with this position is that it flies in the face of recent history. After reading Samantha Power’s book, “A Problem From Hell” I have the impression that for at least the last decade the military has grossly inflated their requirements to avoid having to do anything. A few excerpts on that subject follow:

Bosnia

One deterrent to U. S. involvement was the estimated steep cost of intervening. The U. S. military’s authoritative monopoly on estimating likely casualties lowered the prospects for intervention. Since Vietnam, U. S. generals had opposed U. S. military involvement in all wars and had never favored intervention on mere humanitarian grounds. (P 283)

In 1992 U. S. military planners said it would take 50,000 U. S. ground troops to secure a 30-mile perimeter around the Sarajevo airport for airlift security. The airlift was actually managed with 1,000 Canadian and French forces. (P 283)

At an August 11 Senate Hearing Lieutenant General Barry McCaffrey, assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, told Congress 400,000 troops would be needed to enforce a cease-fire in Bosnia. Scowcroft concedes that the military’s analysis was “probably” inflated but says that “armchair strategists” could not very well challenge the Joint Chiefs. Ambassador Zimmerman remembers his frustration at the military trump card that the Joint Chiefs played time and again. “They never said, we won’t,’ or ‘No we can’t,’” he recalls. “They just tossed around figures on what it would take that were both unacceptable and, because of who was supplying them, uncontestable.” (P 283)

When humanitarian land corridors were proposed, according to Scowcroft, the “troops-to-task” estimate came back at 300,000. This was a daunting figure that many independent observers deemed utterly disproportionate to the quality and commitment of the Serb troops attacking unarmed civilians in Bosnia. But military experts proliferated and pontificated, repeatedly citing the impenetrability of the mountainous landscape and heroic fortitude of Tito’s Partisans in World War II, who tied down the Nazis in pitched battle for months. Powell and Defense Secretary Cheney convinced the President that the risks of military engagement were too high – even to use U. S. air power to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid to Bosnia’s hungry civilians. (P 284)

Rwanda

On May 5, Frank Wisner, the undersecretary of defense for policy, prepared a memo for sandy Berger, the deputy national security advisor. Wisner’s meme testifies to the unwillingness of the U. S. government to make even financial sacrifices to diminish the killing. (P 371)

A U. S. official who kept a journal during the crisis wrote: “A military that wants to go nowhere to do anything –or let go of their toys so someone else can do it.” (P 384)

Some military truisms:

War is hell.

There is never enough of anything.

No plan survives contact with the enemy.

The biggest "experts" are always REMF's and/or civilians.

And, of course, hindsight is 20/20.

REMF?

ROA, R - rear, E - echelon. You can handle the rest. They're like arm chair quarterbacks.

Thanks