By now you probably already know that October was the
bloodiest month for Americans since January, with 7 American troops getting killed just today.
What you may not know is just how extensively the Iraqi insurgency was
able to arm themselves during the chaos that followed the fall of Baghdad.
The Pentagon admits a breathtaking 250,000 tons of heavy ordnance (out of 650,000 tons total): aircraft bombs, artillery and tank shells, mines, rockets were allowed to be looted by our undermanned army in the 4-30 weeks after invasion through gross negligence at the top- equivalent to 1 million 500 lb bombs. At ten 500 lb. roadside mines or market closeouts a day, that's enough for 274 years of attacks.
"Freedom's untidy. And free people are free to commit mistakes, and to commit crimes and do bad things.... Stuff happens."
Rumsfeld's reply to the post-war chaos
---"During the fall of 2003, what you would see was Iraqis going in at night, individually and in trucks," US weapons inspector David Kay told U.S. News . "They would pull ordnances out and drive off." Security was so bad after Saddam Hussein's regime fell, Kay recalled, that his team was often shot at by insurgents when they went to inspect the sites: "There were just not enough boots on the ground, and the military didn't give it a high enough priority to stop the looting. Tens of thousands of tons of ammunition were being looted, and that is what is fueling the insurgency." -US News+WR report
David BeBatto, a Military counterintelligence officer at the massive Camp Annaconda 50 miles north of Baghdad, in charge of hunting the deck-of-cards Baathists, found a 5 square mile ammo dump under 2 miles south of the camp in April 2003 "littered with anti-aircraft missiles, land mines, rocket-propelled grenades, plastic explosives" in dozens of bunkers. He reported it again and again in written reports to his battalion commander Lt. Col. Timothy Ryan, even giving him a tour of the dump. "Local Iraqis told us- `these guys' - and they would point to looters in the distance- `are fedayeen. They're going to take this and make it into bombs and use it against you,'" he said in an interview. Nothing was done. "We had enough people.. if we had placed 4,5,6 guys at the main entry to that facility, that would have been enough!.. Every time I went back there, there was less."
It really is simple: The Bush Administration's incompetence has cost the lives of American soldiers...and it will continue to cost their lives.