WMD's are called "weapons of MASS destruction" in the first place because they are far more likely to cause more death/destruction/damage/chaos/casualities than so-called "conventional" weapons, like the above-mentioned explosives.
The point of this is not that it is a WMD or a rationale for the war. It's that this is a huge stockpile of extremely powerful conventional explosives that the IAEA, (and the US intelligence and military planners), knew about, but that the administration had no plan to secure despite the specific warnings from the IAEA. So what this represents is a clear example of the overall ridiculous failure of the administration's planning of this war. In their, (Rumsfeld's) determination to have a small force rush in to take out Saddam's government and install a proxy one, (Ahmed Chalabi and his INC), that would allow us to start withdrawing US forces quickly, under the naive and simplistic assumptions that most of the government would remain in place to take our orders, and that the public would welcome us with flowers and kisses, the administration's planners simply ignored the warnings from the the more realistic and experienced military commanders, (which it simply sidelined or fired), that we would need "boots on the ground" to actually secure the country and protect the soldiers in the event that things didn't go according to the simple, optimistic theories of the civilian neocons running the Pentagon.
The significance of the particular types of explosives involved here, and the reason the IAEA went to such measures to warn us about them both before the war and once it was reported they were missing is that, unlike WMD which would be particularly valuable in creating public fear regardless of the actual physical impact of a terrorist attack, (see the 1995 Sarin attack on the Tokyo subway which killed 12 people), this stuff would be particularly usefull for insurgent terrorist attacks because they are more predictably destructive when used against US military targets in a war-zone.
There is actually a hatred of the term "weapons of mass destruction" among experts. [ See: <a href="http://www.armscontrol.org/interviews/20040619_Blix.asp" target="_blank">An Interview with Hans Blix</a> - near the bottom. ] It is a gross oversimplification to put in the same category nuclear weapons and many of the bio/chem weapons that are actually not very good at killing people and destroying things. They feel the term actually increases the psychological terror value of the weapons rather than promoting an understanding of which ones are truly dangerous and under what circumstances.
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<a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=540&e=13&u=/ap/20041025/ap_on_re_mi_ea/nuclear_agency_iraq_glance_2" target="_blank">A Look at Explosives Missing in Iraq</a>
Mon Oct 25, 8:53 AM ET Middle East - AP
By The Associated Press
A glance at the destructive power of the nearly 380 tons of conventional explosives the International Atomic Energy Agency says have gone missing from a former military installation in Iraq (news - web sites):
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HMX: High melting explosives, as they are scientifically known, are among the most powerful in use by the world's militaries today. HMX, also known as octogen, is made from hexamine, ammonium nitrate, nitric acid and acetic acid. Because it detonates at high temperatures, it is used in various kinds of explosives, rocket fuels and burster chargers.
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RDX: Also referred to as cyclonite or hexogen, RDX is a white crystalline solid usually used in mixtures with other explosives, oils or waxes. Rarely used alone, it has a high degree of stability in storage and is considered the most powerful of the high explosives used by militaries.
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PLASTIC EXPLOSIVES: Experts say both HMX and RDX are key ingredients in plastic explosives such as Semtex and C-4, puttylike military substances that easily can be shaped. Libyan terrorists used just 1 pound of Semtex in 1988 to down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 27