Betraying the truth betrays the troops

Betraying the truth betrays the troops
BY ANDREW GREELEY
Copyright by The Chicago Sun-Times
March 9, 2007

I see by the papers that Senators Barack Obama and John McCain have been "dinged" by the "researchers" (mud collectors and mud throwers) because they have asserted that lives and money have been "wasted" in Iraq. How dare they say that the lives of "our troops" were wasted? Have they no respect for the feelings of the survivors of "our troops''? Must one maintain the illusion that these brave men and women died for something important, like American freedom or democracy or to prevent another World Trade Center attack?

The truth is that they died because of loyalty to the armed services and to their duty. That ought to be enough. One ought not to pretend that the war was waged for any other reason than that the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense and their coterie of neoconservative intellectuals wanted a war and exaggerated intelligence data to justify it.

The administration talks endlessly about loyalty to our troops and the duty of all Americans to support them. In fact, once they had the congressional resolution justifying the war, they showed precious little concern for the troops. They did not send enough troops to ensure immediate victory, nor did they train them for the kind of war they would have to fight. It was supposed to be over in a couple of weeks. You could win with substantial numbers of reserve and National Guard personnel, weekend soldiers who were yanked away from their families and jobs and sent off to war.

They did not equip the troops with adequate body armor or adequate vehicle armor. They did not devise a way to protect the troops from roadside bombs. They played games with their paychecks. They deployed and redeployed and then redeployed again, like they were yo-yos without any concern for their personal and familial stress. They assigned them to duty in prisons like Abu Ghraib for which they were totally unqualified.

And Donald Rumsfeld delivered himself of the brilliant military dictum, "stuff happens." And remarked that ''you don't fight the war you want to fight but the war you have to fight.''

Then, when the troops died in substantial numbers, they forbade pictures of flag-draped coffins being unloaded by the score from transport planes. They boasted of great progress and then redeployed troops again beyond human endurance.

As the casualties mounted, the president mouthed meaningless cliches like, "Iraq is hard." Hard on whom, one wonders? On himself or the vice president? On Secretary Rumsfeld or Secretary Condoleezza Rice or on the wives and children, the mothers and fathers, the sweethearts and the friends of those who died in a foolish war that has been bungled at every deeper step into the Big Muddy? Hard on the men and women whose lives will be forever blighted by unnecessary deaths? But those of us who wanted all along to remove them from harm's way are accused of not supporting the troopswhen the leaders who sent them into this military miasma clearly don't give a hoot about them, save as a political talking point.

Now we have the revelations of how the returning troops are treated at Building 18 in the Walter Reed Hospital complex, the inadequate treatment at most VA hospitals around the country, and the cover-up of statistics about brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. The returning troops, it would seem, were relegated to a status similar to victims of Hurricane Katrina.

To those of you preparing to write your usual letters telling me I am a traitor for not caring about the troops, I reply that you betrayed them by your silence about the intolerable expenditure of American blood and money (some of which might have gone to VA hospitals) so that President Bush could play-act at the role of a wartime president. And he wasn't even the kind of wartime president who would tour the hospitals or appoint men to make sure the hospitals were decent places to come alive again.

In an administration where spin, doublethink and lies have replaced the truth, why is anyone surprised about mistreatment of injured troops? Why do we still think that the buck stops in the Oval Office as it did in Harry Truman's day?