"Report: Explosives already gone when U.S. troops arrived"

NBC News reported that on April 10, 2003, its crew was embedded with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division when troops arrived at the Al Qaqaa storage facility south of Baghdad.

While the troops found large stockpiles of conventional explosives, they did not find HMX or RDX, the types of powerful explosives that reportedly went missing, according to NBC. [CNN]

Well, I deserved it. That's what I get for imagining that a major, front-page NY Times report on the mistakes of the Bush administration might have journalistic integrity. I.e. thinking they might have actually checked other sources, etc.

Someone brought out a good point in a letter to Andrew Sullivan. Basically, it seems I've been coming to assume that the problems in Iraq are because there aren't enough troops, and if would Bush just put them in, the problems would go away. In other words, hostility of regular Iraqis seems to largely come from the fact that we never provided adequate security, so if we had provided more troops, and more security, the problems would disappear.

The flaw in that reasoning, of course, is that there is no magic number of troops that would make the problems disappear. With twice as many troops, there would still be security gaffes, just fewer. But it is unknown how much smaller the number would be. Would the gaffes be 95% reduced? 50%? 5%? Who knows? If the answer is 5%, it wouldn't be worth it. 50% is probably more reasonable... would it be worth it? Maybe the administration is simply making an intelligent calculation about what's worth it and what is not. That is the alternative hypothesis to the one I stated yesterday in this blog, that Bush lacks the political courage to do the right thing.

In fact in another NY Times article, part of the administration's thinking was described thusly:

In a Feb. 14, 2003, speech titled "Beyond Nation Building," which Mr. Rumsfeld delivered in New York, he said the large number of foreign peacekeepers in Kosovo had led to a "culture of dependence" that discouraged local inhabitants from taking responsibility for themselves.

The defense secretary said he thought that there was much to be learned from Afghanistan, where the United States did not install a nationwide security force but relied instead on a new Afghan Army and troops from other countries to help keep the peace.

I'm not endorsing one argument or the other. What do I know? I'm just trying to get my mind around the question of what the arguments are.