The lead story today is that 380 tons of the world's most dangerous conventional explosive (RDX) was left unguarded at a massive storage site in Iraq after we invaded, and all of it has mysteriously gone missing. It is very likely this stuff is now being used in attacks on our troops in Iraq.

The real scandal, though, is that we knew, or should have known, about the stuff. It was under International Atomic Energy Agency watch, since aside from being military grade explosive, RDX has the dual use of being a triggering explosive in nuclear bombs.

Folks, let's be clear: big deal about this isn't that the RDX went missing. The big deal about this is that this is one of those things for which we should have planned. Like the looting of storage sites for radioactive material and other hazardous/dangerous things, like the looting of museum artifacts, this is one more example of the complete lack of planning the administration put into this little fiasco. Just about the only thing that was secured were sites critical for oil revenues.

So once again, here's what we have: the administration was warned before the war that it wouldn't be a cakewalk. They were warned we'd need several hundred thousand troops to secure the country. They were warned of civil unrest. And all of those warnings came not from fringe hacks, but from the State Department, from high-ranking military officials and the likes of the U.S. Army War College.

The administration didn't listen. They ignored all the expert advice and went instead with the neocons' "no casualties" fantasyworld in which we'd be welcomed with flowers and everyone would be so happy to see Saddam gone that an ordered, lawful democracy would magically spring into being once he was overthrown.

Reasonable planning for this war would have included contacting the IAEA (which doesn't have an army itself capable of securing sites against mobs of looters) and finding out what needed to be looked after. That was not done.

Furthermore, the site is still being looted, despite the administration's own assertions that Paul Bremer, head of the U.S.-run "Coalition Provisional Authority" was informed of it last May. The administration's primary actions in all of this (even assuming we indeed only found about it last May) has been to CYA, demanding the Iraqis keep the issue quiet for fear of impacting the U.S. elections.

The bottom line is 760,000 pounds of the world's most dangerous high explosive is being used to kill our troops and innocent Iraqis; worse, some of it most likely has found its way onto the international black market.

Just what we needed to win the peace and the War on Terror. Do we feel safer yet with Bush in charge?