Does the Bush Administration Support the Troops? Yes, Like a Noose Supports a Hanging Man!

Does the Bush Administration Support the Troops? Yes, Like a Noose Supports a Hanging Man!
by Walter C. Uhler | Jul 16 2007 - 8:57am


On August 2, 2000, while accepting the Republican Party's nomination as Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney told the U.S. military, "help is on the way." Cheney used the occasion to savage the Clinton administration: "Rarely has so much been demanded of our armed forces and so little given them in return." Yet, Cheney's rebuke has proven to be vastly more applicable today than it has been for the past thirty years. When it comes to abuse and neglect of our military, President Clinton emerges as a rank amateur when compared with President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney.

It was the Bush administration that sent American soldiers to war in Iraq without adequate supplies of body armor, without an adequate number of armored vehicles to ward off roadside bombs and, most significantly, without an adequate number of troops to secure the peace in Iraq after toppling Saddam Hussein. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld disdained and abused the senior military leadership - and the disdain was largely reciprocated.

But listen to how Rumsfeld responded in Kuwait, in December 2004, when Spec. Thomas Wilson (a mechanic with the Tennessee Army National Guard) asserted, "our vehicles are not armored." Rumsfeld callously replied: "As you know, you go to war with the Army you have…They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

~snip~

But, rather than respond to this dire situation, Republican smacked-asses, like Senator Saxby Chambliss, place party loyalty to Bush's lost war over country and soldiers. Thus, when Senator Jim Webb, a combat veteran of the Vietnam war, attempted to introduce legislation (S. 2012) that would provide some relief to U.S. troops, chicken hawk Chambliss felt the need to chastise Webb for not knowing America's military history.

What Senator Webb didn't understand, according to blowhard Chambliss, was that "during World War II and other wars of this country, service members participating in those wars deployed for 3 and 4 years with little or no break." Yet, had the smacked-ass party loyalist from Georgia taken the time to seriously inform himself about this issue, he might have learned what retired General William E. Odom knows.

According to Gen. Odom, "No U.S. forces have ever been compelled to stay in sustained combat conditions for as long as the Army units have in Iraq. In World War II, soldiers were considered combat-exhausted after about 180 days on the line. They were withdrawn for rest periods…In Iraq, combat units take over an area of operations and patrol it daily, making soldiers face the prospect of death from an IED or small arms fire or mortar fire each day. Day in and day out for a full year, with only a single two-week break, they confront the prospect of death, losing limbs or eyes, or suffering serious wounds."

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uhc note: another good read on the Iraq mess