Solitair -
I take you at your word and I apologize for misreading your general view on the war and withdraw the quote.
As for the before/after confusion - BOTH could easily have happened, and at least one did. Time will tell the full story, if we're lucky.
Your expectations of instantaneous knowledge of every kilo of WMD component material are simply unrealistic and fail to acknowledge the scope and scale of the problem. That possibilty would have required as a prerequisite that NONE of the declared material be moved by Saddam, something we don't yet know, and clairvoyance about where his undeclared material was stashed. Further, you seem to forget the heat the administration was under to "find the WMD's." Every day in every paper was another article headlined "NO WMD'S YET" and the left was pounding them relentlessly on it. The focus was on locating WMD's, not on high explosives.
The explosives in question may have been "subject to the strictest control" in Iraq, but the IAEA itself said that that control was as porous as Swiss cheese. So we have to pull ourselves away from the baseless assumption that all this stuff is "missing" because right now, it may not be missing at all, just unaccounted for. We have reasonable evidence that at least a sizable portion of the 219 tons at Al Qaqaa was indeed destroyed by a US munitions demolition unit.
You can argue that we should have had better accounting, but the chaos of a hot war doesn't lend itself to tidy accounting and you should acknowledge that. I just find the standard to which you appear to holding the US to be unrealistic and one your government, whichever one it is, could not even come close to satisfying.
And the timing issue is purely political. If you read elBaradei's statement closely, you'll note that the Iraqi WMD chief was responding to a "reminder" from the IAEA that just happened to be sent in September and responded to in record time by early October. So it wasn't just a matter of the Iraqi government giving ole' el a ring and saying, "By the way, did you know...." There is ample reason to suspect impure motives on the part of Mr. elBaradei.
Cheers,
Daiwa
