Jesus Cries Again

We're getting tired of writing about the Bush administration's incompetent handling of Iraq, but we just can't let this one go by:

Missing Antiaircraft Missiles Alarm Aides

By Dana Priest and Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 7, 2004; Page A24

Several thousand shoulder-fired missiles -- the kind that could be used to shoot down aircraft -- are missing in Iraq, and their disappearance has prompted U.S. military and intelligence analysts to increase sharply their estimate of the number of such weapons that may be at large, administration officials said yesterday.

Some U.S. analysts figure that as many as 4,000 surface-to-air missiles once under the control of Saddam Hussein's government remain unaccounted for. That would raise the number of such missiles outside government hands worldwide to about 6,000.

Read those figures again. At a stroke, the administration has managed to TRIPLE the number of surface-to-air missiles in circulation among -- whoever! No one knows who has these weapons, but we're going to go out on a limb and guess that they're not about to show up as a deus ex machina to pull some struggling American military unit out of the frying pan.