Analysis: Military Realities in Iraq

Oct. 29, 2004 -- -- A military analyst approaches an election year subject like Al Qaqaa at his peril. At the same time, it is almost tragicomic to see a debate over the Iraq war acquire such a narrow and largely irrelevant issue. Al Qaqaa is at best a minor symptom of far deeper problems, some of which the Bush administration can be blamed for and some of which it cannot.

There is something truly absurd about focusing on 277 tons of rather ordinary explosives, regardless of what actually happened at Al Qaqaa. No one really has the faintest idea of how many munitions were left at the time of Saddam's fall and the regime collapse. One thing is brutally clear, however, and that is that the 277 tons at Al Qaqaa are part of total stockpiles that were probably in excess of 650,000 tons -- a figure made public by Sen. Joseph Biden and which may well sharply understate the holdings of one of the most militarized nations in the world.

It is now unclear that there actually were 277 tons at the site. Some International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) figures indicate that the actual holdings were 3 tons of RDX, 3.5 tons of Petn and 194.741 tons of HMX or 201.5 tons. The confusion lies in the fact that 125 more tons of RDX were stored at the nearby facility at Al Mahaweel, which fell under the jurisdiction of Al Qaqaa. Including this in the total for Al Qaqaa seems dubious at best since this site does not seem to have ever been visited by U.S. troops and bypassing it meant no more than bypassing all of the other sites in the area of the U.S. advance on Baghdad.

Even if there were 277 tons, however, this means there were some 2,346 other equivalents of the Al Qaqaa site in Iraq at the time of Saddam's fall. Put differently, it means that the munitions at Al Qaqaa were at most around 0.04 percent of the total. Furthermore, Al Qaqaa was only one of some 900 actual sites that had been identified before the war for later investigation, and the U.S. has found some 10,000 actual weapons caches in the years that have followed.

The quality of the explosives is largely unimportant. No proliferator is ever going to be short of enough HMX to carry out a nuclear weapons program, and the volume of the amounts stored shows clearly that the explosives were held for other military purposes. There is no shortage of plastic explosive in Iraq and many other munitions work as well or better for IEDs and other forms of improvised attacks.

Seen from this perspective, the fact U.S. units bypassed the site is no more relevant than the fact so many other sites were bypassed. The Department of Defense also makes a reasonable case that there was little military point in securing this particular site during a period the U.S. was rushing forward with limited forward deployed strength to seize Baghdad before Saddam's forces have any chance to regroup.

The Department of Defense makes these points in the following talking points (Issued on Oct. 27, 2004) on the timeline of U.S. operations in 2003:

According to the Duelfer report, as of mid-September 2004 Coalition forces have reviewed and cleared more than 10,000 caches of weapons.

On March 19, Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched.

The Al Qaqaa facility is one of dozens of ammunition storage points the 3rd Infantry Division encountered on its march toward Baghdad from the Iraq-Kuwait border.