Donald Rumsfeld has been criticized very thoroughly for his glib, condescending replies (and non-replies) to serious questions with which soldiers in Kuwait stunned him the other day.
But not quite thoroughly enough.
There's an important point that must be made more than any other, so much so that I even have the nerve to spend time on my blog reiterating it:
Rumsfeld lied about the armor.
Armor Holdings, the Jacksonville, Florida, company that makes most of the Pentagon's armored Humvees, could easily double production, but REMFsfeld has never asked them to.
That's leaving aside the fact that General Motors could retool one Hummer production line, briefly reduce output for the civilian market, and have armored Humvees bumper to bumper from the Kuwait City docks all the way to Baghdad.
Rumsfeld lied.
He lied because he couldn't care less about something as unimportant as the lives and limbs of working-class scum who would actually go and join the Army.
Actually, maybe Rumsfeld and his friends do care about whether our troops have armored vehicles.
After all, the armor occasionally available has resulted in thousands of soldiers (repeat, thousands) being merely maimed instead of killed outright, and crippled veterans are troublesome to neocon dreams of glory.
Crippled veterans are a visible reminder, far less sanitary than mass-produced crosses in military cemeteries, of what their little adventures really cost. Sure, it's a simple thing to prevent embedded journalists from photographing or interviewing them. And only a little more trouble to exculde them from the victory parades. But once they're dumped on the street, they're harder to control. Someone might *notice* them.
Worse yet, crippled veterans who were sent to war with their ears full of lies and return home broken to be denied medical care and cheated out of their pensions might just possibly vote Democratic next time.
So, much neater and more orderly if they are simply killed.
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