Kerfuffling about al-QaQaa

So something between 3 and 400 tons of explosives "may" have gone missing from a large installation in Iraq sometime in April of 2003. That's the news everyone is in a bother about (Joe has a good writeup here. NZ Bear here. And from the other side of the aisle here.)

Kerry blames the President. He says we needed more troops. This of course is a little silly. Let's examine that:

• more troops means higher cost. Kerry has never complained about the cost of the war.
• more troops means operations (logistics) would take longer (it takes longer to move more men and equipment). Perhaps Kerry thinks the major hostilities took went too fast? This point is reminiscent of the Lefts headspinning change of mind about WMD. Before the start of the offensive it was, "We can't attack he has WMD!". Then it switched without blinking into "Where's the WMD? What WMD?". Guess they want it both ways. Maybe it's one of those urban metrosexual things.
  
• longer time means more time for Saddam to prepare. Kerry perhaps thinks we didn't give Mr Hussein a far fight. I'm not sure what that would mean. Oh that's right. He said in the debates we should have given Saddam more time to prepare. Why, perhaps the whole treason thing wasn't untrue?
  
• slower movement and longer time for Saddam to prepare means higher casualties for both combatants and higher civilian casualties. Kerry surely can't be for that! (see above)
  

He also wanted more allies:

• more egos involved. Means the war would be more complex and take longer. Again more casualties for the troops.
• more poorly trained (now allies) in the field. Again, higher casualties. Of course one could take the low road and insist "at least they wouldn't be American casualties". I dismiss that argument as contemptible.
• more logistical difficulties. Again, this means we would move slower and incur more casualties.
  
• On the plus side however, it means more nations would defray the cost. Just think, save money at the cost of our soldiers and allied soldiers lives. But Kerry might recall for us, they are just peasants. Bah!

Of course, what Kerry really wants to say is we aren't able to fight such a war. America he feels is too soft and too lazy to get in a war. He wants to go home. Perhaps he wants his mommy too. Kerry has traditionally shown distrust of America's ability (and moral rectitude) in projecting strength beyond her borders. In this, he shows a lack of awareness of history.

Dick MacDonald has a nice piece on this here:

Stolen Munitions. Wow, 380 tons of munitions at 1 munition dump 20 miles south of Baghdad are missing. Forget the fact that these munitions went missing before our troops captured that dump. What's 380 out of the 400,000 tons already recovered at 1 dump out of 10,000 dumps already identified. Paul Bremer says that Saddam purchased almost 1,000,000 tons of munitions, mostly from France, China and Germany. Now, John Kerry calls for Bush's scalp for the 380 tons. Numerically brain-dead.

Exactly. Recall this all took place during the shooting phase of the war (April 2003). Recall we don't actually know how much HE is missing, it might be 3 tons? The 3ID quotes "thousands" of 2 1/2 inch by 6 inch bottles contained a white powder which "might" be HE. A bottle that size can't weigh more than a few pounds. "Thousands" of such bottles comes to (hey!) about 3 tons! Not 400 tons. That would take 100's of thousands of bottles . What's a few orders of magnitude between friends.



Kerfuffle a wonderful word, ht Best of the Web (James Taranto).