"THE GREATEST EXPLOSIVES BONANZA IN HISTORY": So let's review. The ostensible purpose for the Iraq invasion was to preempt the unquestionably intolerable acquisition of weapons of mass destruction--chief among them nuclear-weapons material--by Al Qaeda from Saddam Hussein. Leaving aside for a moment what U.S. intelligence officials knew or assessed at the time, it's now clear that this scenario envisions the transfer of weapons that Saddam didn't have to an ally he didn't have. This calculation--the denial of WMD to undeterrable jihadist networks--wasn't applicable in Iraq, but it surely will form the basis for major U.S. security decisions for years to come, regardless of who is in the White House. But thanks to the Bush administration, the global black market in conventional weapons and component parts for nuclear weapons has reaped what an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) memo terms "the greatest explosives bonanza in history": 380 tons of high melting point explosive (HMX), rapid detonation explosive (RDX) and pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), looted from Saddam's unsecured munitions dump at Al Qaqaa beginning after the invasion last year and as recently as last week. Exploding HMX or RDX is typically a key step in facilitating a nuclear detonation. Less than a pound of the material exploded Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988. And now, these tremendously dangerous explosives, typically well-regulated by the world's governments to limit its proliferation, is in the hands of God knows who. If there was any doubt that the Iraq war has severely diminished U.S. national security, the argument may be ending.
It's worth remembering that while the looting of Al Qaqaa appears to be singular in the danger it has caused, it's not the first such facility that the U.S. failed to secure. An insufficient U.S. military presence at Mosul's Al Kindi Research, Testing, Development, and Engineering Facility and at the Tuwaitha nuclear facility southeast of Baghdad in spring 2003 led to severe looting of such dirty-bomb component material as cesium and cobalt. The likely scenario is that Al Qaqaa is the rule, not the exception.
How could this have happened? Insufficient military personnel and sustained attention, certainly. But that doesn't explain why the administration didn't devote critical resources to such a dire problem. One likely explanation is ideology. As Bill Keller described in a 2003 article on nuclear proliferation, the Bush administration worries far more about the character of regimes that possess dangerous weapons than about the danger posed by the weapons themselves. That explains, for example, why the administration didn't make securing Russian nuclear material a tier-one priority even after September 11, but turned its counterproliferation attention (such as it is) to Baghdad. I'm not suggesting that the administration consciously chose not to guard Al Qaqaa. But with a national-security outlook that boils down to "no dangerous regime, no danger," it's hardly surprising that securing munitions sites would fall to what one administration official told The New York Times was a "medium priority"--particularly in the triumphal moments of spring 2003, when the administration was mistakenly gloating about a successful war. (It's the same focus on the centrality of states that leads the administration to misunderstand the war on terror.)
Finally, the administration resorted to another pattern during the Al Qaqaa debacle: covering up what it knew instead of dealing with it. As the Times reports, the Coalition Provisional Authority prevented the IAEA from inspecting the site, and it took until the restoration of notional sovereignty to an Iraqi government for the formal admission that Al Qaqaa was stripped of its hazardous inventory. Admitting that 380 tons of explosives that lend themselves perfectly to terrorist machinations have gone missing would have tarnished the administration's stated line that things are improving in Iraq during President Bush's reelection campaign. It also would have been the first step in limiting the damage to national security. President Bush made his choice, and next Tuesday, so will the rest of us.
http://www.tnr.com/blog/iraqd 
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