Explosive(s)

The "October Surprise" that the New York Times tried to pull, and that Kerry is now trying to exploit, about the allegedly lost explosives in Iraq, is blowing up in the face of the Times and Kerry. The Belmont Club has some great posts explaining this non-story. In its quest to hurt Bush, the Times has disregarded facts, as well as logic. The New York Sun is quoting Charles Duelfer, the US weapons inspector, as saying that he urged the IAEA to destroy these very weapons in 1995, but that they ignored this. And finally, James Glassman shows that these weapons are precisely the reason we needed to invade Iraq.

But far more important, Kerry's complaints about Bush only enforce Bush's reason for invading Iraq. Think about it.

Kerry and Edwards say that Bush didn't do enough to prevent the disappearance of the explosives, which could be used against Americans here at home. But the very existence of such explosives -- whether defined as weapons of mass destruction or not -- was the reason Bush led the nation into Iraq in the first place.

Why did we invade Iraq? Specifically, so dangerous weapons would not be used
against us here at home -- either by Saddam Hussein's forces or by his terrorist friends. Did we miss some of these weapons? Of course. But we got a lot more than we would have gotten if we had not gone into Iraq in the first place.

If we had followed Kerry's strategy, Iraq today would have far more than 380 tons of explosives to use against us.

Like pretty much every one of the Democrats' gotcha stories against Bush, this one is just plain garbage. Kerry is showing his desperation by continuing to trumpet this non-story.