didn't see a thing

readin' Streatfield's lang zang about those long forgot missing explosives us mil forces failed to secure back in those chaotic days of iraq invasion yore.  there's black humour in the story of the locals makin' off with scads of stuff from saddam's depot at Qa'qaa.  it's a fun and awful tale (this is, of course, preferred here, fun and awful). us mil nowhere to be seen.  mountains of shit movin' out, trucks, cranes lifting shit, water pipes dug up.  quite a bit of activity, one surmises.

101st Airborne camped a couple a klicks so'east of the motherfreakinlode of PETN, RDX, and HMX at Qa'qaa, jets n' copters flyin' in 'n out, and no one sees the industrial scale, flea market bootlegging of Qa'qaa.  not one freakin' us eyeball. well, maybe some did, but were told that it was "not on the list."  no one even seemed to know about the place.  locals knew.  and they were having a ball!  set up a bazaar right in the weapons mill compound.   Donald Rumsfeld, as he is wont to do, applied his drill down logic to conclude that such looting could not have happened, precisely because the aforementioned "bit of activity" had never been seen by those keen us eagle eye.  and when rumsfeld concludes, well, that's the end of that.

"Picture all of the tractor trailers and forklifts and caterpillars it would take. We had total control of the air. We would have seen anything like that."

Yes! yes, do picture it!

Hundreds of Yusifiyans were roaming around inside. They were gutting the place. Some targets were easier than others. Trucks vanished fairly quickly. The first few were simply hotwired and driven away. When locals realised there was no rush, however, they became more brazen, using the stolen trucks to return and carry away further loot. The next day they came back for more. "Lathes, machine tools, electrical generators," says Haki. "They were even taking the iron posts from the buildings." Qa'qaa was assaulted from all sides. From the north-west came the Yusifiyans; from the north-east, the inhabitants of Mahmudiyah.

Mahmudiyans were operating a market inside the walls, selling and bartering plundered goods. Ali, the site administrator, was flabbergasted at the scale of the operation. "It was astonishing, the way they managed to steal such big pieces of kit. Some of them were using cranes." He shakes his head. "They even took the electrical cables. They dug them up from the ground and took them. The water pipes. Everything."

wonder if this is one of those known unknowns rummy loved so much.  we know we have not seen looting, and, because we are so great, we know we should have seen looting, therefore no looting occurred.  or is that an unknown known?  fuck, who knows? what is known is that, when rummy is reasoning, there's a whole lotta "un"s in front of  his "known"s.

what seems worse in all this is that the jokers had no idea about the place, didn't seem to care.  as was the theme of the bush years, they were warned about the stockpiles of explosives at Qa'qaa.  nuthin'.  the goop went onto to blow up american troops. this would rank an order of magnitude greater in worseness as far as pentagon support for insurgencies goes.  hell, in the 'ghan'stan, they only indirectly funnel hundreds of millions to the talibaners.  in iraq, they more or less handed the insurgency the matériel directly, in situ.  didn't even have to haul the tonnes of shit in. 40,000 tonnes of shit, that is.

naturally, the response was, well, an election time response: deny, deflect, bullshit (see rumsfeld). nope, wasn't us.  saddam! that bastard.  did it to make us look bad.  the Times spews satan's raw seed, and the IEA is full communists who hate america.

however, the conclusion one must draw here is that the united states does not need saddam hussein to make them look bad.  happily, and also right before the election, osama's tape popped up.  that the incompetence and disregard of the us military was resulting in lethal attacks on us military forces was a story cast adrift amidst the fictive brane of the american corporate media universe, as hamster attentions probed the deep political impact of Osama's video tape right before the election.  beltway belly burblers* (the BBB) consensus ruling was that videotape was proof, not that Bush had failed to bring in bin Laden, but rather that the constantly gawdblessuhd yewwwnited states just needed more Bush.  bush wasn't a failure.  the problem was america had not fully embraced bush's vision. america just needed more of him, and then things would get better.  when something's not working, if it's killing Americans, fuck! more of it!

it's the american political way.



* beltway belly burblers.  var: bbb, var type: `str', descr: bbb content is potentially unlimited, though considered highly redundant.  type `str'  (IIRC spec, min size:  65535 bytes) is considered more than sufficient to capture Washington "prevailing wisdom."