Bush's deadly blunder

NO ONE may ever know what happened to the 377 tons of explosives stored by Saddam Hussein's regime at the Al Qaqaa complex south of Baghdad. But John Kerry's campaign is right to criticize the Bush administration's failure to have a plan to destroy this cache of weapons that could be used by terrorists.

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Meanwhile, the most troubling aspect of the videotape of Osama bin Laden released yesterday is not the content but the fact that bin Laden is alive and well enough to deliver his hateful message.

The two stories undercut Bush's central campaign assertion -- that he is a successful war president, whether in Iraq or against Al Qaeda.

The administration thought the Iraq war would end when Saddam was ousted in April 2003. It lacked a plan to seize and destroy the arms that were scattered about the country and otherwise preempt an insurgency that is still killing Americans and destabilizing Iraqi society. Bush makes much of his determination to fight terrorists, but determination without a thoughtful plan is just stubbornness.

Some facts in the Al Qaqaa weapons controversy are clear. United Nations inspectors sealed the explosives in bunkers in March 2003, just before the war began. Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division swept through the complex in mid-April 2003. The interim Iraqi government reported early this month that the explosives were missing. Bush accuses Kerry of jumping to conclusions when the senator asserts that the material was taken away while US troops were occupying the country instead of just after UN inspectors sealed the bunkers in March, when Saddam was still in power. Rudolph Giuliani, a Bush surrogate, even blamed the troops for not destroying the material.

But a Minneapolis television news crew that accompanied the 101st Airborne Division provides convincing evidence that at least some of the explosives remained under seal on April 18, 2003, as the US soldiers set up a temporary base near the site. And a spokesman for the 101st confirms that the division was not given the responsibility to destroy the cache.

The troops, part of the initial assault force, were heading north following Saddam's ouster, and it was not reasonable to expect that they could have dealt with abandoned arms dumps along the way. Bush, as commander in chief, ought to have deployed more troops to secure explosives.

Bush has wrapped his campaign around the theme of his war leadership, with Iraq a second front after the ouster of Al Qaeda from Afghanistan. Al Qaeda still has the power to jar the United States. Bin Laden's reappearance on videotape shows that this conflict is far from over. And the war in Iraq has become a grinding, relentless struggle, with the roadside bomb and the assassin's bullet replacing the jet bomber and the tank as dominant weapons.

Bush and his deputies failed to anticipate this turn in the war -- hence the failure to promptly secure weapons dumps around the country. US troops and innocent Iraqis are paying with their lives as a result. American voters should hold the president to account for the war he did not anticipate.