After the war, the IAEA warned the Bush Administration to make sure it didn't let these explosives go unguarded, but that's exactly what's happened.

The New York Times reported that the site was still not guarded as of Saturday.

Back in May, according to the Times, the IAEA said, in an internal memo, that terrorists might be helping themselves "to the greatest explosives bonanza in history."

That bonanza consisted of 380 tons of powerful explosives, including the kind of explosives that are used to detonate nuclear weapons.

Dick Cheney has been running around telling people that terrorists may detonate nuclear weapons in our cities. If they ever do so, they might be detonating them with explosives that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were supposed to have safeguarded.

And the damage from the explosives in a nonnuclear attack is hard to exaggerate, as well.

"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 this site, The New York Times reported.

The site contained enough material for 760,000 bombs of the Lockerbie type!

Because of the slovenliness of the Bush Administration, we are less safe here in the United States, and our soldiers are less safe in Iraq.

"It's like they knocked off the Fort Knox of explosives," Joseph Cirincione told Salon. Cirincione is the director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He said the failure to safeguard the depot could fuel "thousands and thousands of potential terrorist attacks."

This is one of the costs of waging war on the cheap, which was Donald Rumsfeld's brilliant idea.

It is also a consequence of hubris. "This is not incompetence as much as it is arrogance," said Cirincione.

And it is the by-product of the Bush Administration's disdain for the United Nations. "This is where the ideology of the Administration has really hurt U.S. national security," Cirincione said. "They wanted to make a point that they didn't need international inspections or the help of international authorities. . . . They rebuffed repeated IAEA requests to come in and help account for and secure the nuclear materials. Now we're suffering the price."

Rumsfeld infamously said, about the raiding of the Iraqi National Museum, that "stuff happens."

A lot of stuff has been happening under his watch, and under Cheney's, and under Bush's.

They'll have a lot of explaining to do when the stuff hits the fan.

© 2004 The Nation

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