Third Grade Arithmetic

I've been having fun with numbers this morning. Shows what a sad, pathetic life I really lead!

Lots of numbers have been thrown around as to how many tons of WMD that they didn't have were at that arsenal. Just to take an average, let's say that the "looters" got 380 tons of explosives. Let’s see – that’s 760,000 pounds at short ton or 840,000 pounds if they are metric tons.

Now, if each "looter" was able to cart off, say, 50 pounds each, that would mean 16,800 looters (15,200 for std tons). If somehow these looters got hold of some government surplus deuce and a halfs, they would need 168 trucks (metric) or 152 for standard tons. Or some combination of trucks times trips.

Busy little fuckers, these "looters".

From March 19th to April 10th – that’s 23 days. But the April 10th date is only one day after Baghdad fell. On April 4th, troops from the 3rd Infantry Division went through that area and found some explosives, but it wasn’t said what kind or how much. There was still a whole bunch of explosives there – just not the sexy stuff.

Let’s say that Saddam’s troops were still at that site until the 3rd Infantry troops came through. That leaves 6 days for "looters" to cart all this off – at 126,667 pounds a day (140,000 pounds for metric). 2,533 trips a day (2,800 for metric) using Abdul’s back, or 25.3 truckloads a day (28 a day for metric).

“Busy little fuckers” doesn’t come close!

Of course, if you want to figure this out in camel loads … Your average camel can carry anywhere from 330 to 1,000 pounds. Let’s take 500 pounds as a decent average. Over the same 6 day period, that would take 1,680 camels (1,520 camels for standard tons).

That’ll do – you can work the rest out for yourselves. I’m tired.