The disappearance of war-broken soldiers

[GliderGuider]

Source: Boston Globe

War-broken soldiers must disappear.

For reasons of national security -- namely, to shore up popular support for war policy -- the Defense Department has longed underplayed the tragic consequences of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Returning corpses (soon to number 4,000) are shrouded in secrecy. The suffering of the wounded (more than 26,000) is kept out of the nation's awareness. It is not that the medical professionals at Walter Reed are callous or uncaring. It is that the entire system is geared to making the men and women who carry visible signs of the war's cost slide back into the general population unnoticed. An inhospitable hospital serves that purpose. Mold infested walls of the Walter Reed housing units are the functional equivalent of unbarred windows at Bethesda.

Of all of the lies that the Bush administration has promoted, none is more egregious than that it "supports the troops." Unlike the others, that lie holds. In its name, Bush vetoed the war appropriations bill last week, as if the welfare of young and vulnerable soldiers is his chief concern. American soldiers are pawns in the game the president is playing with history. No longer capable of pretending that national security requires American presence in Iraq, Bush is simply refusing to acknowledge that what he did was wrong. He's like a child insisting that his arm is broken, when it isn't. In Bush's case, the fake dressing for which he longs are human lives.

Read more: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/05/08/the_disappearance_of_war_broken_soldiers/