JustOneMinute

It's All Good, But...

I may be off for a day or two, but I am leaving lots of posts behind. Can I count on you to scroll down?

I didn't think so.

If you only read one post here, try this one, as we watch the Times rowback on Al QaQaa.

For a bizarre (but imaginative!) attack on a subtle Kerry repositioning that you absolutely have not seen elsewhere (I promise) check out "Wedding Bells For Megan!"

And the most unlikely pun is here; fortunately, the post is worth reading anyway as a sidelight on the Al QaQaa kaka.

Pre-election Analysis

The Man Sans Polls is droll and devastating as he continues his "Pathetic... And Bound to Lose" series. People unfamiliar with The Man's previous efforts will want to click over to see which candidate he thinks fits that rather generic description.

Spoiler Alert - this assessment of the Osama tape caught me:

Consider the humiliating need [for Dem spokespeople] to come up with arguments that it's "unclear" which way the tape cuts in the Presidential race. One sees Kerry spokesman after surrogate after water carrier intoning such rubbish. After complaining for months that they were dreadfully afraid that the Administration would concoct some "October Surprise" to refocus the voting public's memory on 9-11 and terrorism (an issue on which Mr. Bush enjoys a huge lead over his opponent), the Democrats now have to explain how a spectacular and completely real October Surprise that is obviously going to refocus the voting public's memory on 9-11 and terrorism will have "unclear" effect.

Widely Underreported

The Pentagon staged a baffling, "what are you telling us" press conference to address (and compound) the mystery of the explosives at Al QaQaa. Major Pearson did a fine job, although he ducked one good question. Pentagon Pressperson Larry Di Rita needs to be told that his relative from the old country, Derrida, is dead, and that words have regained their meaning.

Let's do the "widely underreported" bit. We have been whining for days that the coverage of the Al QaQaa story, particularly in the Times, has ignored the Times own story from Oct. 20 which told us that Saddam had planned for aninsurgency by dispersing munitions around Iraq. My point - mightn't Saddam's side have already taken what they wanted from Al QaQaa while they still controlled it?

From the press briefing yesterday, I extract this. It does not speak to Al QaQaa specifically, but rather to the planning that went into the insurgency, and the notion that looted weapons left unsecured by the US are driving it:

I also received the mission during the first weeks of April to assist the brigade combat teams of 3rd ID in Baghdad, clearing in sector that they were operating in of captured enemy ammunition that was throughout their area of operations. We conducted multiple of these missions in locations like elementary schools, residential communities.

The particular one that we worked with in northwest Baghdad, in the Hammer Brigade's area of operation, was housing development that was under construction. We took out of one house alone over 7 million rounds of AK-47 rounds -- out of one house, built into the walls of the house, very large area. Took about three days. There was all sorts of ammunition, to include the types that we are talking about here, scattered throughout that. And that was just the one location. We also found them in multiple sites within and around Baghdad.

A housing development under construction? Unless real estate developers were feeling a strange mix of confidence and fear in post-liberation Iraq, it is safe to say that this notion of building ammo into the walls took place under Saddam.

MORE: The Times rowback on Al QaQaa is noted here.

And what question did he duck? Ahh! Eventually someone asked whether he took everything he saw, or just everything his trucks could hold. Since the trucks left fully loaded, one might well ask - did he think he took a small bite out of what was there, did he get most of it, or what? The tape:

Q When you left the facility, how much explosives were still there? All?

MR. DIRITA: Do you know?

MAJ. PEARSON: I can speak -- I don't know. I can't speak about what was left. I can speak about what I took out of the facility.

Q But did you --

MAJ. PEARSON: It wasn't my --

Q You took out as much as you could, but there was more there? Is that right?

MAJ. PEARSON: My intent was to go in there and, the stuff that was easily exposed -- I completed my mission, I got what I needed to get, and we went back to the captured ammunition holding area to continue the operation to support 3rd ID.

MR. DIRITA: It's almost certain there was more, because we've seen the 101st, if the dates are correct from the reporters that were embedded within the 101st.

Q The other bunkers that you left, you didn't check, the ones that you didn't go into, what was the status of them? I mean, was there dirt pushed up against them? Were they locked? What happened?

MAJ. PEARSON: I did see some bunkers, some earth-covered magazines that had berms of earth and gravel pushed up in front of them. This is a technique I've seen repeatedly. It was a common military technique to limit access to earth-covered magazines, especially at abandoned sites. I've seen that at multiple different locations throughout Iraq, and I did see it there....

Also unasked - did any other ordnance demolition crew go back? Major Pearson got dragged in to this press conference because he happened to be watching the news, and he phoned his story in to his Chain of Command (I am not making this up). So is anybody else out there, distracted by the Red Sox or some darn thing? Lines are open.

Missing Explosives - Rowback Watch Continues

We continue our Al QaQaa rowback watch: this Saturday Times story tells us that "Mr. Bush has been on the defensive all week over reports that the United States might have failed to secure nearly 400 tons of high explosives in Iraq after the invasion last year.

Here is Monday's story - find the subtle qualifiers that led to "might have failed". I looked for them in this rowback watch.

And let's look for John Edwards use of a qualifier:

And in Toledo, Mr. Kerry's running mate, Senator John Edwards, was hitting the same notes, telling a crowd, "It is reckless and irresponsible to fail to protect and safeguard one of the largest weapons sites in the country. And by either ignoring these mistakes or being clueless about them, George Bush has failed. He has failed as our commander in chief; he has failed as president."

Gregory Djerejian recaps a week of fun at the Times. To his criticism we would add the following:

First - Buried Story Lines - The Times never told us that IAEA head ElBaradei is seeking a third term, and is being opposed by the US. They also ignored their own reporting of Oct. 20, in which they described Saddam's plan to disperse munitions in anticipation of an insurgency.

Second - Hey Dude, Where's My RDX? The Times piece on Friday is all about HMX. But of the 380 tons of missing explosives, 154 tons were RDX. Que pasa?

UPDATE: Ah ha! In the finest tradition of announcing bad news on Friday, the Times has a huge rowback piece by Sanger and Broad, hidden on p. A12 of the Saturday edition. Golly, the initial story was front-paged on a Monday - go figure.

I will excerpt all of the questions they address, and cherry-pick their answers:

If the whole country was an ammunitions dump, how could anyone expect to secure it all?

In Iraq, commanders say it would be an impossible job...

The officers also note that weapons were not just in depots. Much was dispersed by Mr. Hussein before the war, or in its early days. Much has been looted since. And the arms still in the depots might not alter battle on the ground, since the insurgents already are well armed.

Moreover, the HMX and RDX at Al Qaqaa may be available elsewhere in the country. "There's probably a lot of stuff that is chemically identical to this all around Iraq, but it wasn't under seal because it wasn't located at a place previously associated with nuclear work," said one senior administration official.

[That touches on the Saddam-dispersal theory]

Why didn't the international energy agency blow this material up in the 1990's?

[They didn't. Who cares?]

Who saw it last?

[IAEA inspectors, Pentagon photos of trucks, Army ordnance teams, news crews - all inconclusive.]

Does the satellite photo that the Pentagon released show Iraqi trucks removing high-grade explosives from Al Qaqaa before the American invasion?

[No, and the Penatagon did not claim that.]

Is there any reason that the coalition troops should have known to look for the explosives?

[Yes, no, maybe, so what - we were looking for WMDs, we had many missions.]

Is anyone looking for the explosives now?

It is unclear. Many explosives are being rounded up. But identifying HMX takes experience, and in granular form it can be easily divided up and hidden.

Isn't there a huge discrepancy between the nearly 350 metric tons of high explosives that the energy agency claimed were at Al Qaqaa and what was actually there, especially for the explosive known as RDX?

[This is the "Hey Dude, Where's My RDX question"]

No, weapons experts say. A Iraqi government letter of Oct. 10 identified the lost stockpile as containing 194.7 metric tons of HMX, 141.2 metric tons of RDX, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN.

On Wednesday, ABC News reported that it had obtained a confidential document from the energy agency showing that its inspectors in January 2003, had reported the existence of a little more than three tons of RDX explosives at Al Qaqaa - not the 141.2 metric tons in the Iraqi letter.

Melissa Fleming, an agency spokeswoman, said Friday that the confusion about the quantities arose because Al Qaqaa had more than one site for RDX storage. Three tons were kept at Al Qaqaa, she said, while 125 tons under Al Qaqaa administrative control were kept at Muaskar al Mahawil, about 30 miles away. So the total recent RDX inventory was 128 tons - 13 tons less than the Iraqi ministry wrote in their letter this month.

While Mr. Hussein was still in power, Ms. Fleming said, Iraq told agency inspectors before the war that it had used 10 tons of the RDX between late 1998 and late 2002, when the United Nations did not monitor Al Qaqaa. So the discrepancy, she said, boiled down to three tons.

"We were in the process of verifying and reconciling the three missing tons when the war erupted," she said.

[Oh, so when the Times says at the start of this paragraph that there is no discrepancy, what they mean is, there is no discrepancy once you adjust their original story to account for different locations and different amounts. Whatever.]

Why is this coming out in the week before the election?

[This is the buried story line about ElBaradei. Finally.]

The answer depends on whom you ask. The memorandum from the Iraqi interim government to the energy agency was dated Oct. 10. It was sent in response to a request from the agency for an accounting of missing materials. The Bush administration says it smells a political motive: the head of the agency, Mr. ElBaradei, was told a few months ago that the United States would not support him for another term. They suspect an effort at retribution.

[The Bush Administration? The WaPo smelled a rat in this editorial, and even asked ElBaradei about it. BTW, his response is a joke.]

Mr. Bush's political strategist, Karl Rove, said this week that he believed The Times deliberately published the story the week before the election in an effort to harm Mr. Bush's candidacy. Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, said that the paper first obtained a copy of the Iraqi letter early in the week of Oct. 18, and that its reporters and CBS began asking questions about the explosives in Baghdad, Vienna and Washington during that week. The article was published on Oct. 25. The White House said President Bush was told of the Iraqi warning to the energy agency around Oct. 16.

MORE: Howard Fineman on the strategy of each campaign for the final week. Kerry made a quick shift to Al QaQaa, and this tells why.

Belgravia Dispatch Gets Results

Belgravitas thinks that presenting his analysis showing that Osama is dead just prior to the release of the Osama video leaves him with egg on his face.

Not so! His analysis came out on October 19. When was the tape made? From the Times:

American intelligence officials, who indicated that they had obtained access to the entire videotape, said it appeared to have been made recently, possibly as recently as last Sunday, the date that appeared in Arabic in script superimposed on part of the tape.

Last Sunday was Oct. 24.

Nice job of goading Osama into revealing himself!

MORE: OK, Osama may have been motivated by the election, too.

But I think auto-egging is a result of silly ideas, not wrong ones.

UPDATE: HUGE roundup of reaction at Joe Gandelman's fine site. I sampled a few, and my favorite clip comes from Dave Pell, Expert. He makes the point that partisans can spin this for their side, and then says:

If you are a sensible and reasonably intelligent supporter of either man, then this tape (or any other monologues from sociopathic mass murderers) will have no effect on your voting plans.

That leaves us with a handful of those who are both senseless and undecided who may read Osama's words and only then make their final decision. The only thing more ridiculous than their behavior is the behavior of all of the so-called experts who, five minutes after the tape was aired, were already totally certain which way it would swing those voters who no one has been able to figure out since this election began.

EVEN MORE: I am stealing from Orrin Judd's comments now. After expressing doubts about whether it is even the original Osama, we get this:

...if they want to send someone on TV who gets his talking points off the Democratic Underground message boards, that's fine with me. I'm only sorry he didn't throw in a line or two about his support of National Health Care and Bush's criminal attempt to drill for oil in ANWR.

LAST ONE: Utter paranoia is recycled by the normally unflappable JeraLynn; in the following post, we learn that it "seems" to be debunked. Well, it's Election Time.

Cue The Laugh Track At The Times

David Brooks has an excellent "last attack" column, deriding John Kerry's instinct to play politics with the release of the Bin Laden tape. Yes, for Kerry it was one more opportunity to criticize Bush, rather than an opportunity to unite the country.

But wait! The Stevenson/Wilgoren front page coverage sees a glass half full:

Candidates Give Tough Response to a Qaeda Tape

OLUMBUS, Ohio, Oct. 29 - The broadcast of a new videotape from Osama bin Laden jolted the presidential campaign on Friday, bringing quick reactions from both President Bush, who vowed that Americans "will not be intimidated or influenced," and Senator John Kerry, who said Americans "are absolutely united in our determination to hunt down and destroy" the terrorists.

The two candidates, who in the hours before and after their separate statements were vigorously attacking each other's competence and fitness for office, sounded remarkably similar notes in the wake of Mr. bin Laden's reappearance.

The bext paragraphs describe the "remarkably similar notes":

Mr. Bush in an appearance before television cameras on the tarmac in Toledo said he was sure Mr. Kerry shared his sentiments that the country would not be intimidated "by an enemy of our country." And Mr. Kerry adopted one of the president's signature lines, proclaiming that the United States would do "whatever it takes" to deal with Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

So, Mr. Bush named Kerry. Mr. Kerry made a subtle allusion to one of Bush's "signature lines". Gee, that is practically the same. The Times drops their pretence in the next paragraph:

But the senator also criticized Mr. Bush for allowing Mr. bin Laden to remain at large. "I regret that when George Bush had the opportunity in Afghanistan and Tora Bora, he didn't choose to use American forces to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden," Mr. Kerry said in an interview with an ABC affiliate in Milwaukee shortly after learning about the tape. "He outsourced the job to Afghan warlords. I would have never have done that. I think it was an enormous mistake, and we are paying the price for it today."

Mr. Bush swiftly responded in his final campaign event of the day, suggesting that Mr. Kerry was not only wrong, but was politicizing national security. "It's the worst kind of Monday morning quarterbacking,'' he said. "It is especially shameful in the light of a new tape from America's enemy."

Fine, they reported the facts - Kerry's first instinct was to criticize the President, Bush's first response was to unite the country. Their gratuitous second paragraph editorializing is predictable, yet bizarre.

MORE: Bush statement; Kerry statement.

UPDATE: The Weekly Standard picks a side in this dispute.

Wedding Bells For Megan!

Ms. McArdle chooses her man, and we will not detract from the suspense.

However, as she illuminates her struggle between John and George, she says this:

I've decided to take the advice of a friend's grandmother, who told me, on her wedding day, that I should never, ever marry a man thinking he'd change.

But wait - John will change! (Hmm, does that merit a "Spoiler Alert"?). Let's take a recent example that is either a trivial example of Kerry's endless posturing, or a laser beam into his soul.

At the first debate, John Kerry was intent to reassure America that he could be tough on terror. Martial John said the following:

"I believe in being strong and resolute and determined. And I will hunt down and kill the terrorists, wherever they are."

In the second debate, Kerry used a similar phrasing. But in the third debate, the formula changed:

I will hunt them down, and we'll kill them, we'll capture them. We'll do whatever is necessary to be safe.

Capture? Why was that added?

Well, apparently Martial John was a bit too scary for some people. Check Google, but this letter is a helpful example of the effect Kerry was having on his target audience:

...My son and I were watching TV and a commercial promoting Kerry came on. Most of the time I pay no mind to the President's adds, but one thing Kerry said really upset me. As Kerry tried to make himself look better on television, talking about the terrorists, one line he said stuck with me. He said that all terrorists will be hunted down and killed. Now to me that is not something I want my son hearing from a man who could end up my President. The last thing I want my son to think is that it is OK to go out and kill someone who does not agree with the way we as Americans live.

How about that? Kerry's standard stump speech has been revised, and "capture" is no longer an afterthought. A sampler:

When I am President, I will fight a tougher, smarter, more effective war on terror. We will hunt down, capture, and kill the terrorists wherever they are.

I just saw Kerry's reaction to the Osama tape. He will "hunt down and destroy" Osama Bin Laden, but then says it is hunt, capture and kill for terrorists. Capture is the current modifier to soften the rough edges - Martial John becomes Marshmallow John.

Now, under the Andrew Sullivan theory, this is very encouraging - Andrew has promised that he and Marty Peretz will keep Kerry in line, and earlier Andrew volunteered Brit Hume as well.

And we certainly have the current evidence that on a seemingly core issue such as terror, Kerry's position is subject to fine-tuning and pressure. So sure, maybe Kerry can be pushed into standing tall in Iraq. Or not.

I am just glad to know that Kerry's commitment to fighting terror has passed the proper focus groups.

UPDATE: Hey, what about his convention speech? Good question. The closest Kerry comes to striking a macho pose in this war (as opposed to his war thirty years ago) is here:

"And then, with confidence and determination, we will be able to tell the terrorists: You will lose, and we will win." The future doesn't belong to fear; it belongs to freedom."

That probably did not test out as tough enough.

If Ever There Was A Friday To Announce Bad News

Ok, there is the old "announce bad news on Friday" rule. But the Friday before this election, with the Osama tape as a bonus, means that I could have marched elephants through Times Square without getting air time.

So what did some Government Agency or corporate Investor Relations office sneak past us today?

Nominees below.

MORE: Yes, a "Jo Moore Day".

UPDATE: Duh! In a staggering collapse of my punditry, I fail to predict the now-blindingly obvious - the Times hides their rowback piece on Al QaQaa on p. A12 of the Saturday edition.

Did Anyone Else See the Scary American Terrorist Tape?

We saw the ABC News tape of the American Terrorist, "Azzam the American".

Now, how can I put this in a way that minimizes the adverse Karmic impact? Let's say that not many loan sharks are going to be hiring this guy to do collections anytime soon. When he started pointing his finger and telling me that I would "die, die, die", I realized that if I did not get control of my laughter, he might be right.

Normally, I would know that I had nothing to worry about. As John Kerry boldly assured us in the first debate, he will "hunt down and kill the terrorists, wherever they are."

But Azzam is an American! Does that mean we should listen for a new message from Kerry- "I will hunt them down and kill them, while respecting their civil rights?" Puzzling.

UPDATE: Hmm, I thought I was kidding. Kerry's soundbite has evolved from that first debate, and he is now respecting civil rights. As of Oct. 22:

We will hunt down, capture, and kill the terrorists wherever they are.

Check Google. How about that? Here is a letter showing Kerry the Killer is just too tough for his target audience.

It does look like his ads feature the Oct. 1 version. However, at the third debate, Kerry was saying this:

I will hunt them down, and we'll kill them, we'll capture them. We'll do whatever is necessary to be safe.

Good to see his determination to protect me has been properly focus-grouped and fine-tuned.

Recruiting Surge At KH4K

"Kerry Haters for Kerry" braces for a surge in recruitment after their lesser evil meets with Tom Brokaw.

It's hard to find the most ridiculous bit. He disputes the notion that Kerry Haters for Kerry is his key to victory, reassures us that the explosives were there, and is adamant - a President Kerry might have removed Saddam from power. Or maybe not. But he would have done it the right way, with allies, and the world would have understood.

Is he proud to be a liberal? "It depends on the issue". Hmm, on some issues he is embarrassed to be a liberal?

He would do Mary Cheney all over again, but next time he would make it a threesome with Dick Gephardt's daughter, whose name evidently escapes him.

Tuesday can't come soon enough.

Unexpected Candor From Kerry

He implicitly admits that his military records are have not all been released.

First, no kidding.

Second, bah. If Karl Rove cared, this would have become an issue weeks ago.

UPDATE: Third, stay tuned. [Content currently removed at Swift Vets. Huh?]

MORE: OK, a stray reason to vote for Kerry - if Bush wins, these Swift controversies *may* be resolved fairly quickly, if Douglas Brinkley decides that his future is as an historian.

But if Kerry wins, the questions will all be answered! You may not live long enough to hear them, of course, but Presidential historians will eventually get ahold of everything, and the truth will out.

I will leave some key blog posts for my great grand-kids (if I am so lucky).

OK, I Was One Day Off

My "talking dogs" prediction materializes one day early. Buckle up now.

I Need Some Help From A Dem

John Kerry is promising to bring back the Bay of Pigs, or something. How this will help with Cuban ex-pats in Florida, I have no idea, but I am not privy to the councils of the Dem brain trust.

Oh, seriously, Kerry said this:

Mr. Kerry reminded audiences of Kennedy's response to the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, saying, "Every single one of us knows that when the Bay of Pigs went sour John Kennedy had the courage to look America in the eye and say: 'I take responsibility. It's my fault.' "

Well, fine. And far be it from me to note that John Kerry has plenty of folks he could apologize to.

Instead, I am wondering what Kennedy actually said. Can we trust PBS to deliver us Kennedy with a fair hand? Here they describe the Bay of Pigs, with a bit more here. They tell us that [at] a press conference on April 21, he accepted responsibility for the incident..

Fine. Let's go the press conference. There is a certain poignancy - questions about Vietnam, questions about the first man in space, worries about a medical care plan - but here is how it starts:

THE PRESIDENT: Gentlemen, I have several announcements to make.

I know that many of you have further questions about Cuba. I made a statement on that subject yesterday afternoon. We are continuing consultations with other American republics. Active efforts are being made by ourselves and others on behalf of various individuals, including any Americans, who may be in danger. I do not think that any useful national purpose would be served by my going further into the Cuban question this morning. I prefer to let my statement of yesterday suffice for the present.

No further questions? That is not a particularly promising start. In another era, we would have used a word like "stonewalling". Of course, the reporters do have questions about Cuba, and he answers them, but I can't find the acceptance of responsibility. Hence the request for help.

Now, Kennedy refers to his statement from the previous day. This April 20 speech, perhaps? We get off to a rocky start here, as well:

The President of a great democracy such as ours, and the editors of great newspapers such as yours, owe a common obligation to the people: an obligation to present the facts, to present them with candor, and to present them in perspective. It is with that obligation in mind that I have decided in the last 24 hours to discuss briefly at this time the recent events in Cuba.

On that unhappy island, as in so many other arenas of the contest for freedom, the news has grown worse instead of better. I have emphasized before that this was a struggle of Cuban patriots against a Cuban dictator. While we could not be expected to hide our sympathies, we made it repeatedly clear that the armed forces of this country would not intervene in any way.

Any unilateral American intervention, in the absence of an external attack upon ourselves or an ally, would have been contrary to our traditions and to our international obligations. But let the record show that our restraint is not inexhaustible. Should it ever appear that the inter-American doctrine of non-interference merely conceals or excuses a policy of nonaction-if the nations of this Hemisphere should fail to meet their commitments against outside Communist penetration-then I want it clearly understood that this Government will not hesitate in meeting its primary obligations which are to the security of our Nation!

You can always count on us, next time.

Look, I am not interested in Kennedy-bashing here - I have a different JFK to ponder. And I have certainly grown up hearing "Kennedy apologized", so there may be something to it.

And if someone could show me where he apologized, that would be great.

UPDATE: Sidney Blumenthal is kind enough to respond! By way of Google and the Guardian, of course:

On April 21 1961, President Kennedy held a press conference to answer questions on the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion by Cuban exiles that he had approved. "There's an old saying," he said, "that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan ... I am the responsible officer of the government and that is quite obvious."

Oh my gosh, is that it? And was Maureen Dowd in the White House then? Here is a more complete excerpt - find the apology:

[Reporter]: ...In view of the fact we are taking a propaganda lambasting around the world [on Cuba], why is it not useful, sir, for us to explore with you the real facts behind this, or our motivations?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think in answer to your question that we have to make a judgment as to how much we can usefully say that would aid the interest of the United States. One of the problems of a free society, a problem not met by a dictatorship, is this problem of information. A good deal has been printed in the paper. I wouldn't be surprised if those of you who are members of the press would be receiving a lot of background briefings in the next day or two by interested people or interested agencies.

There's an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan, and I wouldn't be surprised if information is poured into you in regard to all the recent activities.

Now, I think we see some of the problems, to move from this particular case, in the problem of Space, where the Soviet Union -- no reports were made in regard to any experiments that they carried out. "Our man in space" -- I saw in a national magazine about some student said the Americans talk a good deal about their man in space. The Soviet Union says nothing and yet it wins. Well, that is one of the problems of a democracy competing and carrying on a struggle for survival against a dictatorship.

But I will say to you, Mr. Vanocur, that I have said as much as I feel can be usefully said, by me, in regard to the events of the past few days. Further statements, detailed discussions, are not to conceal responsibility because I am the responsible officer of the government, and that is quite obvious, but merely because I do not believe that such a discussion would benefit us during the present difficult situation. I think you will be informed and some of the information, based on what I have seen, will not be accurate.

That's it? I think George Bush says pretty routinely that he is responsible. Just wondering.

Fact-Check - Stem Cell Research

An ongoing Times series.

Recovering The Satellites

We thank one of our lefty commenters for his delightful sense of humor. Guided by his assurance that this proved the Bush Adminstration to be "full of shit", we headed off to the Daily Kos.

Others may prefer the Onion, but this is pretty good:

BUSTED: Pentagon, Bush Know EXACTLY When and by Whom Al Qaqaa Was Looted

The White House claims that nobody knows the facts on who looted the 380 tons of explosives from Al Qaqaa, or when. Well, that's complete bull...

His gist - Powell showed evidence from spy satellites at his UN presentation. Ergo, we had spy satellites over Iraq. And therefore, we must have photographs (and probably video!) of the looting as it ocurred.

A bit more local flavor:

Check it out, and tell me you're not convinced that Bush and the Pentagon know.

And they think we're too stupid to figure it out...

Can we address the "stupid" issue in a moment? Back atThe Kos, a skeptic emerges, but is brushed aside:

UPDATE III: Kossian harrier asks an interesting question:

"I love this thread, but it was my understanding that most low-earth orbit satellites cannot be positioned above a particular viewpoint constantly, and are therefore only able to take pictures during the period where their orbit matches the location.

Could the right claim that Saddam knew where the satellites were and deliberately moved the materiel(al?) while the satellites were not able to watch?"

Here's my answer:

Even if the surveillance wasn't constant, and I think it was, say you have a dozen or so spy satellites up there (and my guess is we have more like thousands)...

Thousands? That must be counting the Black Helicopters.

This story proposes a slightly reduced figure - six. MSNBC reports on a shortage of spy satelites. They don't pick a number, but they tell us this:

“Our spy satellites are so few in number,” says Thompson, “that even when we have them all trained on a single country, most of the time they’re out of range and can’t see what we need them to look at.”

I recall a time when Google News included the Daily Kos among the news services it searched. Now, they seem to have dropped them. I wonder why.

Check Your Calendar

With Halloween in the air, I was obliged to correct a neighbor who informed me, with some trepidation, that Saturday night was "Mischief Night".

No, no - it is on Tuesday that half of the nation will pull an enormous prank on the other half.

I'm just waiting to see whether I am pranker, or prankee.

Missing Explosives - Day Five

The NY Times stages a bit of a rally on the missing explosives story - William Broad and David Sanger, two of the reporters behind the initial story, tell us that:

Video Shows G.I.'s at Weapon Cache

A videotape made by a television crew with American troops when they opened bunkers at a sprawling Iraqi munitions complex south of Baghdad shows a huge supply of explosives still there nine days after the fall of Saddam Hussein, apparently including some sealed earlier by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

And we care because:

The question of whether the material was removed by Mr. Hussein's forces in the days before the invasion, or looted later because it was unguarded, has become a heated dispute on the campaign trail, with Senator John Kerry accusing President Bush of incompetence, and Mr. Bush saying it is unclear when the material disappeared and rejecting what he calls Mr. Kerry's "wild charges."

Incompetence? Back on Monday, Sen. Kerry was saying that " This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of this administration. The incredible incompetence of this president and his administration has put our troops at risk and put our country at greater risk than we ought to be."

Summarizing that as "incompetence" seems a bit mild. Unless Sen. Kerry has since backed down a bit, of course - I suppose I should check. A casual reader of the Times might have an easier time evaluating whether Kerry's charges were, in Bush's word, "wild", if the Times actually reported them. "One of the great blunders of Iraq". Hmm, how does the Senator compare that with, for example, the absence of WMDs? Just wondering. (And no, I am not advising Bush to try a defense of "I've made worse mistakes than that before breakfast").

I digress. What slows the Times victory lap (and they hope you will not notice) is that the RDX is missing. Well, missing from this story, anyway. On Monday, RDX was 141 metric tons of a total of 340 metric tons of "missing" explosive. On Wednesday, ABC News warned us of a paperwork snafu at the IAEA - for the RDX, strike "140 tons", substitute "3 tons".

The IAEA had a response - the RDX had been moved to another site 30 miles away, but under the jurisdiction of Al QaQaa. Whatever. Was that secured, was that looted, was it moved by Saddam?

None of this addressed in the Times, of course. Someone has video of what may or may not be HMX, and all is well in Timesworld. Does the video show "all" of the HMX? Who knows?

And who cares? The Washington Post has a front pager which address the first point I made in my first post on this back on Monday - what is so special about this HMX? The short answer - not much:

Munitions Issue Dwarfs the Big Picture

The 377 tons of Iraqi explosives whose reported disappearance has dominated the past few days of presidential campaigning represent only a tiny fraction of the vast quantities of other munitions unaccounted for since the fall of Saddam Hussein's government 18 months ago.

U.S. military commanders estimated last fall that Iraqi military sites contained 650,000 to 1 million tons of explosives, artillery shells, aviation bombs and other ammunition. The Bush administration cited official figures this week showing about 400,000 tons destroyed or in the process of being eliminated. That leaves the whereabouts of more than 250,000 tons unknown.

Against that background, this week's assertions by Sen. John F. Kerry's campaign about the few hundred tons said to have vanished from Iraq's Qaqaa facility have struck some defense experts as exaggerated.

There is something truly absurd about focusing on 377 tons of rather ordinary explosives, regardless of what actually happened at al Qaqaa," Anthony H. Cordesman, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote in an assessment yesterday. "The munitions at al Qaqaa were at most around 0.06 percent of the total."

Retired Army Gen. Wayne A. Downing, who served briefly as President Bush's adviser on counterterrorism and has criticized some aspects of the administration's performance, said yesterday he considered the missing-explosives issue "bogus."

"Truly absurd". "Bogus". Call me an unrelenting partisan but I still like "wild".

For the not-yet sated, I have poked around for a bit of background on HMX and RDX. However, I am not finding much. HMX is manufactured in Iran (as of Sept 2000), and we have no doubt that the IAEA is worried. We presume that if their industrial base can manufacture HMX, RDX is also within Iranian capabilities.

And we see that Pakistan had plenty of RDX for its terrorists in India. Seven tons for one group? One supplier seems to be "Wah Nobel Industries", and yes, there is an Alfred Nobel connection. (Note - it is misspelled in the linked article). Here is a story about the attack on the Indian Parliament in Dec 2001 - RDX and "Wah Nobel" show up here, as well.

As for Iraq itself, their munitions history is very interesting. Apparently their military had a heavy reliance on artillery (a Russian influence?). They became self-sufficient in munitions production during their war with Iran in the 80's, and rebuilt their conventional weapons capacity in the 90's.

Charles Duelfer, the chief U.S. arms inspector for Iraq, said about the HMX / RDX story "it's hard for me to get that worked up about it," since "Iraq is awash in hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives." The Duelfer Report mentions in Vol. 2 that RDX was a standard part of the warhead for an Iraqi rocket, so we presume that Iraq managed a supply. Since RDX is not dual use, there is no reason to think the IAEA monitored it.

As a bonus, fans of Bill Safire's Agri-gate will like this. The gist - the US was instrumental in building up Saddam's munitions capability during his war against Iran. Old news.

UPDATE: Fox: We blew it up. Or anyway, we blew something up. Why the Pentagon produced this officer, and not the officer in charge of the demolition team, is one more mystery. [Transcript - he was in charge, but see below]

KSTP in Minneapolis/St. Paul airs more video. Now they tell us that they did not enter a building with a seal on it - they were next door. KSTP covers the baffling Pentagon press conference as well.

UPDATE 2: Transcript of briefing. Pentagon Pressperson Derita needs to be reminded that his relative, Derrida, is dead, and words have meaning again. And we liked Major Pearson, but...

Next, can anyone buy some coffee for our press corps? Of two obvious questions, only one was asked.

(1) Did the Major's team take everything available, or just everything they could handle? And how much was left behind? Maybe this was too obvious - they clearly loaded all their truck to capacity and left; as Derita points out, subsequent video showed that there was explosives left behind. Yes, but how much?!? Did the major feel like he had gotten most of it, some of it, or none of it?

(2) This Major's story about how he got involved with this presentation is pretty ad hoc - he was watching television, and phoned his story up the chain of command. Fine. He might not be the guy to ask, but did any other demolitions disposal team go back for more ammo at a later date? Who was keeping track of this sort of thing at the CAHA, and will we hear from such a person? Or was no one keeping track, or was this the only mission? What kind of a bureaucracy are we paying for if we can't get answers to questions like this? C'mon, at least ask.

BONUS: most under-reported tid-bit:

We conducted multiple of these missions in locations like elementary schools, residential communities.

The particular one that we worked with in northwest Baghdad, in the Hammer Brigade's area of operation, was housing development that was under construction. We took out of one house alone over 7 million rounds of AK-47 rounds -- out of one house, built into the walls of the house, very large area. Took about three days. There was all sorts of ammunition, to include the types that we are talking about here, scattered throughout that. And that was just the one location. We also found them in multiple sites within and around Baghdad.

New construction in Baghdad in Apirl 2003? Either the locals were *very* optimistic about a quick return to stability, or this was secret arms stash was planned by Saddam's side.

From One Curse To Another

Good job by the Red Sox. I have a few extra copies of this lying about, if anyone needs one.

A bonus point to ponder. The Red Sox last won in 1918, and the world had the worst flu epidemic in recorded history a few months later.

Today, the Sox have knocked off the Birds in four (and made them look sick), and what does this Russian tell us:

Russian Expert Says Flu Epidemic May Kill Over One Billion This Year

The world is on the brink of a major flu epidemic — one that could claim more than a billion lives, the head of the Russian Virology Institute, Academician Dmitry Lvov said at a press conference organized by the RIA-Novosti news agency on Thursday.

...The academician said the pandemic was most likely to be caused by the so-called bird flu stem. “The death rate among those who contract this type of flu reaches 70 percent,” Lvov said.

I'm very excited for the Sox fans. Congrats, and have a nice day - it may be your last.

Pretty Funny On Don Imus

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico was giving the kerry pitch on Imus this morning. Paraphrasing freely, they had the following exchange:

Richardson: Well, Kerry has been on the Foreign Relations Committee for twenty years, he knows these foreign leaders, he will be able to get us international support in Iraq.

Imus: Yeah, those countries will be in a real hurry to send their people to Iraq so they can get beheaded. That's crazy talk, Governor.

Richardson: Well, it's election time, Don.

Four more days.

In Defense Of Shorter Wars

Why didn't the US secure every arms depot we encountered as we invaded Iraq?

The US military chose a battle plan emphasizing speed and maneuver, rather than opting to advance inch by inch, mile by mile and secure everything in sight.

As to the tactical and strategic benefits of the rapid movement of troops across Iraq during the invasion - yes, it was a trial of our modern military concepts. Here is what the President said about it in his famous "Mission Accomplished" speech:

In the images of falling statues, we have witnessed the arrival of a new era. For a hundred of years of war, culminating in the nuclear age, military technology was designed and deployed to inflict casualties on an ever-growing scale. In defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, Allied forces destroyed entire cities, while enemy leaders who started the conflict were safe until the final days. Military power was used to end a regime by breaking a nation.

Today, we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war; yet it is a great moral advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent. (Applause.)

An insurgency requires men, motivation, and weapons. The concept of the rapid liberation was that we would minimize civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure. One might have expected that this would make it easier for a new government to take over, and for the US to be viewed as liberators rather than oppressors.

The intensity of the insurgency seems to be a suprise. But to say that the quick blitz approach could not possibly have worked, and that the entire strategy of the war effort was wrong, is not what Kerry said then, and is not what Kerry is criticizing today. Instead, he is directing his criticism at the failure to secure one arms dump out of thousands, despite open questions as to whether (a) a significant amount of munitions were still stored at Al QaQaa when the US arrived, and (b) whether HMX and RDX were widely available elsewhere in Iraq.

At the time of the invasion, "everyone", including Kerry, believed we would win. And the quick blitz was what everyone expected.

UPDATE: Fine - how about a larger follow-on force for the "don't call it occupation"? Don't vex me. Foreign troops that never arrived, Iraqis that were never trained...

Searching For John Kerry

From the Times: "2 Kerry Votes on War and Peace Underline a Political Evolution".

John Kerry, dealmaker:

I did not think the president would be quite so arrogant, or quite so naïve, as to ultimately put America in the position of almost unilaterally invading a Middle Eastern country," Mr. Kerry said in an interview late last year, when his campaign was floundering in the face of a challenge from former Gov. Howard Dean, the antiwar Democrat. "If there's any kind of mistake at all, it's in judging that these guys were subject to some kind of basic rule of common sense at some level.

He misjudged George Bush, but he won't misjudge the Iranian mullahs, or the North Koreans.

The Times also describes his resume-burnishing in 2002:

But for Mr. Kerry personally, the most potent change may well have been that by 2002 he had all but publicly resolved to run for president. He was thinking about presidential power, and his own two-decade record as what Mr. Bush calls "a liberal senator from Massachusetts," in new and more defensive ways. The vote came two weeks before the midterm elections, and the White House was happy for the chance to put Democratic senators on the record - and on the spot.

To look good for 2004, Sen. Kerry needed to strike a martial pose. When he positioned himself on the Iraq War Authorization, he did not vote, he Vogued.

Missing Explosives - Day Four

[The Bear is everywhere with another great round-up. But the stuff below is good, too. These vexing time management decisions...]

[We will put this WaPo editorial up at the top. They note the IAEA media manipulation, but fail to note the specific point that the US is opposing ElBaradei's bid for a third term as head of the IAEA. This was reported days prior to the IAEA letter of Oct. 1 that triggered this story.]

Bill Gertz of the Washington Times interviews John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security:

Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein's weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned.

John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.

John Shaw has had legal troubles, but has also been at least partially cleared - we await the smear, although Winds of Change tells us he is an anti-neocon hero.

In a related development, more Pentagon push-back from Army Col. David Perkins - we controlled the roads, if not the facility, so nobody could have moved that much stuff after we arrived:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 27, 2004 – The chances that enemy forces moved 377 tons of heavy ordnance out of the Al Qaqaa arms facility after U.S. forces arrived in the area are nearly impossible, said Army Col. David Perkins, who commanded the American troops who took the area during major combat operations in Iraq in 2003.

...Perkins, now assigned to the Joint Staff, said it is "highly improbable" that the enemy was able to take the explosives out any time after U.S. forces arrived in the area. It would require "that the enemy sneaks a convoy of 10-ton trucks in and loads them up in the dark of night and infiltrates them in your convoy and moves out," he said. "That's kind of a stretch too far."

Finally, the NY Times rowback now looks like an effort by the Harvard Heavyweight Eight - if the Times rows back any faster, they will become airborne:

The missing explosives were first reported Monday by The New York Times and CBS News, and since then the issue and the possibility that American troops in Iraq let the explosives slip into terrorist hands have dominated the presidential campaign.

...The exact timing of the disappearance of the explosives is critical to the political arguments of each campaign. Mr. Kerry's contention that the administration did not adequately secure the country and was unprepared for the war's aftermath presumes that the explosives disappeared after the fall of Saddam Hussein on April 9, 2003, as officials of the interim Iraqi government say.

If the explosives disappeared before Mr. Hussein fell, as Mr. Bush now says is possible, that would undercut Mr. Kerry's argument and bolster Mr. Bush's contention that his opponent is making charges without all the facts.

...The last time that international inspectors saw the explosives was in early March 2003, days before the American-led invasion. It is possible, inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency say, that Saddam Hussein's forces may have tried to move the material out of the 10 huge bunkers at the Al Qaqaa facility where it was stored to save it if the facility was bombed.

If so, that would partly support Mr. Bush's contention that the Iraqis could have moved 380 tons of material very far without being detected.

Yes, that was hidden in the original story, as we noted. Too bad Kerry missed it, while the Times now clings to it like a liferaft.

The Times also notes a Kerry rowback:

...he softened the assertion he made the day before that the explosives had already been used in attacks against American troops, saying instead that they "could very likely be in the hands of terrorists and insurgents, who are actually attacking our forces now 80 times a day on average."

NBC News reported the apparent non-use of the explosives, so this could be the Miklasevski Effect. Or a Bear Bite.

Now, serious question. Kerry's basic position is, "Omigod, terrorists got 380 tonnes of high explosives, vote Bush out now". Bush's basic position is, there are several hundered thousand tonnes of explosives in Iraq, bad people had access to them before, they still do, we don't know the facts, but we do know that Kerry will say anything.

Is Kerry exhibiting the tempermant of a sound, thoughtful leader, or does he sound like he would say anything? Look, if this is opportunistic late-election screaming, fine. But does anyone think he is serious? And are they worried if he is? Does he really believe everything he reads in the Times?

And are the Bush bashers really, cross your heart, telling me that these explosives are so special, and the facts are so clear, that this is a clear example of a Bush screw-up? Has anyone figured out how much HMX or RDX was in Iraq but not at Al QaQaa, where it was singled out as a dual use item? Has anyone figured out how much RDX floats around the world, available in Chechnya or Lebanon, or wherever bad guys operate? Has Kerry or his staff addressed this? Has anyone attempted to establish any perspective at all on this?

Oh, tell me next Wednesday.

UPDATE: OH, WTF is it now? ABC News was unrelenting in debunking the CBS-Killian forgeries, and they seem to be stirring themselves now:

Oct. 27, 2004 — Iraqi officials may be overstating the amount of explosives reported to have disappeared from a weapons depot, documents obtained by ABC News show.

The Iraqi interim government has told the United States and international weapons inspectors that 377 tons of conventional explosives are missing from the Al-Qaqaa installation, which was supposed to be under U.S. military control.

But International Atomic Energy Agency documents obtained by ABC News and first reported on "World News Tonight with Peter Jennings" indicate the amount of missing explosives may be substantially less than the Iraqis reported.

The information on which the Iraqi Science Ministry based an Oct. 10 memo in which it reported that 377 tons of RDX explosives were missing — presumably stolen due to a lack of security — was based on "declaration" from July 15, 2002. At that time, the Iraqis said there were 141 tons of RDX explosives at the facility.

But the confidential IAEA documents obtained by ABC News show that on Jan. 14, 2003, the agency's inspectors recorded that just over 3 tons of RDX was stored at the facility — a considerable discrepancy from what the Iraqis reported.

The IAEA documents from January 2003 found no discrepancy in the amount of the more dangerous HMX explosives thought to be stored at Al-Qaqaa, but they do raise another disturbing possibility.

The documents show IAEA inspectors looked at nine bunkers containing more than 194 tons of HMX at the facility. Although these bunkers were still under IAEA seal, the inspectors said the seals may be potentially ineffective because they had ventilation slats on the sides. These slats could be easily removed to remove the materials inside the bunkers without breaking the seals, the inspectors noted.

Can we revisit the "no confidence in the IAEA" theme?

MORE: Old time CB fans, get out your C.W. McCall single - looks like we got us a convoy. If the ABC story means that we have no idea what was at Al QaQaa, this USA Today piece comes into play:

One year before President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, a U.S. spy satellite over the western Iraqi desert photographed trailer trucks lined up beside a military bunker. Canvas shrouded the trucks' cargo. Through a system of relays, the satellite beamed digitized images to Fort Belvoir in Virginia, south of Washington. Within hours, analysts a few miles away at CIA headquarters had the pictures on high-definition computer screens. The photos would play a critical role in an assessment that now appears to have been wrong — that Iraq had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.

The way analysts interpreted the truck convoy photographed on March 17, 2002 — and seven others like it spotted over the next two months — is perhaps the single most important example of how U.S. intelligence went astray in its assessment of Saddam Hussein's arsenal. Analysts made logical interpretations of the evidence but based their conclusions more on supposition than fact.

...The eight convoys stood out from normal Iraqi military movements. They appeared to have extra security provided by Saddam's most trusted officers, and they were accompanied by what analysts identified as tankers for decontaminating people and equipment exposed to chemical agents.

But the CIA had a problem: Once-a-day snapshots from the KH-11 spy satellite didn't show where the convoys were going. "We couldn't get a destination," a top intelligence official recalled. "We tried and tried and tried. We never could figure that out."

As far as U.S. intelligence was concerned, the convoys may as well have disappeared, like a mirage, into the Iraqi desert. Nearly a year after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Saddam's supposed arsenal remains a mirage.

...The eight suspicious convoys bore a striking resemblance to known chemical-weapons convoys that had been picked up by spy satellite photos in 1988. Briefing top officials at CIA headquarters, analysts placed examples of the old and new photos side by side on poster board. They also contrasted the eight suspicious convoys with more than 100 conventional Iraqi military shipments also photographed during the spring of 2002. They showed them on posters labeled "Normal Activity" and "Unusual Activity."

...What were the convoys doing if they weren't moving chemical weapons? The tanker trucks might have been carrying water in case munitions exploded, or fuel to keep a long-distance convoy moving. The trailer trucks might have been loaded with conventional rockets or shells, which would be hard to distinguish from chemical munitions. U.S. intelligence did not know for sure, and still does not know, where the convoys were going or what they were carrying.

The timing does not square with the Gertz story, where the stuff was moved "weeks before". And the Gertz story does not fully square with the ABC story, which opens the possibility that there was no stuff to move. But as to the initial Times account, fully embraced and endorsed by John Kerry, questions have been raised.

As to the tactical and strategic benefits of the rapid movement of troops across Iraq during the invasion - yes, it was a trial of our modern military concepts. Here is what the President said about it in his famous "Mission Accomplished" speech:

In the images of falling statues, we have witnessed the arrival of a new era. For a hundred of years of war, culminating in the nuclear age, military technology was designed and deployed to inflict casualties on an ever-growing scale. In defeating Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, Allied forces destroyed entire cities, while enemy leaders who started the conflict were safe until the final days. Military power was used to end a regime by breaking a nation.

Today, we have the greater power to free a nation by breaking a dangerous and aggressive regime. With new tactics and precision weapons, we can achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians. No device of man can remove the tragedy from war; yet it is a great moral advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent. (Applause.)

An insurgency requires men, motivation, and weapons. The concept of the rapid liberation (as contrasted with advancing mile by mile and securing everything discovered) was that we would minimize civilian casualties and the destruction of civilian infrastructure. One might hope that this would make it easier for a new government to take over, and for the US to be viewed as liberators rather than oppressors.

So far, not so good. But to say that this approach could not possibly have worked, and that the entire strategy of the war efort was wrong, is (a) hindsight; and (b) not what Kerry is saying.

At the time, according to Kerry, "everyone knew" we would win. And the quick blitz was pretty much what everyone expected.

MORE: Put this KTSP News story in the mix. it certainly documents what we have already been told - there were unsecured ammo dumps in Iraq. Were these the dumps with the HMX / RDX, and was this all of the explosive? Who knows?

KH4K

Kerry Haters For Kerry has a classic - My Dinner With Kerry, starring Wallace Shawn. An excerpt:

So, you know, for me it's humiliating to vote for Kerry, because I don't respect him; but I would -- I will -- it's unpleasant, it's like killing a big rat that is running around your apartment. It must be done. But you're not proud of it. But you have to do it.

Check the whole site - morale boosters everywhere.

WTF Is It Now?

The Red Sox poised on the brink of ending their curse; Arafat poised on the brink of ending ours; Rehnquist with thyroid cancer - and it's still only Wednesday.

By Saturday, dogs will speak and endorse Kerry. The cat rebuttal for Bush will be Sunday.

It has been a long time since I said "Thank God it's Tuesday", but I sure will be next week.

UPDATE: Lest I forget, on Monday we bag Bin Laden. No, really:

NEW DELHI, October 25: Fugitive Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden has been spotted in the Tibet-Laddakh region, close to the North-Eastern tip of Pakistan, bordering India and China, Indian and US officials believe.

A high-ranking official of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) flew from Islamabad on Sunday to meet top Indian officials here in Delhi after reports of Bin Laden’s presence in the region.

According to sources, following the meeting between Indian security bosses and the FBI, the New Delhi Government has put its security forces in the North Western region, specially the Kashmir Valley, on 'red alert.'

Kashmir? What happened to Waziristan?

Folks who remember the story remember that Bin Laden worked with the Pakistani ISI to train terrorists that operated against India in Kashmir. In fact, IIRC, Richard Clarke told us that the famous 1998 cruise missile strike into an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan killed some ISI agents.

A Must Read

A must read from the Times. Quickly:

Bush Says Kerry Exploits Uncertainty on Lost Explosives

WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 - President Bush addressed for the first time today the mysterious disappearance of 380 tons of explosives in Iraq, accusing his campaign rival, Senator John Kerry, of exploiting the issue without knowing, or caring about, the truth. Mr. Kerry, meanwhile, continued to hammer away on the issue.

Campaigning in Pennsylvania, where Mr. Kerry is thought to be holding a slight advantage in the contest for the swing state's 21 electoral votes, Mr. Bush said no one yet knew for sure when the explosives were taken from their storage site or by whom.

"Our military is now investigating a number of possible scenarios, including that the explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived at the site," Mr. Bush told a Republican crowd in Lancaster, Pa. "This investigation is important and it's ongoing, and a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief."

...The disappearance of 380 tons of explosives from a huge Iraqi military complex known as Al Qaqaa was disclosed on Monday by The New York Times, working with the CBS News program "60 Minutes." The explosives were of the type that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland in 1988 and blasted a hole in the American destroyer Cole in 2000.

The timing of the disappearance is crucial. The stockpile was found to be intact in March 2003, when United Nations weapons inspectors checked it just days before the American-led invasion. On April 10, one day after Saddam Hussein was toppled, American troops visited the Al Qaqaa depot, not finding any big cache of explosives but apparently not looking very closely either.

The troops' commander has explained that his unit was on its way to Baghdad and had simply paused at Al Qaqaa to plan the next stage of their advance.

If it could ever be established that the explosives disappeared while Mr. Hussein was still in power, Mr. Kerry's assertions that the disappearance illustrates the Bush administration's incompetence would be diluted.

...The Bush campaign office was quick to note remarks by Richard Holbrooke, a former ambassador to the United Nations and now a Kerry adviser, and Jamie Rubin, chief State Department spokesman in the Clinton administration, that no one can be sure just when the weapons were removed from the depot.

Hmmph. If it could ever be established that the Times had investigated the timing of the disappearance before running their Monday Bush-basher, questions about their bias and incompetence might be diluted.

If it could ever be established that the material had disappeared after the US was in control of the site, questions about whether Sen. Kerry has gone off half-cocked based on incomplete information might be diluted.

This article also slides right past the question of just what it is the Times reported on Monday - there did not seem to be any issue about the timing then, although we noted this morning's rowback.

On behalf of the Times, their Dead Tree version has a graphic noting that US troops were at Al QaQaa on April 3/4. This story is stuck on April 10 as the first visit. The most recent CBS story is inconclusive as to what may have been found.

Gotta go. Developing...

MORE: I need to track down the specific quotes from Rubin and Holbrooke. Should be easy.

Holbrooke:

In a television interview Tuesday with Fox News, Holbrooke said "the U.N. inspectors had told the American military this was a major depot." He added: "I don't know what happened. I do know one thing -- in most administrations the buck stops in the Oval Office."

Here Comes Reality

Our friends on the left never fail to amuse. Our latest smile comes from the current fad to associate oneself with the "reality-based community". Let's single out Matt Yglesias as a protypical example - Matt is neither humorless nor lacking in insight, so I suppose he is simply being wilfull in his misinterpretation of a delightful passage from a recent NY Times magazine article.

Ron Suskind wrote this on October 17:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Mr.Suskind attempts to use this anecdote to create a dichotomy between "reality-based" and "faith-based", but he was right the first time - he didn't fully comprehend. Allow me to illustrate by painful personal example.

Only last week, I was a deeply committed member of a reality-based community. As a long time Yankee fan, I would study my television screen, throwing popcorn at it and imploring A-Rod to get one clutch hit, just one time! Oh, I studied the heck out of that reality, and wasted a lot of popcorn doing it.

Red Sox slugger David Ortiz, on the other hand, took a different tack. With each swing of his bat, he gave me a new and increasingly ghastly reality to study. By the time Johnny Damon joined the carnage in Game 7, Yankee fans had seen enough reality to last through the winter.

The point being made by the White House aide was clear enough - there are watchers, and doers. But, given the pride taken on the left by their reality-based orientation, a simple division of labor suggests itself as the election approaches - you keep watching, and we'll keep doing.

MORE: Mickey gets all Marxist on this.

The Power Of A Soundbite

Howie Kurtz of the WaPo demonstrates the power of a soundbite:

Fact Check-o-Rama David E. Rosenbaum provides highlights of the New York Times campaign fact-checking. Allow me to summarize some of his summaries:

• Bush says Kerry continually shifted positions on Iraq: Not true....

We hooted at this the first time we saw it, and are still in awe of the chutzpah required by the Times to print that. Whatever editor passed on this must have a Kerry-style cache of botox to keep a straight face. Let's roll the tape (again):

A review of Mr. Kerry's public statements [on Iraq] found that his position had actually been quite consistent. But as the politics changed, Mr. Kerry repeatedly changed his emphasis. News accounts reflected what he was emphasizing at the time. And Mr. Kerry was often unclear in expressing his views.

...In May 2003, two months after the United States invaded Iraq and routed Mr. Hussein's army, Mr. Kerry was the presumed front-runner for the Democratic nomination. Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, from the antiwar wing of the party, was not yet regarded as a serious threat. In a nine-candidate debate in Columbia, S.C., that month, Mr. Kerry declared: "I would have preferred if we had given diplomacy a greater opportunity, but I think it was the right decision to disarm Saddam Hussein. And when the president made the decision, I supported him, and I support the fact that we did disarm him."

By October 2003, Dr. Dean had begun to emerge as a strong candidate and it had become clear that no unconventional weapons would be found in Iraq. Mr. Kerry asserted that month on the ABC News program "This Week With George Stephanopoulos": "The president and his advisers did not do almost anything correctly in the walk-up to the war. They rushed to war. They were intent on going to war. They did not give legitimacy to the inspections. We could have still been doing inspections even today."

Unwavering. On this rock, John, I will build my foreign policy.

But Mr. Kurtz repeats the sound-bite, so that will be enough for cocktail party chit-chat.

Back in April, the Times ran a piece provocatively titled "Kerry's Shifts: Nuanced Ideas or Flip-Flops?". Their conclusion then was a bit different. And folks may remember this article as the inspiration for the "Kerry Motto Lotto".

And while we are on the subject, let's dredge up one of our favorite Kerryisms, as he rationalizes his war vote to the San Fran Chronicle. This is March 2004, so look for Kerry-the-Dove:

"What we thought we were doing was getting him (Bush) to a place where it would be harder to go to war."

Just so. That subtle signal may have been overlooked by the White House, however.

MORE: More "Kerry Motto Lotto" foolishness here - look for the emergence of "I voted for the $87 billion...".

And let it be noted - Andrew Sullivan's long expected endorsement of John Kerry hinges on the notion that Kerry's elevation may force the Democratic Party to sober up and fly right. And so it may. Or, it may not.

But this "strategy" calls to mind what should have been the winning entry, if Mr. Scheiber would ever acknowledge it - from Patrick Sullivan himself, who magically encapsulated the Kerry appeal with "Let's Fly Under The Bridge!"

UPDATE: Searching For Kerry's Soul - the NY Times gives us "2 Kerry Votes on War and Peace Underline a Political Evolution".

Hard to pick a favorite, but this is new:

He is personally close to just a handful of senators, including John McCain, the Arizona Republican whom he sounded out about joining the Democratic ticket this year. He is politically close to others like Mr. Biden, with whom he discusses foreign policy and campaign strategy. But his best friends are mostly outside politics, roommates from college, colleagues from his earliest days as an antiwar protester and Congressional candidate.

Has he changed much?

The excerpts from his speech opposing Desert Storm are dramatically anti-war as well. Interesting that he picked a book written to oppose World War Two to make his point. No good wars, I suppose.

Missing Explosives, Day Three: The Times Begins The Rowback

Relax, folks, we all misread the scary surprise story in the Monday Times. See, you probably thought that the Times was reporting that the explosives were looted from the Al QaQaa facility after US troops passed through and failed to secure the area. Maybe you drew that mis-impression from the first two paragraphs, which I will reprise here:

Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq

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.

...Administration officials say they cannot explain why the explosives were not safeguarded, beyond the fact that the occupation force was overwhelmed by the amount of munitions they found throughout the country.

A reasonable misunderstanding. And John Kerry was duped as well, leading him to say this:

"Now we know that our country and our troops are less safe because this president failed to do the basics," Mr. Kerry said, the first of several times he repeated the theme. "This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the great blunders of this administration. The incredible incompetence of this president and his administration has put our troops at risk and put our country at greater risk than we ought to be."

But it's Wednesday now, and the rowback has begun. Here is the lead to Missing Explosives 2.0 from David Halbfinger of the Times:

The disappearance of the explosives has roiled the presidential campaign since the report on Monday, by The New York Times and CBS News, that some of them may have been removed from an ammunition dump after American troops passed by and failed to secure the area.

Some of them may have been removed? Are they kidding?

To compound the confusion, Jim Dwyer and David Sanger have their own story in which they describe the earlier Times coverage thusly:

No Check of Bunker, Unit Commander Says

...The New York Times, working with the CBS News program "60 Minutes," reported that the explosives at Al Qaqaa, mainly HMX and RDX, had disappeared since the invasion.

I am not sure what the official positon of the Times is at this point on the matter of what they actually reported. As to content, the Dwyer piece is good, and puts the NBC reporting in a new light. However, this information should have been part of the initial story, which remains deeply flawed.

In any case, the veil has been dropped, and it is now perfectly obvious that neither the Times nor anyone else has any firm grip on whether these explosives were at the site when US troops passed through.

Sorry, that is not accurate - John Kerry, and some members of the reality based community, have taken on faith that the explosives must have been there. The rest of us eagerly await facts, which the Times may or may not develop in the fullness of time. Yes, whether or not the explosives were actually there would seem to be the key to the story; yes, we think the Times may have jumped the gun; and yes, Saddam did plan for an insurgency and disperse explosives. But let's see what the Times learns.

We have a hint as to the timing of the ongoing investigation - evidence that the explosives were not at the site will only become available to the Times after Nov. 3.

UPDATE: Looks like I picked a bad day to switch to decaf - Dwyer and Sanger interview the commander who was at the site on April 10. However, yesterday I noted that the site had been searched on April 4, a fact I now seem to have forgotten. However, Captain Ed is there!

The Bear has an excellent round-up, although he inexplicably overlooks the IAEA connection.

Left unasked, and unanswered - did the Duelfer Report address this in his comprehensive search for WMDs in Iraq? And if not, why did no one howl when the report came out?

I have done quick searches for "HMX", but get no hits. But the glossary at the back of Vol. 3 tells me that "RDX" and "HE" are used in the report. "HMX" is not mentioned, "HE" is High Explosive. Someone with a better machine than mine needs to check this out. Or more likely, this has been done - someone give me a link to the answer! [This Sun article is weirdly related-but-not - Duelfer complains about what the UN did not do in 1995, but does not comment on what he did during the last year.]

Finally, the Bear documents what we heard Jim M of NBC News say yesterday - Pentagon sources say these explosives have not been used in Iraq.

MORE: This CBS News story compounds our confusion, and has something for everyone. Extensive excerpts in the continuation. And still nothing definitive on whether the explosives were there, and nothing definitive on why these were so special.

The Missing Explosives - Was Saddam A Man with A Plan?

Far be it from me to doubt the NY Times when they scream at me about Administration incompetence. But the basic theme of the "missing explosives" story is that, even though we have no specific evidence that the explosives were there when the US troops arrived, it must be Bush's fault that they are gone.

But it was the NY Times itself that reported this news about Saddam's pre-war planning on October 20, all of six days ago:

In a major misreading of Iraq's strategy, the C.I.A. failed to predict the role played by Saddam Hussein's paramilitary forces, which mounted the main attacks on American troops in southern Iraq and surprised them in bloody battles.

The agency was aware that Iraq was awash in arms but failed to identify the huge caches of weapons that were hidden in mosques and schools to supply enemy fighters.

Patient readers have to work their way to the seventh paragraph to learn that. Maybe the Times editors never made it that far, or simply forgot.

But for the rest of us, this reporting opens our minds to the vaguest of possibilities - Saddam actually had a plan to fight an insurgency, and dispersed ammo throughout Iraq. Eye-opening stuff. Oh, not really - the NY Times wrote about the Fedayeen Saddam in March 2003, and we have a bit more here.

So, we might wonder, why would Saddam's plan *not* have included dispersing the ammo at the Al QaQaa facility? The facility was under his control from March 8 (the last UN inspection) until April 4, when US troops arrived.

This is the sort of intellectual challenge that Times reporters might engage with starting, hmm, November 3.

I would think that, absent a good answer, folks might be inclined to give a bit more weight to the theory that the munitions were gone when we got there.

And BTW, a bad answer would take the form of "our air power would interdict a huge 40 truck convoy". A good answer would credit Saddam's team with a bit of sense. For example, three trucks a day from March 19 to April 4 would be more than adequate.

UPDATE: Thanks to a helpful commenter, we get this from the April 29, 2004 NY Times:

Hussein's Agents Are Behind Attacks in Iraq, Pentagon Finds By THOM SHANKER WASHINGTON, April 28 — A Pentagon intelligence report has concluded that many bombings against Americans and their allies in Iraq, and the more sophisticated of the guerrilla attacks in Falluja, are organized and often carried out by members of Saddam Hussein's secret service, who planned for the insurgency even before the fall of Baghdad.

The report states that Iraqi officers of the "Special Operations and Antiterrorism Branch," known within Mr. Hussein's government as M-14, are responsible for planning roadway improvised explosive devices and some of the larger car bombs that have killed Iraqis, Americans and other foreigners. The attacks have sown chaos and fear across Iraq.

...the assessment helps explain how only a few thousand insurgents, with professional leadership from small numbers of Mr. Hussein's intelligence services and seasoned military officer corps, could prove to be such a challenge to the American occupation. "They carefully laid plans to occupy the occupiers," said one United States government official who has read the report. "They were prepared to try and hijack the country. The goal was to complicate the stabilization mission, and democratization."

John Kerry, Candidate Of The IAEA

The NY Times story about missing high explosives was set off by an Oct. 1 letter from the IAEA. Yesterday, I wondered about the timing - why was the IAEA so excited just now? Today, I speculated that the IAEA prefers John Kerry's approach to Iran over George Bush's.

Let's add this story from the Sun:

UNITED NATIONS - Bush administration officials suspect political motivation behind a letter focused on the disappearance of 377 tons of explosives sent yesterday from the International Atomic Energy Agency to the United Nations Security Council.

Now, I criticized the Times for failing to note the possible political angle being played by Mohammed El Baradei, head of the IAEA. These stories from late September and early October confirm that something was up:

UN nuclear chief seeking third term as new IAEA board meets:

nuclear watchdog met in Vienna Monday to draw up procedures for electing a new director general, with current chief Mohamed ElBaradei seeking a third term despite US opposition.

And "UN nuke chief heads to S. Korea, Japan":

El Baradei’s visit to Asia is his first official trip since he announced his desire to remain at the helm of the UN agency for a third term. The United States is against his candidacy, but diplomats in Vienna said El Baradei hoped to confirm the support of Seoul and Tokyo during the trip.

...El Baradei has the backing of a majority of the IAEA’s member states, but he will face strong opposition from Washington. Officially the United States says it opposes any official remaining at the head of a UN agency beyond a second term. Unofficially, Washington is unhappy with his performance and wants him out, diplomats in Vienna say.

How did the Times miss that?

In their Day Two story the Times did have space for a sentence which elevated the importance of the story by drawing on the imagined authority and neutrality of Dr. ElBaradei:

"He doesn't do that [send a report to the Security Council] to report trivia," a European diplomat familiar with Dr. ElBaradei's views said. "It's something that is considered grave."

Perhaps the Times could find space for a few more sentences:

It was reported at the end of September that the US would oppose Dr. ElBaradei's bid for a third term. Dr. ElBaradei's letter requesting an update on the status of the Al QaQaa explosives was sent to the President of the Security Council on October 1.

MORE: The LA Times tells us that the NY Times was in a race with CBS to break this Bush-basher. Two pretty credible operations slug it out.

My Rapid Response On Tora Bora

George Bush dragged Tora Bora back into the news, the Kerry team delivered a Rapid Response, and I put forward a tedious response below.

Since we only have seven days until the election, let me summarize it: John Kerry apparently thinks he is smarter than his generals, and will micromanage the war; George Bush will let his generals make the battlefield decisions.

The WaPo has a recent article reviewing the second-guessing on Tora Bora. The lead:

Soon after arriving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Oct. 1, 2001, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers raised doubts about the war plan -- days from execution -- to topple the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Gen. Tommy R. Franks, then chief of U.S. Central Command, planned a single thrust toward the Afghan capital from the north.

Franks anticipated, correctly, that resistance from Taliban and al Qaeda fighters would collapse. He did not, however, position a blocking force to meet them as they fled. Some Bush administration officials now acknowledge privately they consider that a costly mistake.

Hindsight is often 20/20. My takeaway - if the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff chose not to overrule his subordinate, why should Bush? This article actually strenghtens Bush's case - the issue was identified, alternatives were weighed, and a decision was made. We all wish the right guess had been made, but I, at least, am glad that the decision making team was aware of the issues and the alternatives.

If Kerry is campaigning on a promise to make the battlefield decisions and always make the right ones, good for him. Say Anything, John.

MORE: The transcript which provided Bush's ammo is excerpted at this post; please also note that, on Dec 14, 2001 Kerry was obsessing about Saddam. And let's all give props to Rich Lowry - from the NRO to Bush's lips.

UPDATE: Charles Krauthammer crushes Kerry:

This election comes down to a choice between one man's evolution and the other man's resolution. With his endlessly repeated Tora Bora charges, Kerry has made Afghanistan a major campaign issue. So be it. Whom do you want as president? The man who conceived the Afghan campaign, carried it through without flinching when it was being called a "quagmire" during its second week and has seen it through to Afghanistan's transition to democracy? Or the retroactive genius, who always knows what needs to be done after it has already happened -- who would have done "everything" differently in Iraq, yet in Afghanistan would have replicated Bush's every correct, courageous, radical and risky decision -- except one. Which, of course, he would have done differently. He says. Now.

Missing High Explosives, Day Two

As they continue their coverage of the missing high explosive story, the Times looks in the mirror and smiles - the Old Grey Lady can still cause talk, as their headline indicates: "Iraq Explosives Become Issue in Campaign".

Well, yes - allegations of Administration incompetence and breathless whisperings of a connection to nuclear weapons can have that effect.

Today's Times story essentially marvels at the flap they created and recycles the spin from the Kerry and Bush camps. This was a clever thrust from the White House:

On Monday afternoon, Ken Mehlman, the Bush campaign manager, wrote a letter to supporters saying that "every day brings a new charge against the president and every charge is pulled right from the headlines of The New York Times."

John Kerry, the candidate of the NY Times! Very slick - work it.

Late in the story we get this:

On Monday evening, Nicolle Devenish, the spokeswoman for the Bush campaign, noted a section of the Times report indicating that American troops, on the way to Baghdad in April 2003, stopped at the Al Qaqaa complex and saw no evidence of high explosives. Noting that the cache may have been looted before the American invasion, she said Mr. Kerry had exaggerated the administration's responsibility.

Finally! We will discuss the NBC News and Fox News items below. The gist - NBC had embedded reporters with a US unit that inspected Al QaQaa on April 10th and did not find any HMX or RDX. However, Fox reports that troops were at the base on April 4.

And a bit later we learn this:

While the White House sought to minimize the importance of the loss of the HMX and RDX - two commonly used military explosives that can also be used to bring down airplanes or to create a trigger for nuclear weapons - the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, took the unusual step on Monday of writing to the United Nations Security Council to report that the explosives were gone. He usually sends a report every six months, and his last was just a few weeks ago.

"He doesn't do that to report trivia," a European diplomat familiar with Dr. ElBaradei's views said. "It's something that is considered grave."

Well. This provides the second prong with which to Fork Kerry - in addition to being the candidate of the NY Times, Kerry is the candidate of the IAEA. Is the IAEA playing games with George Bush? Has that possibility even ocurred to the Times?

Perhaps I can help - Iran has been in the news with the challenge of its nuclear reactor programs. The US has wanted to refer the problem to the Security Council. The IAEA has been working with Britain, Germany and France on a milder approach (backed by Kerry). Hmm, who might Mohamed ElBaradei of the IAEA prefer to see in office? These questions are too tricky for the Times, so I will refer you to the Sept 30 WSJ:

The outlines of this hardest of all policy issues were evident earlier this week at a conference on nuclear oversight held at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. John Bolton, the State Department's point man on proliferation, opened by saying that the Bush administration wants the International Atomic Energy Agency to stop temporizing over Iran and refer the problem of its nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council.

He noted that it is technically possible for Iran to remain in compliance with the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, then suddenly renounce the NPT and "breakout" with its own bomb. Rather than wait for that moment, the administration wants a Security Council referral, which would elevate the problem politically.

Speaking from the Democratic side of the divide, the Carnegie Endowment's Joseph Cirincione defended the IAEA's inspection process and said the agency isn't referring Iran to the Security Council because the Bush administration's handling of Iraq's WMD created a problem of "trust and credibility."

Do tell. This Oct. 13 story describes new flexibility by the Administration, but of course the IAEA letter that started this story was sent October 1.

Stir together the NBC report, the fact that Kerry is parroting NY Times speculation, and the "fact" that the IAEA is trying to influence this election, and you have a nice cocktail to serve to John Kerry. I'll welcome suggestions for the soundbite, but mine is, "John Kerry has been annointed by the NY Times and the International Atomic Energy Agency, but it is the American people who choose their President."

MORE: Here is a timeline of the Iraqi invasion. I suspect that somewhere in the blogosphere, someone has worked out a detailed accounting of which units were in the area of Al QaQaa on which days, and I would love to see it. So far, Fox has placed US troops there on April 4 (with no reporting as to whether there was HMX present), and NBC says that, as of April 10, there was no HMX or RDX at the site.

Now, I have a question for the reality based community. It was all of six days ago that the Times reported on the intelligence surprises we encountered upon invading Iraq. I will excerpt this:

In a major misreading of Iraq's strategy, the C.I.A. failed to predict the role played by Saddam Hussein's paramilitary forces, which mounted the main attacks on American troops in southern Iraq and surprised them in bloody battles. The agency was aware that Iraq was awash in arms but failed to identify the huge caches of weapons that were hidden in mosques and schools to supply enemy fighters.

Let's see. Saddam's paramilitary is operating in southern Iraq. Al QaQaa is thirty miles south of Baghdad, and was under Saddam's control from March 8 (the last UN inspection) until April 4.

Why would the paramilitary *not* take munitions from Al QaQaa? Is it utterly unreasonable to think that they might have dispersed as much of the materiel as they wanted to hiding places throughout Iraq? If not, why not? There is plenty of evidence that this insurgency was planned - why would they wait until *after* they had lost control of this arms dump to seize the explosives there?

The Times makes no attempt to address this. However, the reality based side has found an anonymous Pentagon source to say that the explosives were there at one time.

And Josh Marshall, in a bit of unintended irony, has three posts up, each taking a different tack in criticizing the Administration for changing their story. I will provide links eventually - his site is freezing on my machine just now.

But he does address my question, and his gist seems to be that moving the stuff before and during the war would have been very difficult, since one large convoy would have been noticed and bombed. Huh? Maybe Saddam's people thought of that, too. One or two trucks at a time couldn't move this stuff to mosques, schools, hospitals, and so forth? Or did we wave a forty truck convoy through Iraq *after* the liberation?

As to attacking the Administration's changing story, this is a standard debate tactic - the Times has surprised everyone with a wild charge. Now the Dems want to shift the story to, gee, unless they answer every wacky question we have immediately, accurately, and consistently, the Administration is lying. Clever, but transparent.

This AP story provides ammo for both sides.

And no one is remarking on the tag end of the NBC NEWS report, where Jim M said that Pentagon sources tell him that there is no evidence that these HMX / RDX explosives have been used in Iraq. I rolled the video and then lost the link. Try going to the NBC news front page, and then clicking on the News Video link. [The Bear is on it].

Here is an account of the Pentagon position.

And another stray thought - this Fox story says that troops on April 4 sent a white powder off to be tested, and it was described as an explosive. What explosive? Since Al QaQaa manufactured conventional munitions, it might be something quite ordinary. Or, well, explosive. But someone must know.

Kerry's Rapid Response On Tora Bora

Team Kerry has a rapid response on Tora Bora. Or is that a "tepid" response? Mickey is not impressed.

Our most recent post, with many links and updates, is from Oct. 19; let's comment on this Kerry effort:

George Bush accused John Kerry of throwing out a “wild claim” about Bin Laden’s whereabouts in the fall of 2001. Apparently, George Bush thinks Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Myers were also making wild claims when they said that bin Laden was at Tora Bora in the fall of 2001.

Let's just roll the tape from the first debate:

Kerry: ...And they believe it because they know I would not take my eye off of the goal: Osama bin Laden.

Unfortunately, he escaped in the mountains of Tora Bora. We had him surrounded. But we didn't use American forces, the best trained in the world, to go kill him. The president relied on Afghan warlords and he outsourced that job too. That's wrong.

Pretty clear - Osama was at Tora Bora and escaped. Here is Kerry from the third debate:

KERRY: Yes. When the president had an opportunity to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, he took his focus off of them, outsourced the job to Afghan warlords, and Osama bin Laden escaped.

Not quite as specific, but when placed with the first quote, we think we know what he means. And Kerrywas very clear at a rally in Nevada:

``Can you imagine trusting them when you have your 10th Mountain Division, the United States Marine Corps, when you had all the power and ability of the best-trained military in the world?'' Kerry told a rally at the University of Nevada-Reno. ``I would have used our military and we would have gone after and captured or killed Osama bin Laden. That's tough.''

Now, the Kerry Rapid response is to argue that Dick Cheney, Gen. Myers, and Paul Wolfowitz all said Osama was at Tora Bora. Well, yes they did, subject in each case to the sort of hedging and nuance that Kerry left out of his own pronouncement.

Cheney: "according to the reports that were coming in";

Myers: Can't be sure. But we think we know."

Wolfowitz: "Well, I guess there's a question what constitutes belief... we don't have any credible evidence of him being in other parts of Afghanistan, or outside of Afghanistan. But the kinds of reports that we're working on are very fragmentary, not very reliable. We're not talking about eyewitnesses who came in right afterwards and said, 'I saw him in such and such a place.' So--but the reports that we get, tend to leave him in that area.

Look, some people get confused about their own whereabouts pretty routinely. Shouldn't they hedge a bit when describing someone else's whereabouts? [UPDATE: As I was saying, people can move so quickly they seem to be in two places at once. Maybe Osama moved quickly too.]

As to the question of whether Kerry actually criticized the Afghan outsourcing contemporaneously, the Kerry Team has an excerpt of Kerry saying this:

SEN. KERRY: “Not just air attack. No, no. I'm talking about people on the ground, the very people I talked about earlier, the level of engagement here with either rangers or Special Forces…”

Please. We had Special Forces and Rangers on the ground at Tora Bora. A few days ago, Kerry was calling for the 10th Mountain, which had not yet been deployed to Afghanistan.

If someone can get a copy of the transcript, it might be interesting to see what Kerry meant by "the very people I talked about earlier". Otherwise, this excerpt weakens his case, rather than strengthens it. Citizen Smash discussed troop availability.

As further evidence that you ought to read at least a bit of what you link to, the Kerry Team pulls the Cheney quote from this Christian Science Monitor article.

One wonders whether they noticed this, a bit further down from the Cheney excerpt:

Between two and four days later, somewhere between Nov. 28 to Nov. 30 - according to detailed interviews with Arabs and Afghans in eastern Afghanistan afterward - the world's most-wanted man escaped the world's most-powerful military machine, walking - with four of his loyalists - in the direction of Pakistan.

On Dec. 11, in the village of Upper Pachir - located a few miles northeast of the main complex of caves where Al Qaeda fighters were holed up - a Saudi financier and Al Qaeda operative, Abu Jaffar, was interviewed by the Monitor. Fleeing the Tora Bora redoubt, Mr. Jaffar said that bin Laden had left the cave complexes roughly 10 days earlier, heading for the Parachinar area of Pakistan.

The WaPo has a slightly different version of events from April 2002. And they update the second-guessing here. Very briefly:

Soon after arriving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Oct. 1, 2001, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers raised doubts about the war plan -- days from execution -- to topple the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Gen. Tommy R. Franks, then chief of U.S. Central Command, planned a single thrust toward the Afghan capital from the north.

Franks anticipated, correctly, that resistance from Taliban and al Qaeda fighters would collapse. He did not, however, position a blocking force to meet them as they fled. Some Bush administration officials now acknowledge privately they consider that a costly mistake.

As do we all. But are we blaming Bush for failing to overrule his generals, when they were not willing to overrule each other? Myers was the boss - he didn't need Bush's authority to change the plans. If Myers did not feel strongly enough about his objections to present them to Bush or overrule Franks, why blame Bush now? Other than the obvious reasons, of course.

That is some fine job by the Kerry people. Maybe it is the Backward Response Team.

The Republican Message Machine Is Clicking Now

With its sensitive evocation of the environmentally conscious Kevin Costner classic, BC04 wins over Matt Yglesias.

UPDATE: NO! Not "The Postman"! That is America's future under John Kerry. Unless Kerry brings us to "Waterworld".

I Will Reach Out To Our Allies

To the haunting strains of "It's Only Make Believe", RedState and the Washington Times tackle one of John Kerry's ongoing delusions:

I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable.

All, some, a group meeting, private meetings - who knows? Integrity, integrity, integrity.

My question - does Kerry know he is lying, or is his memory really that bad? A quick reprise of his memory failures would surely include:

(1) the adventure in Cambodia which was "seared" into his memory;

(2) the fateful November 1971 Kansas City meeting at which the Vietnam Veterans Against the War talked about assasinating some Senators;

(3) his now-forgotten early opposition to Reagan's liberation of Grenada;

(4) his date of discharge from the military (OK, that was a short term memory failure - he told the Harvard Crimson in 1970 that he had been discharged, and stayed with that story until his records caught up with him).

Look, I would like to think I have had an interesting and varied life. But as full as it has been, I am sure that I would still find a heated discussion of the assassination of some US Senators to be quite memorable. I would probably remember when I left the service (I remember when I graduated from high school!). And I am sure that if people had been shooting at me on Christmas Eve while I was on a covert mission, I would not get confused about it.

On Grenada, Kerry might have forgotten that he hated everything Reagan did and the air he exhaled - from time to time lately, I have actually slipped and said something nice about Bill Clinton, so how can I judge another?

As to meeting with the Security Council, my guess is that Kerry goes to so many meetings, and these foreigners to whom he is constantly reaching out must all be shorter than he, and they're all speaking languages only Teresa understands... it probably becomes a blur.

But all that said, this one is absolutely inexplicable: "I was 30 yards away from Billy Buckner in that famous Shea Stadium game in '86."

No he wasn't. Unbelievable.

UPDATE: Well, yes he was. Or at least, he has a good story.

I can actually comment on this:

Kerry had also claimed to have ran in the Boston Marathon in the late 1970s or early '80s, though no records of his finish exist. Meehan said Kerry ran the race unofficially "as a bandit." Running the race without a number was more commonplace 25 years ago than it is today.

Well, he ought to remember the year. I'll say this - when I ran the marathon as a bandit in 1978, there were plenty of folks with no number and no official record of their presence. But I did not see Kerry!

MORE: Oh, I wanted that Grenada thing! I was rummaging through the archives for something else in this TIME story, and noticed that implausible comment about Grenada. The Boston Globe iced my cake, too. But for some reason, the NRO ran a story today, so I wimped out and used theirs.

Unexpected Indecision At The Times

The NY Times chats with a few undecided voters, and manages to surprise us. The first person they offer voted for Bush in 200, but is now hesitating. However, the next three people they talk to are Gore supporters who are leaning towards Bush - don't tell ABC News!

Let's meet the former non-believers who are still skeptics:

It seems like every day, I'm changing my mind," said Victoria Lichtman, 50, of Delray Beach, Fla. Ms. Lichtman said the president, whom she did not support in 2000, had done a poor job on the environment, as Mr. Kerry has charged. But, she wondered, was Mr. Kerry proposing a form of government-controlled medicine, as the president has claimed? The war started by Mr. Bush breaks her heart, Ms. Lichtman said, but would Mr. Kerry swing too far in the other direction?

Word has spread among friends and family that she has not made up her mind, and many have called to woo her, said Ms. Lichtman, an artist who works in Internet music sales.

"They have heard that I'm not against Bush - they are horrified," she said. "It's like I'm excommunicated. They're calling me up and saying, let me win you back. It's not that they're for Kerry - it's that they are against Bush."

In St. Louis, Doug Newton, 37, a high school history teacher, said he was leaning toward Mr. Bush. "The concrete is still a little soft," he said. "Anything could happen. I'm a supporter of our actions in Iraq, even though the weapons of mass destruction have not been found, and may never be found. I kind of feel like I know where Bush stands and what he is for. To me, Kerry is more of a guy who is against things."

For him and for his wife, he said, security was a critical issue. "That's why I tend to go with the veterans, and went with Gore in 2000," he said, and even though Mr. Kerry served in the Navy, Mr. Newton had some doubts about his willingness to buck world opinion.

Kimberly Parmer, 33, who works as a human resources manager in western Michigan, said the emphasis on national security issues had distorted the campaign.

"I don't think terrorism is as big a threat as everyone is making it out to be," Ms. Parmer said. "Yes, we have had a couple of incidents, but other countries have hundreds every year. Iraq is important, but so are things like Social Security and Medicare. Neither one has really touched on those subjects because no one is going to be happy, no matter what you do."

Ms. Parmer, who said she is firmly planted in "the very low middle class," also saw the Bush tax cut as poorly timed. She normally votes for Democrats, she said, but is not sure this time.

"One is too polished; the other one, I think to be honest, I don't know how he ever got to be president," Ms. Parmer said. "I am really surprised he has gotten as far as he has in life. I do think he's honest."

Even so, Ms. Parmer said, she thought she might vote for Mr. Bush. "If you actually look at him, and he stands up next to Kerry, you just kind of feel sorry for him," she said. "I feel he's more of an underdog, he's had a hard go of it in the last four years."

That's it! George Bush, the little guy struggling to keep up with Tall John, nails down the bleeding heart vote. We'll take it.

This Sounds Terrible, But...

The NY Times has a big, scary story screaming at us from the front page:

Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq

This article was reported and written by James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger.

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....

American weapons experts say their immediate concern is that the explosives could be used in major bombing attacks against American or Iraqi forces: the explosives, mainly HMX and RDX, could produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings.

...The explosives could also be used to trigger a nuclear weapon, which was why international nuclear inspectors had kept a watch on the material, and even sealed and locked some of it. The other components of an atom bomb - the design and the radioactive fuel - are more difficult to obtain.

Not good. But the article raises some questions that one might have expected it to answer a bit more emphatically:

(1) What else is HMX used for? These articles suggest it is also commonly used for artillerty, rockets, and conventional explosives. How much HMX might be littered all over various Iraqi arms dumps?

The closest we get to an answer is in paragraph 10:

A Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said Sunday evening that Saddam Hussein's government "stored weapons in mosques, schools, hospitals and countless other locations," and that the allied forces "have discovered and destroyed perhaps thousands of tons of ordnance of all types." A senior military official noted that HMX and RDX were "available around the world" and not on the nuclear nonproliferation list, even though they are used in the nuclear warheads of many nations.

(2) Why the focus on this site? Iraq apparently had several sites for making or storing high explosives.

The answer seems to be that this site was special because it was associated with Iraq's nuclear program, not that it was a special storage site for the the HMX in Iraq. Late in the story we get this:

Administration officials say Iraq was awash in munitions, including other stockpiles of exotic explosives.

"The only reason this stockpile was under seal," said one senior administration official, "is because it was located at Al Qaqaa," where nuclear work had gone on years ago.

As a measure of the size of the stockpile, one large truck can carry about 10 tons, meaning that the missing explosives could fill a fleet of almost 40 trucks.

By weight, these explosives pack far more destructive power than TNT, so armies often use them in shells, bombs, mines, mortars and many types of conventional ordinance.

(3) Was the stockpile moved before the war? The short answer seems to be yes, it was probably moved while under Saddam's control. But where? We have this:

By late 2003, diplomats said, arms agency experts had obtained commercial satellite photos of Al Qaqaa showing that two of roughly 10 bunkers that contained HMX appeared to have been leveled by titanic blasts, apparently during the war. They presumed some of the HMX had exploded, but that is unclear.

Other HMX bunkers were untouched. Some were damaged but not devastated. I.A.E.A. experts say they assume that just before the invasion the Iraqis followed their standard practice of moving crucial explosives out of buildings, so they would not be tempting targets. If so, the experts say, the Iraqi must have broken seals from the arms agency on bunker doors and moved most of the HMX to nearby fields, where it would have been lightly camouflaged - and ripe for looting.

Or it could have been dispersed to other hiding places - non one knows, but there is certainly evidence that Saddam planned for an insurgency. We do see this:

...A senior Bush administration official said that during the initial race to Baghdad, American forces "went through the bunkers, but saw no materials bearing the I.A.E.A. seal." It is unclear whether troops ever returned.

Fine, the Iraqis under Saddam probably unsealed it and moved it. US troops did not see anything under seal. Would they have paused to secure or destroy a stockpile of HMX? They have in many other places.

(4) Why the sudden alarm? What makes this HMX special is that at one time it was under IAEA supervision as part of their attempt to monitor the Iraqi nuclear program. Since that is officially still their job, they have decided to call attention to this. Which is fine - somebody ought to be keeping track of Iraq's nuclear program - but it does not mean that this is a breathtaking new discovery.

A slighly less excting version of this story seems to be, Saddam had conventional explosives, not all of which can be accounted for, and we did a poor job of securing munitions dumps. The presence of the IAEA lets the NY Times include a special fear factor. And we love this, near the conclusion:

More worrisome to the I.A.E.A. - and to some in Washington - is that HMX and RDX are used in standard nuclear weapons design.

Yes, the IAEA would be worried about that, since it is their job. More worrisome to the FAA (if the Times had called) would have been the fear that this HMX would be used to bring down an airliner. More worrisome to the Army Corps of Engineers is the possibility that this could be used to blow up the Hoover Dam, or the George Washington bridge. And so on.

I can't decide how much of this story is "news", and how much is the Times attempt at an October surprise. But my guess is that the reality-based community is pretending that Bush has lost track of all of the HMX in the world.

UPDATE: Kerry on the attack. But the article does not have any Administration response. I'm getting lonely here, guys...

FINALLY: If Jim Geraghty of the Kerry Spot is with me, who will stand against me? Follow his links, but one of his points is, the Army Corp of Engineers estimated that there were 600,000 tons of munitions in Iraq, of which 238,000 has been destroyed or captured. He also notes, as I do, that these explosives may have been moved before the war, or immediately after it started.

CNN has a different slant, and some Admin reaction. Here's the spin:

According to the Pentagon official, coalition forces, who went to the area around Al Qaqaa in the months after the war ended, searched 32 bunkers and 87 other buildings. They found no weapons of mass destruction, but indications of looting.

The discovery was not made public sooner because standard intelligence practice is not to let enemies know such information, said a senior administration official.

There are hundreds of tons of other weapons and munitions missing around the country, and it is impossible for the United States to track down all of them, the official said.

Even so, he conceded, the story is not a good one for the White House, just over a week from Election Day.

...The senior administration official downplayed the importance of the missing explosives, describing them as dangerous material but "stuff you can buy anywhere." The official added that the administration did not see this necessarily as a "proliferation risk."

"In the grand scheme -- and on a grand scale -- there are hundreds of tons of weapons, munitions, artillery, explosives that are unaccounted for in Iraq," the official said. "And like the Pentagon has said, there is really no way the U.S. military could safeguard all of these weapons depots or find all of these missing materials."

OK, the notion that hundreds of tons are already missing, so what is a few hundred more, is not wholly reassuring. I would rather they focus on the notion that this area was under Saddam's control for some time after the war started, and the explosives could have been moved then. The fedayeen were south of Baghdad, and fighting with what seemed to be a plan, after all. Or, if this facility was in a Republican Guard sector, what about the view that the Republican Guard slipped away to fight another day? [MSNBC says no to this - why can't CNN or the Times get this news?]:

At the Pentagon, an official who monitors developments in Iraq said U.S.-led coalition troops had searched Al Qaqaa in the immediate aftermath of the March 2003 invasion and confirmed that the explosives were intact. Thereafter the site was not secured by U.S. forces, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. [NBC tells a different story, in UPDATE 2 below]

From CNN, the key bit of the Admin response to John Kerry: "John Kerry can't lead the nation to victory in a war he doesn't believe in."

Welcome to the Grand Diversion.

INFO on IEDs: Some info on Improvised Explosive Devices can be found in this AP story, at Global Security, and in the WaPo.

From the WaPo:

Car bombs have largely taken the lives of Iraqi civilians. IEDs have killed and wounded large numbers of U.S. troops.

...Almost all of the roadside bombs combine PE-4 and some sort of artillery munitions, from small mortar rounds to powerful 155mm shells.

PE-4, or PE4, is an RDX derivative which is made in Portugal or England, although a different story mentions Russia as a source. Could it be made from the RDX from Al QaQaa? And where would the facilities for such a conversion exist?

BURIED WHERE NO ONE WILL SEE IT: This explosive went missing from Al QaQaa, and I am wondering about the name. Can we all agree that "QaQaa" should be pronounced like "Kaka"?

UPDATE 2: From Jim Geraghty again, transcribing the NBC Nightly News:

NBC News: Miklaszewski: “April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army's 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qakaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing. The U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX...

A bit later in the broadcast, Mr. Miklaszewski adds that Pentagon officials have seen no evidence that these explosives have actually been used in Iraq.

Down To The Wire In Waziristan

It's more exciting than NY Yankee baseball as foreign journalists speculate on whether Bush will bag Osama before the election.

Hints are everywhere - 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman says that Osama is in South Waziristan.

And what's this? "A “foreign hand” in South Waziristan cannot not [sic] be ruled out, Interior Minister Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao said on Saturday. This story suggests that by "foreign hand" he means that foreigners (apparently Indians) are influencing terrorists within Pakistan. Well, no kidding! But could "foreign hand" mean US troops have been given permission to operate in South Waziristan? Is this an innoculating pre-announcement? Kerry-ites feel the fear! Although, as Kerry himself said, the capture of Osama at any time would be a good thing.

Finally, the BBC tells us that a new push is on.

Nail-biting suspense to the final reel. Even if Osama is dead.

Multilateral Man

From the excellent column by Jon Rauch:

And what are Kerry's core beliefs? If you shake him awake at 3 a.m., what are the two or three things he knows deep down, the way Reagan knew that Big Government and Communism were bad and Bush knows that Al Qaeda and its allies have launched a global insurgency on behalf of a virulent totalitarian doctrine? I don't know.

I do know - If you crept into his Georgetown residence and shook Kerry awake at 3 AM, he would know it is 9 AM in Paris.

The Rauch column comes to us by way of the always-engaging Ms. McArdle, who is casting about for reasons to choose between Bush and Kerry.

She tabs the key domestic policy issues facing America as follows:

The biggest threat is failing to deal with budget and other problems inherent in the demographic surge towards an older population, until the problem deals with itself, catastrophically. The second biggest threat is screwing up the health care system so that we don't get innovative new drugs and equipment. And the third is running out of oil and/or screwing up the climate with our fossil fuel consumption.

I would put education reform in the top two, and move Social Security reform out of the top three - if we can educate our current youth, and do a better job of educating and absorbing immigrants, Social Security and Medicare become much more tractable. And I am grudgingly accepting the notion that we need a Federal energy plan of some sort.

Left unasked in her column - our next President will be expected to restructure and transform the CIA, the FBI, and the military while fighting a war on terror. Do either Kerry or Bush inspire special confidence with their ability to wrestle with the various bureacracies, make decisions, and move the processes forward?

In answering, don't forget that Kerry was a whiz-bang prosecutor, although, based on his reported reductions in the case backlog, the older he gets, the better he was. He also started a cookie company.

Critics can draw on a seemingly limitless stockpile of stories about Kerry's quirks as the leader of his campaign. Here is one from the WaPo, and two from the NY Times.

UPDATE: From commenter "PerfectSense":

...if you shake him awake at 3 a.m., what are the two or three things he knows deep down...

1) I served in Vietnam

2) I have a plan

3) I voted for it before I voted I voted against it.

MORE: Kerry's record as an attorney - I was for it before I was against it.

Here Is Your October Surprise

Via Mickey: Sailer Steve tests the candidate's IQs.

The intro is a classic, and the content shows a lot of hard work. Good job on a non-issue.

BTW, I am not surprised.

UPDATE: The NY Times' John Tierney picks this up.

Linda Gottfredson, an I.Q. expert at the University of Delaware, called it a creditable analysis said she was not surprised at the results or that so many people had assumed that Mr. Kerry was smarter. "People will often be misled into thinking someone is brighter if he says something complicated they can't understand," Professor Gottfredson said.

So that was the reason for Kerry's tongue-twisters explaining his Iraq vote!

Best Party Money Can Buy

Jane Mayer writes in the New Yorker about the new Billionaire Boys Club also known as the Democratic Party:

On August 6th, a week after the Democratic Convention, a clandestine summit meeting took place at the Aspen Institute, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains. The participants, all Democrats, were sworn to secrecy, and few of them will discuss the event. One thing that is certain, however, is that the guests formed a tableau that not many people would associate with the Democratic Party of the past. Five billionaires joined half a dozen liberal leaders in a lengthy conversation about the future of progressive politics in America. The billionaires were not especially close socially, nor were they in complete agreement about politics or strategy. Yet they shared a common goal: to use their fortunes to engineer the defeat of President George W. Bush in the 2004 election.

Yes, the New Yorker could never write so calmly about a similar scenario unfolding in the Republican Party, but get over that shock and press on (and yes, they eventually run quotes from concerned Dems). The story focuses on George Soros. Near the end, we learn what he hopes to get from his investment - access, and a respectful hearing for his ideas. And what are his ideas?

“I’m not looking for a job,” he said, then joked, “I don’t believe in working.” But, he added, “I would be very happy to advise Kerry, if he’s willing to listen to me, and to criticize him, if he isn’t. I’ve been trying to exert some influence over our policies, and I hope I’ll get a better hearing under Kerry.”

Soros had already compiled a list of specific notions about how to solve the crisis in Iraq which he’d like the next President to consider. He and Leslie H. Gelb, the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, had worked out a plan calling for summit talks on Iraq, under U.N. auspices, which would include neighboring countries. The two men envisioned that Iraq could be divided along ethnic lines into largely autonomous regions, united by a federal government that would distribute oil revenues. “It’s purely an idea, but one I’d support, and advocate,” Soros said. He also told me that he would push for eliminating Bush’s tax cuts.

The NY Times published Leslie Gelb's "The Three-State Solution" in November 2003. Some excerpts:

The only viable strategy, then, may be to correct the historical defect and move in stages toward a three-state solution: Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south.

Almost immediately, this would allow America to put most of its money and troops where they would do the most good quickly -- with the Kurds and Shiites. The United States could extricate most of its forces from the so-called Sunni Triangle, north and west of Baghdad, largely freeing American forces from fighting a costly war they might not win. American officials could then wait for the troublesome and domineering Sunnis, without oil or oil revenues, to moderate their ambitions or suffer the consequences.

There is a hopeful precedent for a three-state strategy: Yugoslavia after World War II. In 1946, Marshal Tito pulled together highly disparate ethnic groups into a united Yugoslavia. A Croat himself, he ruled the country from Belgrade among the majority and historically dominant Serbs. Through clever politics and personality, Tito kept the peace peacefully.

I need to pause here and blink. "Through clever politics and personality, Tito kept the peace peacefully"? Golly, if only we could find an Iraqi strongman like Tito. But not one like Saddam. A good strongman. Not a bad strongman. No, not a bad one.

Here we go again:

The first step would be to make the north and south into self-governing regions, with boundaries drawn as closely as possible along ethnic lines. Give the Kurds and Shiites the bulk of the billions of dollars voted by Congress for reconstruction. In return, require democratic elections within each region, and protections for women, minorities and the news media.

Second and at the same time, draw down American troops in the Sunni Triangle and ask the United Nations to oversee the transition to self-government there. This might take six to nine months; without power and money, the Sunnis may cause trouble.

For example, they might punish the substantial minorities left in the center, particularly the large Kurdish and Shiite populations in Baghdad. These minorities must have the time and the wherewithal to organize and make their deals, or go either north or south. This would be a messy and dangerous enterprise, but the United States would and should pay for the population movements and protect the process with force.

Emphasis added to what was described in former Yugoslavia as "ethnic cleansing". I vaguely recall that the US was against that, and I suspect Kerry was too, but times have changed.

Now, how seriously might this proposal be taken in Democratic circles? I have no idea. But we are all looking for hints as to which faction will ultimately win Kerry's heart and mind, so the Soros Option probably ought to be put into the mix.

Stolen Hour

Alessandra Stanley of the Times reviews "Stolen Honor", an abbreviated version of which will air in some television markets. This controversial broadcast addresses John Kerry's days as an anti-war protestor.

Yesterday's commentary from the Times was provided by Jim Rutenberg and Kate Zernike.

Last February, Todd Purdum of the Times wrote about Kerry's anti-war days. Extended excerpts are here.

David Halbfinger of the Times took a turn in April.

From yesterday's Rutenberg/Zernike piece:

Several historians said yesterday that Mr. Kerry's testimony could be legitimately criticized for greatly exaggerating the frequency of atrocities but that atrocities did occur.

"They didn't happen with the frequency with which John Kerry talks about them in the truncated comments we've all heard," said Gary D. Solis, a former marine who is a law professor at West Point.

But, Professor Solis said, "All the things that Senator Kerry described did happen, no question."

He said My Lai was unparalleled in ferocity, and in the number of Vietnamese killed and raped.

"Were there things like cutting off ears and war crimes?'' he asked. "Sure there were."

Mr. Solis was also quoted by Todd Purdum last February:

But Gary Solis, a former Marine lieutenant colonel, Vietnam veteran and expert on war crimes who is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center here, said Mr. Kerry had made a grave error.

"Sure it's true," Mr. Solis said. "Sure there were people raped, ears cut off and so on. Each one of the things that he mentioned happened, in some cases I know, and in others I'm confident. But when you put them all together in one sentence and say this was well known at every level of command, it impugns, it seems to me, everyone who fought over there and it gives the impression that everyone who fought over there was a war criminal and that's just not true."

The Times must have had more free space to fill back then.

Here is Kerry's Senate testimony from April 1971.

The Curse Of The Bamboozled

George Steinbrenner is paying Yankee "pitcher" Kevin Brown too much money to tolerate this.

Good job by the Red Sox. When my children are old, they will hear sports broadcasters say that only one team in baseball history has climbed back from an 0-3 deficit in a playoff series. I can not adjust myself to the knowlege that, for the next century, the Red Sox will be baseball's ultimate symbol of "never say die", but there it is.

Of course, that storyline goes by the boards if the Red Sox win the first three against the Astros, drop the next three, and face Clemens in a titanic Game 7. Keep hope alive!

Tom Friedman Questions My Patriotism

Tom Friedman questions my patriotism. I question his judgement.

In an odd and self-contradictory column, Mr. Friedman questions the patriotism of the conservative commentariat:

Conservatives profess to care deeply about the outcome in Iraq, but they sat silently for the last year as the situation there steadily deteriorated. Then they participated in a shameful effort to refocus the country's attention on what John Kerry did on the rivers of Vietnam 30 years ago, not on what George Bush and his team are doing on the rivers of Babylon today, where some 140,000 American lives are on the line. Is this what it means to be a conservative today?

Had conservatives spoken up loudly a year ago and said what both of Mr. Bush's senior Iraq envoys, Jay Garner and Paul Bremer, have now said (and what many of us who believed in the importance of Iraq were saying) - that we never had enough troops to control Iraq's borders, keep the terrorists out, prevent looting and establish authority - the president might have changed course. Instead, they served as a Greek chorus, applauding Mr. Bush's missteps and mocking anyone who challenged them.

Conservatives have failed their own test of patriotism. In the end, it has been more important for them to defeat liberals than to get Iraq right. Had Democrats been running this war with the incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld & Friends, conservatives would have demanded their heads a year ago - and gotten them.

Only dissent is patriotic! Or more accurately, only people who agree with Tom Friedman and criticize the President accordingly are patriotic. Or has this been written with deliberate wriggle-room? I am not sure what Mr. Friedman means by conservatives and "their own test of patriotism". Is this the test we are routinely administering to recalcitrant liberals, who then burst into tears?

Friedman's column has been widely ignored in the blogosphere - this fellow hates it, this fellow likes it, and (so far at least), I am the tie-breaker (I hate it!). My guess as to what's (not) going on - this column is too stupid for righties, and too toxic for lefties - questioning people's patriotism is probably not the road down which lefties want to walk, having screamed about it so often in the past.

As to the self-contradictory element, Mr. Friedman uses this very column to explain that people have serious doubts about John Kerry's credibility as a leader in the war on terror. That being the case, what do we make of his statement that "it has been more important for [conservatives] to defeat liberals than to get Iraq right."? Perhaps conservatives believe that getting Iraq right requires the defeat of liberals. Perhaps conservatives harbor the doubts about Kerry that Mr. Friedman has identified. Perhaps we prefer the dubious competence of George Bush to the dubious commitment and vision of John Kerry.

On Kerry's Vietnam service, Friedman says this:

John Kerry's most important challenge in this election campaign is to connect up with that gut fear in the American soul and pass a simple threshold test: "Does this man understand that we have real enemies?" Mr. Kerry, wrongly in my view, tried to use his heroic Vietnam War record to pass that test by implication. He did not make the sale.

Kerry focused his late-July nominating convention around his Vietnam service; Mr. Friedman's column alludes to the Band of Brothers, the martial video, or Kerry's speech itself. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth began running ads in August. I assume Mr. Friedman supports their free speech rights; I hope he can tolerate a bit of a rebuttal to the "Vote for the War Hero" image Kerry was attempting to project.

As to the notion that the Swift Boat Veterans have failed to raise any legitimate points, will Mr. Friedman volunteer to help us find John Kerry's Form 180, which would authorize disclosure of his military records? That should help to resolve questions about Kerry's first Purple Heart. And anyone who can make it past the Kerry-philic headline can see that even the WaPo found lots of unanswered questions about Kerry's Bronze Star, once they decided to look.

Also missing from this column is any criticism of the patriotism of those who guided the national debate into an exploration of George Bush's Texas Air National Guard service thirty years ago. Michael Moore, Wesley Clarke, John Kerry - not patriots? Or is it only conservatives that have a duty to focus on current events?

The Times has sixty articles since the start of the year that mention Bush and "Texas Air National Guard"; twenty articles mention Kerry and "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth". Where are the patriots?

Finally, I doubt that conservatives have been monolithic on the subject of the President's performance in Iraq. Mr. Friedman could compound our amusement in a subsequent column by naming names, and listing the unpatriotic among us.

UPDATE: Mr. Friedman finally arrives at Memeorandum. Funniest take here.

Happiness Is A Warm Gun

John Kerry solves his Teresa problem... NO! John Kerry's "Say Anything" tour becomes a "Do Anything" extravaganza as he tries to disguise his position on the 2nd Amendment by dressing up as a hunter and gunning down a hapless goose.

Maureen Dowd, who is not my normal source for wisdom, discussed this photo-op on Imus in the Morning. Paraphrasing freely, she said that this is just more of Kerry's annoying "me-too"-ism. "Bush shows he's religious, so Kerry has to show he's religious. Bush does something macho, so Kerry has to do something macho. But it doesn't come off as macho - instead, he just looks like Bush's woman."

Don Imus replied that "woman" could not be the word she meant to use. Ms. Dowd admitted that she had cleaned up her act for radio.

My take on this - I understand the political significance of the gun lobby. I only wish we had a stronger Circus Clown's Union - if we did, we would surely be treated to photo-ops of Kerry in a clown suit. Although this is a close second.

MORE: Dick Cheney has a belly laugh. And Kerry did not carry his bird out - is there an etiquette on this?

Thinking Too Hard

James Taranto notes that Kerry's support is slipping in the black community, and uses this to explain Kerry's recent mention of Mary Cheney:

Note that the explanation for the shift centers on older black voters and Christian conservatives. Is anyone still obtuse enough to believe it's mere coincidence that Kedwards have been shouting from the rooftops that Dick Cheney has a homosexual in the family?

The Baseball Crank has more evidence on this point, and here is some reaction from the black clergy during the discussion in Massachusetts last winter.

That said, my take is that people are thinking too hard, and overlooking the obvious reason that the two Johns keep mentioning Mary - when they think of hot "girl on girl" action, they think of Republicans. And why not? Tall John has probably been hearing from Teresa for years what we just learned this week - Republicans have better sex.

Jimmy Carter - Weirdest Interview Yet

Chris Matthews interviews Jimmy Carter, who has just written a history book. Jimmy and Chris explain that Saddam Hussein was Ben Franklin, and George Bush was King George. Or something.

The Captain and the Brother Judd have thoughts.

I am having a hard time picking a favorite bit. The current contenders:

(1) CARTER: Well, one parallel is that the Revolutionary War, more than any other war up until recently, has been the most bloody war we‘ve fought. I think another parallel is that in some ways the Revolutionary War could have been avoided. It was an unnecessary war.

Comments on casualties can be found at the B Judd post. And what is "recently", the Civil War? I understand they hold that close to their hearts in the South, but honestly.

(2) CARTER: Well, I think almost any reasonable person who knew history would say that you can‘t go into an alien environment and force by rule of arms by forcing the people to adopt a strange concept.

I don't know the Japanese phrase for "Ridiculous".

(3) MATTHEWS: Let me talk about another parallel you drew a couple minutes ago, and that is how war became unnecessary. The war we have had with Iraq, and it is an ongoing war, was it possible that if the president or his secretary of state could have reached Saddam Hussein, Saddam Hussein could have explained to the president no matter what we think of him and his tyranny over there that he didn‘t have weapons of mass destruction or was it a case where are people because of ideological reasons simply wanted to take over that country and they were using WMD as an excuse? Do you think there was any way to have avoided that war if people were of good heart and mind?

Hmm, people of good heart and mind would have found a way to leave Saddam in power, "no matter what we think of him and his tyranny over there"?

Even John Kerry pretends that his approach would have resulted in regime change, although no one can figure out how that would have happened - the inspector's failure to find arms probably would not have incited France to war. In my opnion, anyway.

(4) CARTER: ...I, you know, thought about it a lot and I finally decided that if I did attack Iran, I could have destroyed Iran with our weaponry. There‘s no question about that. But our hostages would have been lost. And also tens of thousands of innocent Iranians would have been lost. And all the troops that we sent there subsequently, many of them would have been casualties.

I think I made the right decision.

MATTHEWS: What do you think Bush and Cheney would have done in the same situation?

CARTER: I don‘t know. If you judge this by the Iraqi war, and if they had a predisposition to go to war, I think they would have done so. I don‘t think that in the case of Iran there was any predisposition on our part to go to war against Iran.

I think Bush and Cheney developed a predisposition to go to war after 9/11. Whether they would have had such a martial instinct in response to the taking of 50 hostages is a question better left to real historians. Whether the US military was ready to go after Iran during the Cold War in 1979 is yet another question. Would this have been popular five years after Vietnam? More questions.

The Times On "Get Out The Vote" Efforts

"Interest Groups Mounting Costly Push to Get Out Vote":

No mention of the Religious Right, or the NRA. What am I missing, and what is Karl Rove's strategy?

Not Ready For Prime Time (cont.)

Now Matt Drudge trumpets Teresa wondering whether Laura Bush ever had a job. Here is the inflammatory quote from The Charming One's interview with USA Today:

Q: You'd be different from Laura Bush?

A: Well, you know, I don't know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her eye, which is good. But I don't know that she's ever had a real job — I mean, since she's been grown up. So her experience and her validation comes from important things, but different things. And I'm older, and my validation of what I do and what I believe and my experience is a little bit bigger — because I'm older, and I've had different experiences. And it's not a criticism of her. It's just, you know, what life is about.

She doesn't know. I thought it was common knowledge that Laura Bush was a librarian and school teacher, but I suppose there is nothing common about Teresa - after all, her validation and her experience are a bit bigger.

Suggestions for Dems:

- You might be underdogs in a referendum on Laura versus Teresa. It would be a GREAT idea to send her on a fact finding trip to Africa, or somewhere (anywhere!), just to get her out of sight. Failing that, try duct tape - just two weeks now!

- We understand the the NEA is totally in your pocket, but still, this is kind of disrespectful to teachers everywhere. Naturally, Teresa can never apologize [UPDATE: Except when she can, and quite graciously], especially to a Republican, but perhaps you could schedule a photo-op with her and some underemployed teachers. Maybe put them on her Gulfstream and fly them to her Idaho getaway for some fishing and hiking - this could broaden their life experiences, and help to validate them.

- Tall John was having a bit of success with his charm offensive towards women. Hard luck about this latest. But at least we see why, when Bob Schieffer asked about the strong women in his life, John preferred to talk about his mom.

- Nice try, Teresa, but Ms. Edwards comments about Ms. Cheney were even more offensive.

- Careful, Dems. This subtle scheme to promote class warfare and demonize the rich may backfire. Great bumper sticker though - No Tax Cuts For Queen Teresa.

Now, in a spirit of bipartisanship, some hints for Laura:

- Resist the overwhelming temptation to respond with "shove it"; a simple "many people underestimate the demands of being a school teacher" will be fine.

- Do keep it simple - rephrasing that last suggestion as "many billionaires are out of touch with the demands of being a school teacher" may be viewed as a bit harsh. "Billionaire heiresses" would be even more so.

And a final thought for the media - enough, already, with the "isn't Teresa a free spirit, so candid, so outspoken, such a breath of fresh air" spin. This comment was none of those things; rather, it was ignorant and condescending.

Now, if this was a true domestic and political partnership, someone, perhaps Tall John himself, would sit Ms. Heinz down and explain to her that it is past time for her to get her act together. And yes, even if it is only an act, she needs to pretend to be capable of conventional standards of civility.

There is not much evidence to date that anyone is able to rein her in, from which I infer this not a partnership at all. Rather, it is just what it looks like - Ms. Heinz is a billionaire heiress to whom no one, including her husband, says boo.

Make another joke about her money, John - maybe that can carry us for four years.

MORE: Yes, I'm peeved. Does it really show?

UPDATE: OK, nice apology, I could be wrong. (I'm not, but losing this evidence prompts me to switch over to a faith-based initiative).

UPDATE 2: As I was saying, nice apology, if you want to denigrate housewives and mothers. And how is it that I am coming so late to this angle myself? I have no idea. My first thought was that Teresa's comment was even stupider than Hillary's "stay home and bake cookies" debacle, and then I brain-locked on the NEA. Well, I did note the bit about Kerry's appeal to women, but I surely did not emphasize the obvious.

Fortunately, we have Karen Hughes on our side:

Bush adviser Karen Hughes later criticized Heinz Kerry twice -- first for remarks ``indicative of an unfortunate mind-set that seeks to divide women based on who works at home and who works outside the home'' and later for an apology she called ``worse because she left out the very important real job of a mother.''

Laura is properly above the fray:

Laura Bush said Thursday that Teresa Heinz Kerry didn't need to apologize for saying she couldn't remember whether the first lady had ever had ``a real job.''

``She apologized but she didn't even really need to apologize,'' Mrs. Bush told reporters at a coffee shop before attending a rally for President Bush. ``I know how tough it is and actually I know those trick questions.''

Hmm. She is above the fray, unless she put an emphasis on "I", as in "I know how tough it is and actually I know those trick questions."

More Times coverage here.

John Edwards Ought To Get My Vote

John Edwards deserves my vote - if he can bring the same focus and single-minded determination to the war on terror that he brings to parting his hair, Osama may as well surrender on Nov. 2.

What's that, you say - Osama is probably pushing up poppies? No worries - John Edwards has a plan for raising the dead, too.