David Pugh wrote:

If you can't afford to do it right, maybe you should consider not doing it
at all.

Depends on what the threat is. In the military we call it risk assesment. Is
the risk that Hussain may be able to arm some terrorists worth the risk of
fighting a conflict without the resources to defeat a regime and secure all
suspected WMD sites? With 20/20 hind sight we *may* be able to say it wasn't
worth it, but knowing only what his intell sources were telling him, I have a
hard time making an issue out of the choice the civilian leadership made.

can you honestly say we are
better off now than if we had never invaded?

I'm not sure we have enough info to make that call. In the past week we've seen
the use of mustard and sarin gas. Not too effective in Iraq, against military
personnel trained to deal with such weapons, but whose to say, without
invasion, if those weapons would have been used in the NYC subway?

I should have said that the importance of securing this site
was set too low, given the potential consequences of not securing the site.

The potential consequences of a trained Iraqi military employing weaponized
chemical agents is a tough one to beat on the priority scale.

Setting the relative importance of various objectives, especially
non-military objectives, was not Franks' responsibility.

However, both these issues *were* military and as such, up to the discretion of
the combatant commander.

By all accounts, however, Al Tuwaitha was
exceptional (recent and reliable reports about hundreds of pounds of
radioactive material).

The way the Iraqis moved their "stuff" around, there was no reason to expect
the Al Tuwaitha site above any other. Additionally, according to U.S. forces,
when they arrived it was already looted. Seems it was a wise choice not to
divert too many men to secure it as they would have wound up guarding an empty
site and not helping seize Baghdad.


BUFDRVR

"Stay on the bomb run boys, I'm gonna get those bomb doors open if it harelips
everyone on Bear Creek"