To put Al-Qaqaa in a broader context, however, there’s this story from Wednesday’s New York Sun, which points to the larger problem with “monitoring” Saddam’s weapons:

Nine years ago, U.N. weapons inspectors urgently called on the International Atomic Energy Agency to demolish powerful plastic explosives in a facility that Iraq’s interim government said this month was looted due to poor security.

The chief American weapons inspector, Charles Duelfer, told The New York Sun yesterday that in 1995, when he was a member of the U.N. inspections team in Iraq, he urged the United Nations’ atomic watchdog to remove tons of explosives that have since been declared missing.

Mr. Duelfer said he was rebuffed at the time by the Vienna-based agency because its officials were not convinced the presence of the HMX, RDX, and PETN explosives was directly related to Saddam Hussein’s programs to amass weapons of mass destruction.

So, the IAEA could have demolished these weapons in the mid-1990s, but it’s the Bush administration’s fault that they were swiped in 2003?

Right.