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Also posted at The Next Hurrah]
The foreign policy of the Bush administration has kept my head spinning all day. Karen Hughes to run public diplomacy in the Middle East, and now this absolutely incredible article from the NYT that describes how almost the entire physical infrastructure of the Iraqi WMD program was systematically and expertly looted, and sensitive equipment that can be used to develop nuclear and chemical weapons have vanished, quite possibly ending up in Iran and other countries seeking to develop nuclear weapons. You should read the entire article, just be prepared to be outraged.
But let me highlight one particularly important passage:
The peak of the organized looting, Dr. Araji estimates, occurred in four weeks from
mid-April to mid-May of 2003 as teams with flatbed trucks and other heavy equipment moved systematically from site to site. That operation was followed by rounds of less discriminating thievery.
"The first wave came for the machines," Dr. Araji said. "The second wave, cables and cranes. The third wave came for the bricks."
That's right, the looting occurred after US troops had occupied the area south of Baghdad where most of the weapons facilities were located, and the looting, involving heavy equipment such as cranes, went on undisturbed and uninterrupted for four weeks!
The Bushies like to talk about the operation in Iraq as an effort to "drain the swamp" of terrorists. The more apt analogy is that our effort in Iraq was a successful effort to blindly swat a calm and contained hornets nest with a garden rake, sending dangerous creatures spewing forth to attack over a wide area. In this case, Saddam was doing nothing with equipment he had amassed prior to the Gulf War and the subsequent embargo and sanctions that succeeded in halting his development of WMD. But now the equipment is lost, seized by well-organized looters who apparently recognized the value of his weapons facilities, which were obviously left completely unguarded by the U.S. forces occupying the area. In other words, the threat of WMD and nuclear proliferation has increased because of our invasion of Iraq.
Sanctions that the Bush administration ridiculed succeeded in keeping material needed for WMD from getting into Iraq. The Bush administration failed miserably at keeping sensitive equipment used to develop WMD from getting out of Iraq, and most likely into the hands of Iran, Saudi Arabia and possibly even North Korea. I am at a loss to think of any act of American foreign policy since Vietnam which has precipitated exactly that which it was supposed to prevent.