With just eight days to go before the Election, those of us dedicated to the triumph of the cause of liberty (and, I suppose, those who support Kerry as well) can expect to suffer through at least that many days of nervous twitches and churning stomach acid. These are difficult times: the final hours before a vital moment in history. The final minutes before we who love America discover if, “history still has a place for a nation so strangely composed of great ideals and uneasy compromise as she” are ticking by.

It is, therefore, unsurprising that the mainstream media is opening fire on the President. We must be stalwart in these hard days and we must win.

Some on the left are already hyping a front-page story in Monday’s New York Times about three hundred and eighty tons of high-quality explosive that have gone missing from a site in Iraq. They should carefully read the entire two thousand word story before they get too excited. From what I’ve read, this is very old news repackaged to make it sound menacing and hurt the President.

To sum it up: during the Saddam years there were an estimated three hundred and seventy-seven tons of high quality explosives suitable for use in triggering a nuclear weapon stored at a facility named Al Qaqaa. At some point during the last nineteen months those explosives have gone missing (or, rather, are “unaccounted for”). Presumably, some quantity of explosive found its way into the hands of the Iraqi insurgents.

Near the top of the story (the part people will actually read) is an account of all of the damage that high explosives can do (NYT Headline: “Explosives Can Kill, Experts Say”) as well as a number of references to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which was theoretically guarding these materials.

Now, the story fails to answer one core question: when did these explosives go missing? It is simply never mentioned anywhere in the body of the story. American forces, one official is quoted as saying, went through the facility sometime towards the beginning of the war, saw no materials carrying the IAEA seal, and moved on. Buried deep within the story is the most likely explanation for what happened to the stockpile: it was standard Iraqi practice to, prior to bombing, move explosives out into the open and camouflage it. In all probability, it was long gone before any American soldiers ever got near the place.

Presumably, this story is designed to feed on the liberal argument that too few troops were sent to Iraq and that, as a result, US casualties have been higher than they otherwise needed to be. John Kerry tried to push this line during the debates.

This ignores two critical points:

First: in all probability most of what was at Al Qaqaa and these other places was looted before the arrival of US troops. Post-war intelligence confirms what many of us have long believed: that Saddam had, by March of 2003, abandoned all hope of defeating the United States in a conventional war and, therefore, had staked his hopes on the victory of a guerrilla force which, in collaboration with seditionists in America, would undermine the morale of the American people and force a US withdrawal.

Second: more US troops, unless the numbers were truly substantial, would probably have not made a difference, except for resulting in more US dead. In the sort of operation such as the one ongoing in Iraq, a point is reached where more troops simply mean more targets. Iraq was (and is) a nation literally floating on a sea of explosives. To secure all of those sites (and to do so without sustaining heavy losses) would have required, literally, more than a million men. This, of course, is the point of these attacks. Liberals are now for defending America, so long as we’re able to do it with more troops than are physically available. Anyone even a vague knowledge of history fully knows that these things happen: munitions linger long after wars end. To this very day, people still occasionally find bombs from the Second World War lying about.

This is really a non-story. “Explosives go missing in war zone.” In other news: “Drug paraphernalia found in crack house.” The only way to spin this against the President is to argue (as Democrats have lately taken to doing) that it is possible to conduct a war perfectly.