Serious about The Long War
Two phrases crop up frequently in the discourse of war supporters, “serious” and “the long war.” You can read sentences like “for those who are serious about the WOT …” or “I have always understood that we were in for The Long War, our generational struggle against the evil of our times.”
Yammering away at the administration for every development, from Halliburton to armored Humvees, leaves me cold. But, a central criticism, not a distraction nor a detail, of the Bush administration is that it is very “unserious,” that it has tried to run the war on the cheap, paying lip service to important war-fighting & nation-building realities, while not really doing what needs to be done. There is plenty of evidence that this is a pervasive aspect of our conduct of the Iraq war, that the Walter Reed mess is not isolated, but just one more example. I recall a quote from one of the guys who worked for the CPA in Baghdad in 2003-2004, who described his work as “fluffing up feathers and calling it a duck.”
So here’s one more damning thing. “You want a hospital? Sure, here’s a hospital for you.”
Soldiers Face Neglect, Frustration At Army’s Top Medical Facility
Behind the door of Army Spec. Jeremy Duncan’s room, part of the wall is torn and hangs in the air, weighted down with black mold. When the wounded combat engineer stands in his shower and looks up, he can see the bathtub on the floor above through a rotted hole. The entire building, constructed between the world wars, often smells like greasy carry-out. Signs of neglect are everywhere: mouse droppings, belly-up cockroaches, stained carpets, cheap mattresses.
This is the world of Building 18, not the kind of place where Duncan expected to recover when he was evacuated to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from Iraq last February with a broken neck and a shredded left ear, nearly dead from blood loss. But the old lodge, just outside the gates of the hospital and five miles up the road from the White House, has housed hundreds of maimed soldiers recuperating from injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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