Well, this report in The Washington Times is very plausible, as to what may have happened with the explosives at Al-Qaqaa:

Russian special forces troops moved many of Saddam Hussein’s weapons and related goods out of Iraq and into Syria in the weeks before the March 2003 U.S. military operation, The Washington Times has learned.

John A. Shaw, the deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security, said in an interview that he believes the Russian troops, working with Iraqi intelligence, “almost certainly” removed the high-explosive material that went missing from the Al-Qaqaa facility, south of Baghdad.

“The Russians brought in, just before the war got started, a whole series of military units,” Mr. Shaw said. “Their main job was to shred all evidence of any of the contractual arrangements they had with the Iraqis. The others were transportation units.”

The more that comes out about this story, the more it seems implausible that “looters” took the explosives. The tonnage — the whole hook to the story — it’s just too big, it doesn’t fit. Whoever moved these weapons had significant logistical capabilities.

How we missed the Russians or anyone else transporting this material (before or after the invasion) still strikes me as of concern, though. I mean, if the Bush administration’s working theory is that WMDs could have been moved to Syria or elsewhere before the invasion, well, shouldn’t we have been monitoring all of this pretty closely?