Do you feel safer now?

From this morning's New York Times:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Oct. 24 - The Iraqi interim government has warned the United States and international nuclear inspectors that nearly 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives - used to demolish buildings, make missile warheads and detonate nuclear weapons - are missing from one of Iraq's most sensitive former military installations.

The huge facility, called Al Qaqaa, was supposed to be under American military control but is now a no man's land, still picked over by looters as recently as Sunday. United Nations weapons inspectors had monitored the explosives for many years, but White House and Pentagon officials acknowledge that the explosives vanished sometime after the American-led invasion last year.

...

The bomb that brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 used less than a pound of the same type of material.

...

Earlier this month, in a letter to the I.A.E.A. in Vienna, a senior official from Iraq's Ministry of Science and Technology wrote that the stockpile disappeared after early April 2003 because of "the theft and looting of the governmental installations due to lack of security.

Huge Cache of Explosives Vanished From Site in Iraq, By James Glanz, William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, The New York Times, 24 October 2004

Let's see. President Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1st, 2003. So I guess he regards it as part of our "success" in Iraq that 380 tons (that tons, not pounds) of explosives disappeared on our watch. He must, because "the Bush administration would not allow the [International Atomic Energy Association] back into the country to verify the status of the stockpile." The IAEA was involved because the explosives are dual-use, many countries use them as detonators for their nuclear warheads.