The anti-war advocates made loud and vigorous claims that the United States would end up killing hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians if it invaded Iraq.  Others claimed that it would take years for the United States to defeat Saddam ("Iraq would be no Afghanistan") and ("The road to Baghad will be covered with American blood.").

And yet despite that, the American military crushed Iraq in a matter of a few weeks. Now, nearly 2 years later, fewer than 1,1200 Americans have died -- and that's counting both the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation and counting accidental deaths which represent a significant percentage of the deaths.

In addition, relatively few Iraqi civilians died in the process. One thing our troops learned during the invasion, if may recall, is that Saddam had vast VAST caches of weapons, ammunition, and explosives tucked around the country. He also had billions of dollars in cash tucked away across the country.  Coalition forces, having defeated the Iraqi forces in an amazingly short amount of time at a very low cost also managed to secure hundreds of thousands of tons of these caches and confiscate over a billion dollars of Saddam's cash.  All this in a matter of weeks.

And yet now, a week before election, the increasingly partisan American media and the Kerry campaign (And supporters) have latched onto the still iffy allegation that somehow looters walked off with 380 tons of ammunitions from one of those weapons caches I just mentioned. This represents a tiny percentage of the total caches captured mind you.  And moreover, that somehow, George W. Bush -personally- is to blame for this.

To me, this just sounds hysterical. Grasping at straws.  I recall in 2002 two guys in the Washington D.C. area putting the entire country into hysteria because they went around sniping people. 2 guys did that. During the Florida hurricanes there was wide spread looting.  During the Rodney King verdict, LA erupted into massive riots.  Do we blame our Presidents for these things? No. That's absurd. Yet somehow, almost by magic, it becomes the President's fault if (surprise surprise) there's looting in Baghdad in the aftermath of Saddam's fall from power. As if somehow, US forces, trying to take control of a country of 25 million people are supposed to be able to secure and maintain order over the entire population -- but without causing civilian and American casualties in the process.

This latest incident speaks to that seeming irrational thinking on the part of the Kerry supporters. I just..well it just sounds desperate. It's about as nutty as blaming the weather on Bush -- except that they blame that on Bush too.

In engineering, you create systems that will have a certain percentage of failure. In software development, for instance, a product is successful if it works on >99% of systems.  And most software products these days are lucky to be greater than 98%.  Yet, calling the administration and America's military incompotent (and let's be candid here, you can't blame the President on this one without blaming the military in Iraq as well) because <1% of the weapons caches in Iraq got botched is simply unrealistic.

The only reason this is a story at all, which is more telling than the story itself, is that this issue, now over a year old, happens to pop up a week before the election. Indeed, CBS was originally planning to run it Sunday night without very much research having gone into it.

Even now, we don't really know what happened. We don't know looters took the stuff away. The materials might have been taken away by US forces and not correctly inventoried. Saddam loyalists might have spirited them away while the US was busy pacifying Baghdad and sent them to Syria. No one knows really yet because not enough time has passed to give a thorough look at the situation.  All we know for sure is that in January of 2003 the exposives were there and in May 2003 when US inspection forces arrived they were gone (btw, for those arguing the incompotence case, bear in mind that the US inspection team did arrive pretty quickly after the war, this isn't stuff that was hanging around and got taken away this summer due to US troops having just left the place open -- things were pretty busy in early 2003 if you remember).

What we can say is that these things aren't being used against our troops at this point. The insurgents are much more in need of land mines, guns, ammunition, radios, RPGs. These are things that are not claimed to have been lost there.

In the end, it's not going to change minds. But it does demonstrate a certain level of irrationality on the part of Kerry supporters. That they'll cling on to anything. Anyone who has studied military history can tell you that all wars have set backs and blunders.  As one simple example, in World War II, US torpedoes didn't actually work for the first couple of years (they just whacked against the side of the ship and did nothing). Many thousands of Americans died in vain as a result.  Back then, being American meant a bit more than being a Democrat or a Republican so you didn't see massive outcry in blaming President Roosevelt for this.

Sometimes, when someone is making a bunch of very loud charges against someone else you learn more about the people making the charge than the target of those charges.