In Any Reasonable Democracy, the Fuckin' Camel's Back Should Be Broken:
Oh, those heady days of early 2003, when the majority of the nation was all a-twitter about Iraq and weapons of mass destruction and terrorists, oh, my. When we were told, Joe McCarthy-style, that there were hundreds, yea, hundreds of sites that needed to be checked for those ol' vials of botulism and those cannisters of nerve gas. God, what a pussy you had to be back then, so, so long ago, to believe that Iraq didn't have them. You may as well have said you squat to pee if you dared to say that United Nations weapons inspections should continue. And the International Atomic Energy Agency? With their suspiciously Arab-sounding leader? Fuck, all they were saying was that Iraq didn't have nuclear weapons, but fuck them, those fuckin' wimps - fuckin' Dick Motherfuckin' Cheney knew better.

Can you imagine back then even suggesting that perhaps it would be important to secure the non-WMD weapons that Iraq had? Like say an IAEA identified site that contained, let's say, just for shits and giggles, you know, 380 tons of high-grade explosives that could be used for, who knows, blowing shit up? Maybe, say, blowing the shit out of our own soldiers with what is, ostensibly, our ammo dump?

So it is that during those first few Old West days of freedom in Iraq, when looting and raping was the rule of the land, that among the things looted (other than, say, nuclear waste and ancient artifacts) was, glory be, 380 tons of explosives. Mostly HMX, High Melting eXplosive, and RDX, Royal Demolition eXplosive (both have a bunch of other names). They're colorful bits of death. And they blow shit up at an alarming rate, over 26,000 feet per second. They create shock waves that shatter everything in its path. Fuckin' Bruce Willis could not run fast enough to get away before he was melted into scrapeable goo on the glowing pavement. But, you see, apparently this kind of stuff was not worthy of the attention of American authorities in the minutes, hours, days, and weeks after the invasion, unlike, say, the oil ministry in Baghdad. Even now, one senior Bush adminstration official said, sure, it could kill you, "but it's not a proliferation risk." Other than, you know, the fact that it could be used for making, well, shit, nuclear weapons - the mystical, magical "dual-use" materials Bush used to stammer about, back in the day.

Of course, this material was already under the supervision of the IAEA and well-known to weapons inspectors. Here's a report from the IAEA from 1995 about the Al-Qaqaa site: "The work [on weapons compenent] was explained to have started as early as 1988, and had used various kinds of explosives, including Baratol, PETN, COM-B, TNT, RDX and HMX." Even in 1994, the IAEA was aware of the HMX at the Al-Qaqaa facility. Al-Qaqaa was the last vestige of the failed attempt by Saddam in the mid-1990s, to build nuclear weapons. Here's the deal, though: they weren't even close and, Yosemite Sam-style, they blew themselves up trying, killing 700 people at the factory in Al-QaQaa. Why, in February 2003, UNMOVIC (the inspectors) checked out the Al-Qaqaa site to make sure the equipment was sealed. It was even reported in the American media, so we're not really talkin' a secret here. Jesus, the British even had it listed as a WMD site in their sexed-up dossier.

They just don't fuckin' get it, at all. So concerned was the administration with finding something, anything, please, Lord, any thing, that would reveal massive quantities of WMDs or al-Qaeda links, that they didn't care - they just didn't care about the rest of it. And they didn't get that they ran the entire friggin' country. The worst part is they knew - they were warned, they had the lists, their own people were telling them. So the only conclusions can be they are complete boobs or they just didn't care. Hence chaos. Hence stolen explosives. Hence dead soldiers and Iraqis. Hence a more dangerous world.

It's an old, old story. Man believes he is more powerful than the gods. Gods bitch slap him back into reality through the revelation of man's horrible deeds. Thus it is with any member of the Bush administration. Oh, sure, we like to ascribe the aspects of tragedy to Colin Powell because he "knew better," but we're talkin' Greek tragedy here, motherfuckers, where brazen assholes get the smackdown when they overreach. As Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Rice scramble to say they didn't know they fucked their mothers, we're all just sittin' here, a chorus of non-believers, waiting for them to scratch their own eyes out and head into disgrace and exile.