About Those Missing Explosives…
While the New York Times and John Kerry yell about 380 tons of missing explosives, a report at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reveals that in June 2004, the Army Corps of Engineers had destroyed or accounted for at least 248,000 tons of weaponry in Iraq: WMD? Iraq is teeming with conventional arms. (Hat tip: LawHawk.)
Although the world’s attention has focused on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, scant attention has been paid to the mountains of weapons of conventional destruction unearthed in Iraq.
The bombs, rockets, grenades, cannon shells and bullets amount to the world’s fourth-largest stockpile of weapons, Army Corps of Engineers officials say. An estimated 600,000 tons of munitions with markings from all over the world, including the United States, and some so old that the weapons that fired them are no longer made, were stashed in Saddam’s innumerable caches.
To date, 110,000 tons have been destroyed. An additional 138,000 tons are stored behind protective barriers. Saddam seemed to hoard this cornucopia of death aimlessly. “There are no aisles to walk down. It’s just heaped,” he said. “It just blows your mind to see this stuff.”