What were they thinking?

[pecunium]

Anybody here know what C4 is good for? For those who don't, it's the Army's preferred plasitc explosive. It's what makes the ball-bearings in a Claymore mine so effective. Carefully applied one could use a pound, or so, to take out a one story home.

We let looters get at 350 tons, or so, go missing, during the war.

I'd let this go, but for a couple of things... the most important being we knew exactly where it was. It was under seal in Al Qa Qaa. They were locked up because of the sanctions in place, from the last fracas.

Becaause they can be used as triggering charges for nukes, they were off limits, so long as the sanctions were in place. But, because they can be used in construction, and for other, non-military functions, they weren't removed. Just kept locked away.

The IAEA offered to help us look for WMD, and to police up known sites, after the shooting stopped, but we rebuffed them.

Anyone care to guess what those explosives are being used for now?

TK

Comments

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Why do I want a new administration? Because this is the sort of asininity that can easily be avoided, and they haven't avoided it. It seems like every single blessed time they had a chance to make an intelligent decision, they ran right out and made a dumb one instead.
Even as an ignorant civilian, I can grasp the concept of "Easily handled explosive material--should be kept safe and out of public circulation." What's their blind spot?

Everyone I've ever known in the military (that is, that the military didn't take steps to get rid of ASAP) was a past-master at the art of contingency planning--the school of "What if?"--an old marine I know says "What if can be the difference between alive and dead." Rumsfeld & Co. seem to treat "What if" as doubting and naysaying, instead of simple prudence. It's like they're operating on the Jiminy Cricket school of planning--"If you wish upon a star..."

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I've known businesses that were run like that -- save a nickle, spend a dime later; all that matters is this month's balance sheet. They all went downhill sooner or later -- mostly sooner. The present Administration appear to be trying to run the Government as if it were a business, which I don't consider a reasonable approach, and they're doing it with dreadful ineptness at that. They tried to operate The Iraq Project on the cheap, not sending in nearly enough troops to handle, adequately, the obvious potential problems many prudent people foresaw. It's possible (and all too often done, usually with poor results) to operate a science-fiction convention, say, on the basis of coping with the (many) problems and emergencies after they arise, but I don't consider that a sensible, moral, or acceptable way of handling something in which human lives are at stake. There are no dependable figures on the death toll in the Iraq Adventure, but the number is almost certainly above 20,000, more than half of them civilian non-combatants, and is increasing daily. And of course the original idea behind it all -- establishing a satrapy to serve as a base for American military domination of the Arab World -- was reprehensible to start with and is pretty much down the tubes by now.

[eirehound.livejournal.com]

The present Administration appear to be trying to run the Government as if it were a business, which I don't consider a reasonable approach, and they're doing it with dreadful ineptness at that.

Well, all you have to do is look at the business track records of the executive officers. :-( If I were a shareholder and I saw their sort in the driver's seat, I'd start selling shares.