Screwing the vets

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Of course it isn't just Walter Reed. The problem is a pervasive one throughout the military. As Fred Kaplan put it at Slate yesterday, President Bush is screwing the vets in more ways than one:

The scandals and shortfalls in the military's health-care system stem from the same sensibility that produced the scandals and shortfalls in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It is the Bush administration's sensibility of denial -- its willful disinclination to face war's true cost (in all senses of the word) and its readiness to use bookkeeping tricks to perpetuate the deception.

"I am concerned that our soldiers and their families are not getting the treatment that they deserve," President George W. Bush said yesterday, in announcing the creation of yet another blue-ribbon commission, this one "on the care of returning wounded warriors."

No doubt he is concerned. The real scandal is that he's felt no reason to be concerned until the recent spate of news stories revealed plenty of reasons that he should be. The bureaucracies in charge of the returning wounded have been shuffling through the motions as if nothing extraordinary was happening -- and the politicians who are ultimately responsible have made it clear, by not telling anybody otherwise, that they prefer things that way. They are all acting as if there isn't a war going on.

Exactly. The so-called war on terror (and the ongoing Iraq War which is allegedly a key part of it) seems to be an endless military operation that is both the epochal struggle for our very survival and nothing worth worrying too much about. Our way of life is being threatened by some nebulous Other, but there's nothing that a heavy dose of shopping won't fix. And so American men and women are being sent into unconventional war zones around the world, but when they come home no one gives a shit about them. Well, some do -- their friends and families, no doubt -- but not those who sent them off to risk their lives for The Cause, whatever that happens to be at any given time, not those who have all the courage in the world to risk nothing of their own.

The pain and suffering of the returning vets is America's shame. The news reports of the atrocious conditions at Walter Reed have focused the spotlight on the wider problem, but much remains to be done.

Bush, as usual, avoided responsibility, but he can't now. The truth has sucked his head out of his ass, compelling him to deal with the inevitable human costs of war, to confront war as war rather than war as a game played in the comfort of righteous self-delusion. Over six years into his presidency, over six years as commander-in-chief, he still doesn't get it.