Things we know we don’t know about Iraq

Associated Press says that the extent to which Iraq’s military and industrial sites were looted during and after the US invasion of the country is greater than had been previously reported.

U.N. satellite imagery experts have determined that material that could be used to make biological or chemical weapons and banned long-range missiles has been removed from 109 sites in Iraq, U.N. weapons inspectors said in a report obtained Thursday.

U.N. inspectors have been blocked from returning to Iraq since the U.S.-led war in 2003 so they have been using satellite photos to see what happened to the sites that were subject to U.N. monitoring because their equipment had both civilian and military uses.

The US failure to secure sites that had been under UN seal prior to the invasion was known within weeks after the country fell, but was first widely reported in connection with the theft of hundreds of tons of very high explosives from the complex known as Al Qa Qaa. Now the UN says that 109 known sites, many of which housed dangerous materials and equipment that could be used to make conventional and biological or chemical weapons, have been entirely or partially looted.

[A UN spokesman] said analysts found, for example, that 53 of the 98 vessels that could be used for a wide range of chemical reactions had disappeared. “Due to its characteristics, this equipment can be used for the production of both commercial chemicals and chemical warfare agents,” he said.

The report said 3,380 valves, 107 pumps, and more than 7.8 miles of pipes were known to have been located at the 39 chemical sites.

A third of the chemical items removed came from the Qaa Qaa industrial complex south of Baghdad which the report said “was among the sites possessing the highest number of dual-use production equipment,” whose fate is now unknown.” Significant quantities of missing material were also located at the Fallujah II and Fallujah III facilities north of the city, which was besieged last year.

Pondering how our government could have so completely, dramatically failed to secure the sites whose potential insecurity they said compelled us to war creates a sensation akin to what it must be like to hike through an Escher print. Perhaps that’s among the reasons the administration have suffered so little for what they’ve done: the failures are so immense that it’s difficult to wrap one’s mind around them for more than a minute at a time.