Slaughter and sloppiness - Seattle Post-Intelligencer Editoral Board

[Keirsey]

The most foolhardy comment one can make about the mess in Iraq is that it can't get any worse. The weekend brought the massacre of 50 freshly minted Iraqi soldiers and news that nearly 400 tons of explosives had simply vanished from a former Iraq military installation.

These events -- one horrific, the other potentially catastrophic -- are more evidence of the Bush administration's gross miscalculations in a war that was unnecessary.

Allowing hundreds of tons of munitions to disappear from a well-known stockpile is again the result of having insufficient military forces to secure a hostile nation the size of California. One of the cited justifications for the war was the threat posed by an Iraqi nuclear weapons program. The site at issue, Al Qaqaav, was widely known to contain explosives capable of detonating nuclear weapons, yet it was not secured.

******

President Bush offered little more than the familiar hustings hooey: "My opponent has the wrong strategy for the wrong country at the wrong time."

The rest of the editorial opinion here:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/196723_iraqmessed.html

[Dudley_DUright]

1. Devastating editorial (for BushCo)

I hope it is widely read.

[struggle4progress]

2. A vote for * is a vote for smouldering wreckage. eom

[Miss Authoritiva]

3. Somehow, incompetence doesn't do it justice.

If the Bush Administration was trying really, really hard to run the Iraq War as incompetently as possible, they couldn't do as good (or as bad) a job as this. This has wandered over into the land of self-sabotage.

Did Bush and the PNACers bark and snarl themselves into a corner? Maybe they were genuinely stunned by the lack of acquiesence on the part of the German, French, and Russians, couldn't go back to the UN after all the maniacal nose-thumbing, and decided to quick-march on into Iraq anyway. Which, if they really believed their own intelligence assessments, was a pretty insane thing to do with such a dodgy coalition.

I'm old enough to know better than to try to figure out why stupid people (individually or collectively) do the things they do, but damn!....

[Technowitch]

4. But hey! Dick Cheney says Iraq has been a 'remarkable success!'

Yah... I know, Aaron Brown respectfully ripped Mr. Vice Prezident a new one, but these people are either insanely deluded or truly such massive liars it beggars the imagination.

Either conclusion is sad.