Thought experiment

Let's say, hypothetically, that you are in charge of the invasion of a country. Let's say this country has been very bad in the past, so that international inspectors have been in the country for years, keeping close tabs on material that could be used for weapons. Some of these things are dual-use, meaning that, while they make dandy weapons, they also have legitimate, peaceful uses. For example, high explosive. Very good for excavating and mining, also good for blowing up vehicles, or the triggering component of a nuclear weapon.

Let's say, hypothetically, that the international inspectors had "sealed" and were keeping an eye on, a stockpile, like 350 TONS(!) of this high explosive. Now, let's say the inspectors left, because you were invading, and going to be bombing the heck out of the place, and moving troops in.

Here's the question: would you, a) quickly deploy forces to take possession of this supply of high explosive OR, b) would you not take control of the explosives, permit a period of widespread lawlessness and looting, prevent the return of the inspectors, and then, when you later found that the explosives had all been looted, and were gone, refuse to tell anyone, especially the inspectors, for more than a year?

If b), there may be a place for you with the Bush administration.

If only this were a thought experiment. Josh Marshall is reporting tonight that it may, sadly, be the truth of what's happened in Iraq. He's expecting wider coverage of this soon.

Update: The New York Times is online with its article about this. They have the number as 380 tons. They also have this disturbing paragraph:

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 be used to produce bombs strong enough to shatter airplanes or tear apart buildings. The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the material of the type stolen from Al Qaqaa, and somewhat larger amounts were apparently used in the bombing of a housing complex in November 2003 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the blasts in a Moscow apartment complex in September 1999 that killed nearly 300 people.

As well as:

The International Atomic Energy Agency publicly warned about the danger of these explosives before the war, and after the invasion it specifically told United States officials about the need to keep the explosives secured, European diplomats said in interviews last week. 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.

And:

One senior official noted that the Qaqaa complex where the explosives HMX and RDX were stored was listed as a "medium priority" site on the Central Intelligence Agency's list of more than 500 sites that needed to be searched and secured during the invasion. In the chaos that followed the invasion, many of those sites, even some considered a higher priority, were never secured.

"Should we have gone there? Definitely," said one senior administration official. "But there are a lot of things we should have done, and didn't."

They never made it to some sites. There were sites that were higher priority than the one the IAEA told them had tons of high explosive. God knows what was in them, since it wasn't WMDs. At a pound or so per attack, the terrorists now have explosives to last them centuries.

"And the American People are safer!"