A Grain of Sand In the Desert

At Captains Quarters I came across evidence of sanity and integrity form the mainstream media in the form of this Washington Post article.

The post took a look at some of the numbers swirling around the Al Qaqaa story and added spme much needed contgect and perspective to the mainstream coverage.

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.

Yet the Kerry campaign continues to brae on about 377 tons that at some unknown time either before or after the invasion went missing. What has also been missing from Kerry's stump speeches and the vast majority of news coverage is any information on the massive amounts of explosives Hussein's Iraq possessed. Lacking that context the thought of 377 tons of explosives is probably something most people have a hard time grasping. When you put that 377 tons in the context of the "400,000 tons destroyed or in the process of being eliminated" it starts to look a lot smaller. When you look at 377 tons as a part of an estimated 650,000 to 1 million tons it looks pretty small.

"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."

Given that we don't know when the explosives were removed, and that we do know what a overwhelming small portion of the explosives in Iraq the represent, this becomes the biggest non-issue of the campaign. It is a grain of sand in the desert.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 05:24 AM | No Comments | Add Comment