http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2205&ncid=742&e=14&u=
ucgg/20041213/cm_ucgg/rumsfeldmaysoonregrethisarrogancetowardustroops
http://tinyurl.com/6eu39
RUMSFELD MAY SOON REGRET HIS ARROGANCE TOWARD U.S. TROOPS
By Georgie Anne Geyer
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- By the early 1970s, after seven long and savage years of
fighting in Vietnam, the phrase that came to characterize the pitiful
hopelessness and absurdity of that conflict was, "We had to destroy the
village in order to save it."
Unbelievably, our secretary of defense has just given us the existential
phrases for the Iraq (news - web sites) war: "As you know, you go to war
with the Army you have ... not the Army you might want or wish to have at a
later time."
How could Donald Rumsfeld, a smart and savvy man despite his perverse
fascination with conflict, possibly say such an insulting and arrogant
thing to American soldiers? Is he really trying to tell them, as it surely
sounded last Wednesday when he addressed American troops in Kuwait, that
they are not the Army he wanted, but he had to put up with them?
Well, just maybe, if the cavalier attitude of the civilians in this
administration toward American troops continues, there will come a time
when our soldiers will not put up with THEM! Perhaps that was beginning
last week in Kuwait.
To briefly review, one soldier in Kuwait, Spc. Thomas Wilson, a member of
the Tennessee National Guard, confronted "Rummie" with a pointed question.
"We've had troops in Iraq for coming up on three years and we've always
staged here out of Kuwait," he said. "Why do we soldiers have to dig
through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic
glass to up-armor our vehicles, and why don't we have those resources
readily available to us?
"We're digging pieces of rusted scrap metal ... that has already been shot
up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our
vehicles to take into combat."
Rumsfeld then made his incredible comment, pointing out to any rational
person the degrees to which this administration is not so much lacking
battlefield intelligence but basic human instinct. Even President Bush
(news - web sites), whose own responses to the troops, despite his
melodramatic public "emotion," are cool and distant, seemed to realize that
Rumsfeld had gone too far.
"If I were a soldier overseas wanting to defend my country," he said from
Washington, "I'd want to ask the secretary of defense the same
question." (At this point, some of would like to ask him the question of
why, as commander in chief, he hasn't asked it himself?).
Then it was revealed that the question had been worked out in concert with a
journalist covering the troops, Edward Lee Pitts of the Chattanooga Times
Free Press -- and this fact was somehow meant to discredit the whole
encounter. Sorry about that! Such exchanges of ideas -- and especially of
complaints -- are not only part of the war scene, they are central and
appropriate to it.
But let us not forget the context of Rumsfeld's words. This is Rumsfeld's
war -- not America's, but his. He and his pugnacious neocon cohorts -- all
of them still reigning in the Pentagon, and none of whom having ever served
in the military -- ran all around the uniformed military's and the State
Department's warnings about this war. They got exactly what they asked for:
an adventure, a thoroughly unnecessary "war of choice," and a growing
disaster-in-the-making.
Senators Joseph Biden Jr. and Chuck Hagel just returned from Iraq, saying
that not one American general said we were winning. Other warnings are the
same. Rumsfeld's answer to everything is to train Iraqi forces to take the
place of ours (perhaps because we, poor guys, only have "the Army we
have"), but they are falling apart in many Iraqi cities.
And then Rumsfeld made things even worse. Responding to questions as to why
he did not even remotely anticipate these intense "insurgencies," he
answered blithely: "I don't think anyone would say that the intelligence
left anyone with the impression that you'd be in the degree of insurgency
you're in today." No look at Iraqi history, no attempt to match ambition to
potential, no common sense --and surely no apologies!
You can see the anger beginning to build in the armed forces, with the
"stop-loss" policies that force men and women to stay in uniform long after
their terms are over, with the callousness about the armor, with the
ludicrous analysis by the civilians in the Pentagon of what Iraq and its
history were really like.
Now his unfortunate quote will go down in history to show how much he and
his group, most of them remote and self-interested intellectuals, look at
battlefield soldiers as chess pieces at their disposal. In the end, they
care about nothing except their game.
--
Triratanam sharanam gaccami
Dharmananda
http://mysite.verizon.net/res6zeam/american-buddhist/news.html
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