Missing weapons in Iraq

In an attempt to smear President Bush and the US military, CBS recently came out with a story alleging that a huge stockpile of explosives had gone missing in Iraq. Kerry came out firing by saying that this represented a failure on the part of the Bush administration. Kerry said Bush "must answer for what may be the most grave and catastrophic mistake in a tragic series of blunders in Iraq." Subsuquently, it was learned and reported that the weapons had gone missing before US troops had even reached the location where the weapons had been. From this NBC News story,

• An NBC News crew that accompanied U.S. soldiers who seized the Al-Qaqaa base three weeks into the war in Iraq reported that troops discovered significant stockpiles of bombs, but no sign of the missing HMX and RDX explosives.

Here is the Drudge story where the truth broke.

This begs one question. If explosives known to the UN went missing before coalition troops reached Baghdad in early 2003, were the WMDs known to be there also removed before we arrived?

CONCLUSION: John Kerry thinks we rushed to war too slowly to prevent weapons that didn't exist from being stolen by terrorists who didn't exist until we got there. Instead, we should have allowed the bribed UN inspectors to continue enforcing UN sanctions, because the 17 resolutions passed against Iraq and Saddam were working.

UPDATE(credit to Rush, from Presidential debate #2):

• KERRY: You rely on good military people to execute the military component of the strategy, but winning the peace is larger than just the military component.

  General Shinseki had the wisdom to say, "You're going to need several hundred thousand troops to win the peace." The military's job is to win the war.

  A president's job is to win the peace.

  The president did not do what was necessary. Didn't bring in enough nation. Didn't deliver the help. Didn't close off the borders. Didn't even guard the ammo dumps. And now our kids are being killed with ammos right out of that dump.
  

Which ammo dumps are those, Senator? If you knew about this on October 8, why are you shocked by this story coming out now?

UPDATE: Why did CBS originally plan to release this story on October 31? Was this supposed to be the October surprise?

UPDATE: Today, Kerry has once again repeated his claim that President Bush "rushed to war" without a plan to "win the peace". However, isn't it now obvious that we didn't invade soon enough? After all, had we gone in sooner, might not there have been a chance that we would have located these missing explosives, and perhaps even the WMD that the left now claims never existed?