The Weapon Story Stumbles On.

The Iraqi Explosives story (and what the heck are we calling this, anyhow? I haven’t gotten the memo…) continues to roll on, and not in a way that’s making the New York Times look very good at all.

First, there’s the news that the missing explosives were moved in March, 2003 by our friends, the Russians.

John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, “almost certainly” removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.

When an official goes on the record and says “almost certainly”, you can bet he’s got documentation behind him on which he’d bet his firstborn. Shaw is the guy who would be in the know on this, since it’s been his job to track all the conventional weapons sold to Iraq by outside suppliers.

And it looks like the Russians moved the explosives in Syria Lebanon, and perhaps even into Iran. The article doesn’t say how much was moved, but it seems that the Russians were there to scrub their names from the Iraqi record.

“The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units,” Mr. Shaw said. “Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units.”

Read the story. I’ll come back to it for a little rampant speculation.

Here’s the second story of interest. It appears that maybe Mohammed ElBaradei, head of the IAEA, hasn’t been quite as forthcoming as he’d like us to think. He claimed that 377 tons of explosives were missing but documents from his own agency show that that number was just a teensy weensy bit lower.

More like 3 tons.

The Iraqi interim government has told the United States and international weapons inspectors that 377 tons of conventional explosives are missing from the Al-Qaqaa installation, which was supposed to be under U.S. military control.

But International Atomic Energy Agency documents obtained by ABC News and first reported on “World News Tonight with Peter Jennings” indicate the amount of missing explosives may be substantially less than the Iraqis reported.

The information on which the Iraqi Science Ministry based an Oct. 10 memo in which it reported that 377 tons of RDX explosives were missing — presumably stolen due to a lack of security — was based on “declaration” from July 15, 2002. At that time, the Iraqis said there were 141 tons of RDX explosives at the facility.

But the confidential IAEA documents obtained by ABC News show that on Jan. 14, 2003, the agency’s inspectors recorded that just over 3 tons of RDX was stored at the facility — a considerable discrepancy from what the Iraqis reported.

The IAEA documents could mean that 138 tons of explosives were removed from the facility long before the start of the United States launched “Operation Iraqi Freedom” in March 2003.

Well, there’s a “3″ in “377 tons”. Maybe it was just a big typo?

Now for my own speculation.

The Russians are not our buddies in this. I know it’s natural to feel a lot of sympathy with them considering their fight against Chechen terrorists and I do feel some. On the other hand, when we offered them the chance to take on terrorism everywhere and get some help for their situatioin in Chechya, they were too busy taking the showshovel loads of cash and oil from Saddam Hussein to worry about it.

Do you remember not long ago when Vladimir Putin said that he knew there were WMDs in Iraq? That didn’t surprise me one bit because I believed that his knowledge was firsthand. Russia knew about Iraqi WMDs because they were in bed with Hussein. And it ought to be no surprise that Russia was there hustling out prohibited explosives before we went in there and found them (and as much of the paperwork that implicated them as they can find).

And how interesting is it that these explosives could have gone to Syria and Lebanon, right where some intelligence reports have said that Hussein’s WMDs went at about the same time? This report certainly makes those reports look a lot less speculative, don’t they?

It also looks to me like Mr. Elbaradei might have been a little political game with the President a week before the election, too. Is it a coincidence that his four-year term as head of the IAEA ends next year and that the Bush administration has never been particularly high on him?

Yet the Kerry campaign is running full speed ahead on the charges, bolsterd by the NYT’s stubborn refusal to back off of the original rather hurried story. It doesn’t help that they’re getting a little assist from the Washington Post who carries neither of these two stories, but instead has one headlined “Missing Munititions Become Focus of Presidential Race”. I suppose they are, but that seems a bit self-congratulatory, don’t you, since the story’s been the darling of the Post since it broke.

The disappearance of nearly 400 tons of explosives in Iraq dominated the presidential race for a third straight day on Wednesday, as Democratic nominee John F. Kerry accused President Bush of evading responsibility and the Republican said Kerry was making unsubstantiated charges.

Kerry, traveling in Iowa, scrapped plans to talk about domestic policy to accuse Bush of trying to cover up the failure to secure the explosives in Iraq. “This is a growing scandal and the American people deserve a full and honest explanation of how it happened and what the president is going to do about it,” Kerry told supporters in Sioux City. Instead, he said, “we’re seeing this White House dodging and bobbing and weaving . . . just as they’ve done each step of the way in our involvement in Iraq.”

You know, I can’t help but think, in the back of my mind, that there’s some sort of strange rope-a-dope thing going on right now and that either Friday or Monday we’re going to see a whole boatload of stuff on Iraq, these explosives, and Hussein’s WMDs get dumped out of the White House onto the media. I could well be wrong – it’s awful late in the campaign to do something like that. But still, that nagging little feeling just won’t go away. There’d be some sense to holding this until the very last minute, then pounding the media with it to the point that they couldn’t bury the story until Wednesday.

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Category: Fighting the Islamists, Our Foreign Policy, President George Bush