Writing in the LA Times, the New Yorker's Jon Lee Anderson on the Pentagon allowing massive looting of arms stockpiles in Iraq -- giving an endless arsenal to the insurgents:

Inexplicably, the looting in Baghdad was not halted after a few days, but went on for weeks. Hospitals, museums, ministries and even some of Saddam Hussein's palaces were looted and, in some cases, burned.

The U.S. inaction was bewildering and a source of great anger and frustration to most of the Iraqis I knew. There have been few public explanations from U.S. officials about this, but, off the record, senior U.S. military officers have told me they did not intervene because they had insufficient numbers of troops.

Today, most also acknowledge that this period of anarchy helped lay the foundation for the Iraqi insurgency by souring the perceptions of many Iraqis toward the occupation troops while simultaneously revealing the extent of U.S. intelligence weaknesses to the members of Iraq's fallen regime, who had melted away to watch and wait. It was not long before they began attacking Americans.

And at least some of the weaponry they have been using comes from unguarded arms caches like Al Qaqaa's.

In June 2003, two months after the invasion that toppled Hussein, I visited a vast dumping ground for war detritus on the southern outskirts of Baghdad — just up the road from Al Qaqaa, in fact. There, I found live rocket warheads, howitzer shells and large quantities of live ammunition lying around, being picked over by scavengers and looters. There were no Iraqi sentries or U.S. soldiers in sight.

Whenever I have mentioned my visit to this place to U.S. officials — and the dangers it seemed to pose to U.S. soldiers — the reaction has always been the same: They grimace, acknowledge the problem and, once again, cite the lack of troops to guard such sites.

The problem, of course, is that the war has been made much easier for the insurgents by their easy access to so much bomb-making material, just sitting there for the taking.

Rumsfeld's war indeed.

Posted by Laura at October 30, 2004 11:23 AM