The New York Times walks us through the horror that was the Bush Administration's support for the troops they sent in harm's way. Apparently, despite Georgie's claims to the contrary, he and his henchmen never really took the plight of the troops seriously and didn't do everything possible to support the troops they sent off on a fool's mission.

The war in Iraq was hardly a month old in April 2003 when an Army general in charge of equipping soldiers with protective gear threw the brakes on buying bulletproof vests.

The general, Richard A. Cody, who led a Pentagon group called the Army Strategic Planning Board, had been told by supply chiefs that the combat troops already had all the armor they needed, according to Army officials and records from the board's meetings. Some 50,000 other American soldiers, who were not on the front lines of battle, could do without.

[. . .]


The insurgency had already taken root in Iraq when General Cody made his decision on April 17, 2003, that enough soldiers had bulletproof vests. As more casualty reports flowed in during the next month, he came to recognize that the advice he had gotten from staff members in Washington did not reflect the reality of the war.

In the following weeks, as Iraqi snipers and suicide bombers stepped up deadly attacks, often directed at those very soldiers behind the front lines, General Cody realized the Army's mistake and did an about-face. On May 15, 2003, he ordered the budget office to buy all the bulletproof vests it could [. . .]

it took the Army 47 days from when General Cody issued his order for bulletproof vests to allocate the necessary funds so that contracts could be awarded

If nothing else, this account highlights the total failure on the part of Georgie & Co. to fully understand exactly what they were doing in Iraq. In the rush to war, the Bushies forgot about a lot of things...like thinking through their assumptions about Iraq's supposed WMD, giving diplomatic efforts a chance, letting the UN inspectors do the work they were appointed to do, and perhaps most tragically, making sure that the young men and women they were sending into battle had the equipment they needed to do the job.

Now before you go off steaming there's more....

The delivery and tracking of body armor was so chaotic that by Jan. 23, 2004, when the last American soldiers got theirs, 10,000 plates were still missing

. Yep...that's right...somehow the Armed Forces, under the command of George Bush lost 10,000 badly needed armored vests. I'm sure some of the family and friends of the 10,000 plus wounded soldiers find that bit of news heart warming. But it gets better. The general in charge of getting all those armored vests to the troops had this to say:

"Our planning process wasn't keeping up with the changes that were required," said Gen. Paul J. Kern, the head of the Army's Materiel Command [. . .]. "That resulted in the lag in response in acquisition. While we would all like to be faster and more responsive, it was fairly responsive."

Yeah..."fairly responsive." When I read these lines Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" came to mind. Of course, we shouldn't be too hard on Gen. Kern because as the NYT points out

American military commanders and Pentagon officials now concede that they consistently misjudged the strength and ingenuity of the insurgency in Iraq, which has grown more sophisticated in its tactics. Because commanders failed to take that force into account, the Army's procurement machine could never catch up, no matter how hard it tried.

Sounds like a failure of leadership to me.


And if all of this wasn't bad enough, the NYT story is based on an "April 20, 2004, report by the inspector general that remained confidential until it was released to The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act." So while Georgie was letting Uncle Karl rip into John Kerry for being "soft on terrorism" and "weak on defense" Georgie knew that his administration had dropped the ball...or never really cared about the ball. Still wondering why it was stamped "top-secret" until well after the election? It's hard to have an "accountability moment" when those in power do everything possible to obscure the facts.

posted by Idle Crank at 3/07/2005 07:49:00 AM