Current News in Context
October 25, 2004
On Sunday, Iraqi authorities reported 49 unarmed National Guard soldiers were found shot dead on a road near the Iranian border.
Charles Glover writing for the Financial Times finds this "possibly the worst death toll suffered by the Iraqi security forces this year in a single incident. Iraq forces police, National Guard, army and border police have suffered more than 700 killed between January 1 and the end of September, according to the Pentagon."
***
This morning, The New York Times broke the news nearly 380 tons of powerful explosives have gone missing.
"BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.
The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year."
***
Today, four coalition and Iraqi military convoys and a provincial government office were bombed, killing at least eight people.
***
The Daily Star has an editorial that should serve as a wake-up call to the occupation forces.
Iraqi civilians are paying the price for American irresponsibility
Two more items from the not-so-good-news-from-Iraq department in the past 48 hours: The International Atomic Energy Agency said Monday that nearly 400 tons of conventional explosives that could be used in missiles disappeared from an arms depot in Iraq that was not being patrolled; and American officials who spend their days studying these things say that the Iraqi insurgency may comprise some 20,000 hard-core militants and active sympathizers and accomplices, far more than previously estimated.
This disturbing news comes at a time when Iraqi civilians or police officers working to maintain security are the primary group of people being killed. A year and a half after the United States and Great Britain launched an unprovoked war of choice on Iraq, the citizens of Iraq are being killed dozens at a time, by a national and regional insurgency using tons of weapons and other dangerous materials that the American-led occupation troops are unable to guard.
This is gross negligence at the micro level of failing to identify and secure dangerous materials that should not fall into the hands of terrorists or resistance fighters; and it is a more dangerous sort of geo-strategic incompetence at the macro level of creating a situation in which an entire country is insecure and turns into a magnet for killers and fighters who target Iraqis as well as foreign occupying troops.
In either case, the United States, Great Britain and others who enthusiastically pushed for this war need to take far more serious responsibility for the consequences of their deeds and misdeeds. It is fine for Messrs Bush and Blair go on and on about the monstrous nature of Saddam Hussein's former regime, yet they are repeating accepted facts that are also largely unaccepted around the world as a reasonable rationale for unleashing the turmoil that defines many aspects of Iraq today. More important than repeating the evil nature of the former Iraqi regime that killed so many innocent Iraqis is the urgency of working more wisely to stop the killing of so many innocent Iraqis today.
Whether Bush or Kerry wins the presidential election next week, the United States must take a far more responsible attitude to the unfolding insecurity situation in Iraq, in which American negligence, disinterest or incompetence are resulting in more and more Iraqis losing their lives or being maimed for life.
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