Placing Blame

According to Hugh Hewitt, John Kerry is committing a vile smear against our boys in uniform by denouncing the President for losing the 380 tons of explosives: "JOHN KERRY now closes his presidential campaign exactly as he opened his political life: Attacking the United States military.
. . . This week he embraced an already discredited account of missing munitions to attack the reputation of the 3rd Infantry Division and the 101st Airborne. Make no mistake, that is exactly what Kerry is doing when he asserts that deadly weapons went unsecured and unreported as these two divisions rushed to liberate Baghdad."
Strangely, Hewitt failed to point out that Rudy Guiliani explicity blamed the troops on the Today show:"No matter how you try to blame it on the president, the actual responsibility for it really would be for the troops that were there. Did they search carefully enough - didn't they search carefully enough?"
Fortunately, Joshua Micah Marshall correctly places responsibility:"The president and his advisors insisted on a warplan that had far too few troops to secure even the key facilities in Iraq that were the reason for the invasion in the first place. Remember, many of the nuclear facilities were stripped bare too. This wasn't the fault of troops streaming through on their way to Baghdad, doing a quick check for chemical and biological weapons. The error was in the planning of the war itself -- planning that came from Rumsfeld's civilians and the White House over and against the advice of the generals."