It was bad enough that the Bush administration failed to make plans to secure or destroy conventional weapons storage sites in Iraq after the March 2003 invasion to topple Saddam Hussein.

The Government Accountability Office reported in March of this year that the human, strategic and financial costs of that failure have been high. The sites have been looted by insurgents and militias. They are the main source of explosives used to construct deadly improvised explosive devices that have "killed or maimed people," and "support terrorist attacks in the region," the report found.

The GAO report concluded that IEDs made with looted munitions have caused about half of all U.S. combat deaths and casualties in Iraq and also are killing Iraqis. Looted munitions continue to serve as the primary source of explosives to make IEDs and continue to pose a risk to U.S. military forces and Iraqi civilians.

But as bad as all that is, things can get worse. It turns out that the Bush administration is not even keeping track of weapons that the United States itself is providing to Iraqis. The title of a July 31 report by the Government Accountability Office tells it all: "DOD Cannot Ensure That U.S.-Funded Equipment Has Reached Iraqi Security Forces."

According to the report, the military "cannot fully account for about 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armor and 115,000 helmets reported as issued to Iraqi forces." That just covers arms sent to Iraq through September of 2005. And that's not to mention unaccounted-for heavy machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

Bush administration officials don't even know which Iraqi units received weapons, how many were received and when.

Worst of all, this situation still has not been corrected. As late as January of this year, the GAO found that "property books found continuing problems with missing and incomplete records."

In an incredible response, administration officials told the GAO that since the weapons' funding did not go through traditional security assistance programs, "accountability requirements normally applicable to these programs — including registering small arms transferred to foreign governments — did not apply." Further, no orders exist "specifying accountability procedures for equipment distributed" to Iraqi forces.

Who knows where all these unaccounted for weapons are turning up. In friendly hands? In hostile hands? For sale on the international black market?

Against this backdrop, the Bush administration now wants Congress to approve dramatically increased transfers of weapons and military technology to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Egypt and Israel. They've got to be kidding.

— Sacramento Bee

Four days after the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minnesota, the photos and videos of that catastrophic event still seem like something out of a Hollywood movie. Forty-year-old interstate highway bridges aren't supposed to just fall down in real life.This tragedy serves as a wake-up call to America. We have to adequately maintain our aging bridges and other infrastructure.The American Society of Civil Engineers estimated in 2005 the cost of sufficiently maintaining our nation's bridges at $9.4 billion per year over the next 20 years. It estimated it would cost $1.6 trillion over a five-year period to bring all the nation's infrastructure, such as bridges, roads and dams, up to good condition.To help meet that challenge, motor fuel tax dollars have to be spent as intended, not diverted to other parts of the budget as Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich has done. And at the federal level, instead of appropriating tax dollars for pork-barrel projects and bridges to nowhere, lawmakers need to ensure that the money goes to essential, priority projects.Building and maintaining roads and bridges are among government's legitimate functions. It's time to concentrate on the basics.<B>— Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat</B>