Oh...my...god. Hundreds - yes...hundreds...of tons of explosives are missing in Iraq. 380 tons of explosives. My oh my. Now, if you read the stories around this so-called news item, you'd hear that the items are missing, but not in the hands of terrorists. They might have been destroyed, they might have been moved, they might have been taken by Iraqi police, they could be anywhere. They're just missing. But let's put this in context, which most people have been unable to do. There are 380 tons of explosives missing. Since we've been in Iraq, the Army's Engineering Corps haved destroyed 110,000 tons of explosives. There are 138,000 tons behind barriers, waiting to be destroyed. So out of the 248,000 tons of explosives that have, or will be, destroyed, 380 are missing. That's not 1% of them that are missing. It's not even one half of 1% that are missing, it's 0.15 of 1% that is missing.

Why not report that? One tenth of one percent of the weapons stockpiles in Iraq are missing. Why not write a story about how Saddam had stockpiled over 250,000 TONS of weapons? No...that doesn't make news. 380 tons of missing explosives & weapons makes headlines around the country. John Kerry even decided to criticize our sitting president over this:

“This is one of the great blunders of Iraq, one of the greatest blunders of this administration and the incredible incompetence of this president and this administration has put our troops at risk and this country at greater risk.”

Because, we all know that we should have just left Saddam Hussein and his 250,000+ TONS of weapons in power in Iraq. WMDs or no, if you've got 250,000 tons of weapons, explosives, and other weapons of destruction, there's a problem.

And as I search for more information on the story, here's a bit more information:

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.

So - 380 tons out of 600,000? Yeah, it's 0.00063 or 6% of 1%. So you take 1% of all the weapons and then take just 6% of that number and you have the amount missing. I think Charles at LGF said it best:

I guess John Kerry feels we were safer when the material was in the hands of Saddam Hussein, because after all ... Saddam was no threat, even though ... he had hundreds of tons of high explosives that could be used to manufacture nuclear weapons, but ... he had no plans for WMD ... uh ... but ...

URL: Yahoo! News - Hundreds of Tons of Explosives Missing in Iraq -UN