Something from The New Republic Online:

MATERIAL BREACH: America's failure to prevent the tragic looting of the Baghdad National Museum has been an understandable source of outrage. But something far worse than looted Mesopotamian art may soon turn up on the international black market: looted Iraqi uranium. That's the grim news in this rather buried Washington Post story.

Now, we can imagine--if not understand--how Donald Rumsfeld would have been simple-minded enough to believe that no stuffy old museum would be worth U.S. military protection. But this latest story defies explanation. Rumsfeld is a man obsessed with weapons of mass destruction proliferation, and he justified the war in Iraq on those very grounds. How could he possibly fail to realize the importance of locking down vulnerable nuclear material? It's as baffling as it is outrageous. If it turns out that nuclear material has indeed gone missing, another shrug of "stuff happens" will absolutely not be an acceptable response from Rumsfeld. "I resign" might be more like it. - 30-

Defense officials acknowledge that the U.S. government has no idea whether any nuclear materials have been stolen, because it has not dispatched investigators to appraise the site. What it does know is that the complex lay unguarded for days and that looters made their way inside. It makes you wonder just how important Weapons of Mass Destruction were as a justification for this war when obvious sites go unguarded for days, but oil fields are the first sites liberated by invading armies.