COLIN POWELL'S FEARS PLAY OUT IN FALLUJAH?

Colin Powell, earlier this week:

Secretary of State Colin Powell has privately confided to friends in recent weeks that the Iraqi insurgents are winning the war, according to Newsweek. The insurgents have succeeded in infiltrating Iraqi forces "from top to bottom," a senior Iraqi official tells Newsweek in tomorrow's issue of the magazine, "from decision making to the lower levels." (emphasis mine)

CNN, today:

A company commander of the Iraqi security forces who received a full briefing on the expected Falluja assault is missing from a military base where U.S. and Iraqi troops are preparing for the possible operation.

The captain, a Kurd with no known ties to the Sunni city of Falluja, is thought to have taken notes from the battle briefing late Thursday. U.S. Marines and his fellow Iraqi officers found no sign of him Friday morning, except for his uniform and a weapon on his cot.

Marines are concerned that the information he knows could be passed along to insurgents. U.S. military sources believe insurgents have friends in the military and government.

Uh oh.

Add to that this news:

American intelligence agencies have tripled their formal estimate of shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile systems believed to be at large worldwide, after determining that at least 4,000 of the weapons from Iraq's pre-war arsenals cannot be accounted for, government officials said Friday.

A new government estimate says a total of 6,000 of the weapons, known as man-portable air-defense systems, or Manpads, may be outside the control of any government, up from a previous estimate of 2,000, officials said.

Double uh-oh. We haven't seen much of those in action yet, and it would appear that the insurgency can escalate their efforts at a time of their choosing.

Meanwhile, at Al Qaqaa, now that the Bush-Cheney electoral strategy of "making as many contradictory excuses as possible so as to confuse the issue long enough to obscure the truth until after the election" worked, the truth is coming out:

In the weeks after the fall of Baghdad, Iraqi looters loaded powerful explosives into pickup trucks and drove the material away from the Al Qaqaa ammunition site, according to a group of U.S. Army reservists and National Guardsmen who said they witnessed the looting.

The soldiers said about a dozen U.S. troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft because they were outnumbered by looters. Soldiers with one unit — the 317th Support Center based in Wiesbaden, Germany — said they sent a message to commanders in Baghdad requesting help to secure the site but received no reply. (emphasis mine)

Why were they outnumbered, Donald?