Crazy Pills: Ruminations on Sy Hersh

Will the Chicken-Hawk-in-Chief never tire of hiding behind our troops? Follow the pretzel logic if you will. We must attack Iran in order to "protect our troops."

At Rice’s Senate appearance in January, Democratic Senator Joseph Biden, of Delaware, pointedly asked her whether the U.S. planned to cross the Iranian or the Syrian border in the course of a pursuit. “Obviously, the President isn’t going to rule anything out to protect our troops, but the plan is to take down these networks in Iraq,” Rice said, adding, “I do think that everyone will understand that—the American people and I assume the Congress expect the President to do what is necessary to protect our forces.”

That's right. We must set Iran on fire, while our troops are sitting ducks in Iraq, in order to protect them. We must exhaust what's left of our military supplies and hardware in order to protect them. I fail to see how destroying our military readiness protects the troops or the country, for that matter.

This is where the rhetoric meets the road and shreds on contact. Protect the troops?! How does not giving them adequate body armor and up-armored vehicles protect them? How does warehousing our injured heroes in fetid squalor, complete with vermin and black mold protect them? How does an overburdened, underfunded VA protect the troops? How does announcing cuts in veteran's health care, while they are busy dodging bullets and IEDs protect them? How does leaving them penniless and homeless protect them?

The Bush Administration gave up any authority to talk about "protecting the troops" when they put them in the most wrong-headed war in American history and allowed comments like this to issue from their cabinet:

As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

For this Administration to talk about "protecting the troops" is as Orwellian as their entire "war is peace" strategy. Sometimes I think their overarching strategy is to short-circuit the collective psyche of the American public with cognitive dissonance. They'll just keep bombarding us with illogic until we shut down like the Mudd's androids. Reading this latest from Sy Hersh, I am left feeling, once again, like I'm taking crazy pills.

"The Redirection" may be the most mind-melting expose of the Bush agenda yet. As near as I can tell, the goal is simply to make the Middle East as unstable as possible; just knocking over as many dominoes as they can to see if they form a pattern. That's certainly what it looks like, as they progress with their impossible plans for attacking Iran. According to Hersh they themselves made this attack necessary by destroying the only viable check on Iran: Iraq. To paraphrase Colin Powell: They Broke it. We bought it.

It's pretty clear to those of us who scrolled through the PNAC papers back in the day, that Iran was always in their sights. That Iraq is in a shambles, Afghanistan is erupting, and our military is nearly broken, doesn't even slow the Bush juggernaut down. They have so little respect for our cognitive abilities that they don't even bother to update their sales pitch. There are weapons of mass destruction! They're over here. No they're over here. Did I say that? Look over here.

Make no mistake. We are in no way prepared to attack Iran. And that's why the generals are balking.

A British defence source confirmed that there were deep misgivings inside the Pentagon about a military strike. “All the generals are perfectly clear that they don’t have the military capacity to take Iran on in any meaningful fashion. Nobody wants to do it and it would be a matter of conscience for them.

The most damning part of Seymour Hersh's newest piece of investigative journalism was highlighted over at Think Progress with video and transcript of Hersh's interview with Wolf Blitzer. Put simply the Bush Administration is funding terrorists. I seem to remember something about the Patriot Act making that explicitly illegal. I wonder if they'll be prosecuted. I won't hold my breath. Bush probably exempted himself from the Patriot Act with a signing statement.

Yes. We are fighting a "war on terror" by funding terrorists.

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.

The Death of the Warrior King

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Let us do a postmortem on the archetype of the warrior king. We shall have no more great leaders, tested in the cauldron of battle. Today's leaders let the peasantry do all the fighting and the dying for the advancement of their empires. We live in an age of coddled boy kings, who avoid service in "Champagne Units" and mock the valor of inconvenient heroes.

Pity the Prince who wishes to fight alongside his men.

Newspapers are filling their pages about the security headache that a war zone assignment for Harry — who is third in line to the throne — could bring for the British army.

"Harry's always wanted to be treated as an ordinary soldier," the Daily Mail quoted an unidentified army source as saying. "He's not an ordinary soldier, of course."

When Harry, 22, left Sandhurst Military Academy last year, he became a second lieutenant and joined the Blues and Royals regiment of the Household Cavalry. At the time, the defense ministry said he could possibly be deployed to Iraq, but that there might be situations when the presence of a member of the royal family could increase the risk for his comrades.

Harry himself was having none of it.

"There's no way I'm going to put myself through Sandhurst, and then sit on my arse back home while my boys are out fighting for their country," he said in a television interview to mark his 21st birthday.

The warrior king mythos is mocked when the Chicken-Hawk-in-Chief plays lets pretend with a caricature of our original warrior President. It is surely dead when he can say things like this with a straight face.

"It's hard for me living in this beautiful White House to give you an assessment, a first hand assessment. I haven't been there. You have, I haven't. But I do talk to people who are and people whose judgment I trust and they would not qualify it as that. There are others who think it is."

The warrior king was defined by his scars. The leader of the free world cannot even look upon the scars of others.

Military amputee uninvited from Bush event because the press would see him with no legs

May these people fry in hell. (This a portion of a much larger, second part of the expose in the Washington Post on Monday.)

Perks and stardom do not come to every amputee. Sgt. David Thomas, a gunner with the Tennessee National Guard, spent his first three months at Walter Reed with no decent clothes; medics in Samarra had cut off his uniform. Heavily drugged, missing one leg and suffering from traumatic brain injury, David, 42, was finally told by a physical therapist to go to the Red Cross office, where he was given a T-shirt and sweat pants. He was awarded a Purple Heart but had no underwear.

David tangled with Walter Reed's image machine when he wanted to attend a ceremony for a fellow amputee, a Mexican national who was being granted U.S. citizenship by President Bush. A case worker quizzed him about what he would wear. It was summer, so David said shorts. The case manager said the media would be there and shorts were not advisable because the amputees would be seated in the front row.

" 'Are you telling me that I can't go to the ceremony 'cause I'm an amputee?' " David recalled asking. "She said, 'No, I'm saying you need to wear pants.' "

David told the case worker, "I'm not ashamed of what I did, and y'all shouldn't be neither." When the guest list came out for the ceremony, his name was not on it.

Bow your head in memory of the warrior king. He is no more.

Why Letting Criminals Join the Military is a Bad Idea

Exhibit A: Pfc. Steven D. Green, the apparent mastermind behind the gang rape and murder of a 14 year old Iraqi girl, and the murderer of her parents and 5 year old sister.

According to statements given at the hearing, the soldiers were drinking whiskey, playing cards and hitting golf balls when Green brought up the idea of going to a house near the checkpoint where they were stationed, to rape the girl.

Barker described Green as very persistent, Bierce testified. The statements said the five soldiers -- Green, Cortez, Barker, Spielman and Howard -- then changed into dark clothing and covered their faces, before going to the house.

According to Barker, Howard was the lookout and was given a radio to use if anyone approached, Bierce said. The four remaining soldiers then entered the home, at which point the statements from Barker and Cortez about what happened diverge, according to testimony.

Barker told investigators that Cortez pushed the 14-year-old girl to the floor and made "thrusting motions" as Barker held down her hands; then they switched positions, Bierce said.

Sometime during the assault, Barker said he heard gunshots come from the bedroom, where the girl's parents and sister had been taken, and an agitated Green emerged and said he had killed them, Bierce said.

According to Barker, Green then put down the AK-47 he had been carrying and raped the girl, while Cortez held her down, and then picked up the gun and shot her several times, Bierce said.

Green then went into the kitchen and, when he returned, said he had opened the propane tank and they needed to get out of the house because it was about to explode, Bierce said.

Pfc. Green was in the Army thanks to a moral-waiver and we will probably be seeing a lot more Steven Greens, more atrocities, and an overall degradation of military values and discipline. As we learn today from the New York Times, Army waivers for criminals are up 65% as the military clamors to fill recruiting quotas.

“The data is crystal clear; our armed forces are under incredible strain, and the only way that they can fill their recruiting quotas is by lowering their standards,” said Representative Martin T. Meehan, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. He has requested more detailed data from the Defense Department on the use of waivers.

“By lowering standards, we are endangering the rest of our armed forces and sending the wrong message to potential recruits across the country,” Mr. Meehan said. “Our men and women in uniform represent the best and brightest in America, and we need to keep it that way.”. . .

Mr. Belkin said the increases in moral waivers in the Army posed a problem only to the extent that the military failed to track these recruits or provide special integration training for them.

Since more than 125,000 service members with criminal histories have joined the military in the last three years, Mr. Belkin said, “you have a sizeable population that has been incarcerated and is not used to the same cultural norms as everybody else.”

“The chance that one of those individuals is going to commit an atrocity or disobey an order is higher,” he said. “Many of those individuals can be good soldiers, but in some cases they have special needs. The military should address those needs rather than pretending they don’t exist.”

But ignoring an obvious problem is exactly what the Army did in the case of Pfc. Green. After granting a waiver to the high school drop-out with three criminal convictions in his history, the Army green-lighted him for duty in spite of glaring indicators of mental pathology.

Pfc. Steven D. Green was found to have "homicidal ideations" after seeking help from an Army Combat Stress Team in Iraq on Dec. 21, 2005. Green said he was angry about the war, desperate to avenge the death of comrades and driven to kill Iraqi citizens, according to an investigation by The Associated Press.

The treatment was several small doses of Seroquel a drug to regulate his mood and a directive to get some sleep, according to medical records obtained by the AP. The next day, he returned to duty in the particularly violent stretch of desert in the southern Baghdad suburbs known as the "Triangle of Death.". . .

From interviews with people who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized by the military to discuss the case, and from viewing the Army's medical and investigative records, the AP also has learned:

Three months passed without Army doctors and clinicians from the Combat Stress Team having any contact with Green. He was summoned for a second examination on March 20, 2006 eight days after the killing of the family. Green was diagnosed as having an anti-social personality disorder and declared unfit for service. The process of discharging him began a week later and he was sent home.

The Army's own investigation of Green's initial treatment, prompted by concerns he and others would use mental health problems as a defense in trial, is highly critical. Among the most salient findings from a July review of Green's treatment: "Although a safety assessment was conducted, there is no safety plan addressing how Soldier (Green) will keep from acting on his homicidal thoughts."

Obviously there are dirtbags in the military, who have no documented criminal history that would require a waiver (Exhibits: Barker through Cortez, for instance) but these standards are and have been in place for good reason.

John D. Hutson, dean and president of the Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire and former judge advocate general of the Navy, said the military must tread carefully in deciding which criminals to accept. There is a reason, he said, why allowing people with criminal histories into the military has long been the exception rather than the rule.

“If you are recruiting somebody who has demonstrated some sort of antisocial behavior and then you are a putting a gun in their hands, you have to be awfully careful about what you are doing,” Mr. Hutson said. “You are not putting a hammer in their hands, or asking them to sell used cars. You are potentially asking them to kill people.”

Cut and Run Republicans, Part 4

At least I think it's part 4. It's hard to keep track. The Republican abandonment of our troops is so constant, so relentless, and so total, that it's impossible to catalog their cynical maneuvers. Another day, another slap in the faces of our fighting men and women from their Commander in Chief.

The Bush administration plans to cut funding for veterans' health care two years from now — even as badly wounded troops returning from Iraq could overwhelm the system.

Bush is using the cuts, critics say, to help fulfill his pledge to balance the budget by 2012.

After an increase sought for next year, the Bush budget would turn current trends on their head. Even though the cost of providing medical care to veterans has been growing rapidly — by more than 10 percent in many years — White House budget documents assume consecutive cutbacks in 2009 and 2010 and a freeze thereafter.

The numbers are so unrealistic that some critics are speculating that the White House is just doing some fancy math, to give the appearance of balancing the budget.

In fact, even the White House doesn't seem serious about the numbers. It says the long-term budget numbers don't represent actual administration policies. Similar cuts assumed in earlier budgets have been reversed.

The veterans cuts, said White House budget office spokesman Sean Kevelighan, "don't reflect any policy decisions. We'll revisit them when we do the (future) budgets."

But, at the risk of parroting the GOP talking points we've been hearing all day as Congress debates Bush's surge "strategy," I have to ask. What the hell kind of message does that send to the troops who are currently doing all the fighting and dying in Bush's war? Don't they have enough to worry about, without learning that their Commander in Chief thinks their health benefits are expendable? How much are they supposed to sacrifice to maintain Bush's tax cuts for the super wealthy?

Iraq War veteran Christopher Carbone said he wouldn't mind a decrease in his medical benefits if it meant that additional federal dollars would be used for armored Humvees on the battlefield.

But Carbone, a survivor of an improvised explosive device attack in Iraq in October 2005, couldn't help being a little jarred when he learned the Bush administration planned to cut funding for veterans' health care by 2 percent in 2009 in order to balance the federal budget by 2012.

"It's kind of surprising," Carbone, 28, of North Haledon, said Monday. "It's one of those things that you always expect to be taken care of after everything you do."

As it is the VA cannot meet the demands of veterans returning damaged in body and spirit; something Jonathan Schulze discovered in his hour of need.

Jonathan Schulze was a United States Marine.

He died earlier this month at the age of 25 -- not in Iraq, but back home, in Minnesota.

He died of wounds received during his seven-month tour of duty in Iraq, wounds different from the ones that earned Schulze two purple hearts. This young man died of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, of wounds to the soul and not the flesh. He died because the government that was there to send him far away to fight in 2004 wasn't there for him when he got home.

Schulze had a harrowing time in Iraq, spending time in the heated battles of Ramadi in April, 2004. While he was there, 35 Marines in his unit were killed, including 17 of them in just 48 hours of combat.

The young Marine was wounded twice in battle but returned home to rebuild his life and to cope with the things he had seen, things he had done and friends he had lost. But, by the time he was discharged from the Marines in late 2005, he was deeply troubled with images of combat and violence that he could not get out of his mind.

According to Minnesota press reports, Schulze went to the Veterans Administration (VA) center in Minneapolis on December 14, 2006, met with a psychiatrist and was told that he could only be admitted for treatment four months later, in March.

On January 11, 2007, accompanied by his parents, he went to the VA hospital in St. Cloud, Minnesota and told people at that VA facility that he was thinking of killing himself. They told Schulze that they could not admit him as a patient and sent him on his way.

The next day, January 12, Schulze called the VA, reiterating that he was feeling suicidal. He was told that he was number 26 on the waiting list....

On January 16, Schulze called his family and told them that he was going to do it -- he was going to kill himself. His family called the local police, who raced to his house, kicked in his door and found him hanging from an electrical cord.

Attempts to resuscitate him were unsuccessful.

I fear there will be many more like Jonathan Schulze who return from increasingly harrowing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to find a failing VA, incapable of meeting their needs.

John McCain is Losing His Mind

John McCain is worried about a "Tet Offensive" in Iraq, turning public opinion against the war. How many more of us have to hate it, John? We're at 62 per cent and counting.

But McCain has a point -- or at least he would have had a point if he'd mentioned this concern before it had already long been a reality. Americans don't have much of a stomach for pointless, interminable war. We don't have endless patience with "turning the corner" or "light at the end of the tunnel" rhetoric, as bodies pile up.

What turned the public against the Vietnam Conflict was that the aftermath of Tet gave the lie to all the rosy predictions and showed Americans just how long that tunnel could be.

Although US public opinion polls continued to show a majority supporting involvement in the war, this support continued to deteriorate and the nation became increasingly polarized over the war.[18] President Lyndon Johnson saw his popularity fall sharply after the Offensive, and he withdrew as a candidate for re-election in March of 1968. The Tet Offensive is frequently seen as an example of the value of media influence and popular opinion in the pursuit of military objectives. That the Communists were able to mount a major, country-wide assault at all was a blow to U.S. hopes of winning the war rapidly, and starkly called into question General Westmoreland's earlier public reports of progress in the War. Likewise, the optimistic assessments of the Johnson administration and The Pentagon came under heavy criticism and ridicule.

Seeing the complete collapse of the PAVN/Viet Cong offensive, the lopsided casualty ratio, the lack of a popular uprising in support of the attacks, and the failure of the attacking forces to gain and hold significant territorial assets, Westmoreland considered it an appropriate opportunity for a counteroffensive action. He put together a request for 206,000 additional troops to prosecute the war in the wake of the Offensive, a move that would have required mobilization of the U.S. Reserves.

While this was being deliberated, the request was leaked to the press and published across three columns of the Sunday edition of The New York Times on March 10, 1968. Then-Lieutenant Colonel Dave Palmer later wrote in Summons of the Trumpet: "Looked upon erroneously but understandably by readers as a desperate move to avert defeat, news of the request for 206,000 men confirmed the suspicions of many that the result of the Tet Offensive had not been depicted accurately by the President or his spokesmen. If the Communists had suffered such a grievous setback, why would we need to increase our forces by 40 percent?"[19] [emphases mine]

And Lyndon Johnson never even declared "Mission Accomplished" on the deck of an aircraft carrier or anything.

24's Joel Surnow: The Chicken-Hawk's Chicken-Hawk

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The New York Daily News is one of a handful of news venues to pick up on a key revelation in the New Yorker's recent profile of "24". The show was approached by military and FBI leaders, who asked them to stop glorifying torture.

The grossly graphic torture scenes in Fox's highly rated series "24" are encouraging abuses in Iraq, a brigadier general and three top military and FBI interrogators claim.

The four flew to Los Angeles in November to meet with the staff of the show. They said it is hurting efforts to train recruits in effective interrogation techniques and is damaging the image of the U.S. around the world, according The New Yorker.

"I'd like them to stop," Army Brig. Gen. Patrick Finnegan, dean of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, told the magazine.

Finnegan and others told the show's creative team that the torture depicted in "24" never works in real life, and by airing such scenes, they're encouraging military personnel to act illegally.

In sharp contrast to the military and FBI brass: "24" creator Joel Surnow. He's pretty sure torture is a good idea. From the New Yorker:

In a more sober tone, he said, “We’ve had all of these torture experts come by recently, and they say, ‘You don’t realize how many people are affected by this. Be careful.’ They say torture doesn’t work. But I don’t believe that.

So how does Surnow know so much more than actual military and FBI interrogators? I wanted to know a little more about his background. From Wikipedia:

Surnow was born in Michigan, however his family moved to Los Angeles when he was ten years old. His father was an itinerant carpet salesman. He graduated from Beverly Hills High in 1972 and attended UC Berkeley before transferring to the UCLA School of Theater Film and Television in 1975.

Soon after graduation, he began writing for film; he then switched to television. His breakthrough came when he began writing for "Miami Vice," in 1984. By the end of the year, Universal Studios, which owned the show, put Surnow in charge of his own series, "The Equalizer," about a CIA officer turned vigilante.

He has five daughters, two from a previous marriage and three with his current wife.

Impressive resume but something seems to be missing... Oh I know. Any mention of a military background, or police work, or any martial training whatsoever, that would qualify him to make pronouncements on the efficacy of torture. Yet Surnow concludes that he knows more than the people who face these realities every day and disregards the nervous nellies who worry about trifles like the safety of our troops.

Surnow is the chicken-hawk's chicken-hawk; rubbing shoulders with draft-dodgers like Rush "Boil On His Butt" Limbaugh, Karl "Dubious College Deferment" Rove, and the psychotic wife of Dick "5 Deferments" Cheney, who describes herself as "an extreme '24' fan."

The show with its prominently featured torture porn has become a rallying point for neo-conservatives.

In fact, many prominent conservatives speak of “24” as if it were real. John Yoo, the former Justice Department lawyer who helped frame the Bush Administration’s “torture memo”—which, in 2002, authorized the abusive treatment of detainees—invokes the show in his book “War by Other Means.” He asks, “What if, as the popular Fox television program ‘24’ recently portrayed, a high-level terrorist leader is caught who knows the location of a nuclear weapon?”

But the "ticking time bomb" device that the show uses week after week, is truly a fictive construct. Torture as an interrogation method is known by experts in the field to be unreliable and ineffective.

But Navarro, who estimates that he has conducted some twelve thousand interrogations, replied that torture was not an effective response. “These are very determined people, and they won’t turn just because you pull a fingernail out,” he told me. And Finnegan argued that torturing fanatical Islamist terrorists is particularly pointless. “They almost welcome torture,” he said. “They expect it. They want to be martyred.” A ticking time bomb, he pointed out, would make a suspect only more unwilling to talk. “They know if they can simply hold out several hours, all the more glory—the ticking time bomb will go off!”

That these "enhanced" measures would be embraced by chicken-hawks, in direct contradiction of pragmatic reality should come as no shock. After all, living vicariously through bizarrely idealized visions of the martial experiences of others is what they do. And like cosseted Romans at the collisseum, the gorier the spectacle, the more they enjoy it.

Laura Ingraham, the talk-radio host, has cited the show’s popularity as proof that Americans favor brutality. “They love Jack Bauer,” she noted on Fox News. “In my mind, that’s as close to a national referendum that it’s O.K. to use tough tactics against high-level Al Qaeda operatives as we’re going to get.” Surnow once appeared as a guest on Ingraham’s show; she told him that, while she was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, “it was soothing to see Jack Bauer torture these terrorists, and I felt better.” Surnow joked, “We love to torture terrorists—it’s good for you!”

Real military commanders like Finnegan worry that life is beginning to imitate art, and that it is becoming increasingly difficult to teach cadets to adhere the laws of war, because of the pervasive influence of shows like "24." But Surnow did not hear out his concerns. Just as he did with any kind of military service, Surnow avoided the meeting.

Several top producers of “24” were present, but Surnow was conspicuously absent. Surnow explained to me, “I just can’t sit in a room that long. I’m too A.D.D.—I can’t sit still.” He told the group that the meeting conflicted with a planned conference call with Roger Ailes, the chairman of the Fox News Channel.

Cut and Run Republicans, Part 3

Republicans love the military to death... literally. I have written before on the right wing propensity for waving the flag and lionizing our troops when it suits their political purposes; then abandoning our fighting men and women if they are injured (and their families if they die.) In a truly brazen move during a war the signature injury of which is brain injury, a Republican led Pentagon and Republican House and Senate are slated to cut in half the funding for the military's brain injury treatment facilities. The details can be found in the Raleigh News & Observer and in this blog (contains worthwhile action steps). As the Observer reports:

Brain injuries are so common among U.S. troops that they're called the signature injury of the Iraq war, but Congress is poised to cut military spending on researching and treating them.

House and Senate versions of the defense appropriation bill would chop funding for the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center from $14 million to $7 million. The center runs 10 facilities across the country, including one at Fort Bragg that has performed research and treated soldiers' injuries since 1998.

"It's just ridiculous," said Sgt. Maj. Colin Rich, a Fort Bragg soldier who has been legally blind since he was shot in the head while serving in Afghanistan in 2002. "Whoever is cutting the budget must have a head injury themselves."

"With the bombs, the gunshot wounds and everything else, their plate is full," he said. "They need that money."

The Pentagon asked only for $7 million and didn't respond properly when congressional staffers tried to find out whether it needed more money for the program, said Jenny Manley, a spokeswoman for the Senate appropriations committee.

"The Pentagon needs to get behind the things that they want," she said. "Otherwise, we'd just be kind of guessing about what they really need."

Pentagon budget experts did not respond Monday to a request for information on why they had not sought more money.

Cut and Run Republicans, Part 2

In addition to underequipping troops deployed to the bloody Iraqi theater, the Bush Administration is also failing to support them when they return. It may seem a little unfair to single this Administration out on this, as this country has never done right by its veterans, but the disconnect between rhetoric and reality is too pronounced to ignore. Bush has claimed the mantle of "war time president," and has parlayed that title into carte blanche authority to unwrite our civil liberties. He makes many of his speeches before the captive audiences of military bases and academies, where our people in uniform are compelled by the UCMJ to show unwavering support for the Commander in Chief. He adopts pseudo-military regalia like some stunted version of a third world generalissimo. No other President in US history has adopted military trappings, including the former 5 star General Eisenhower, who always appeared in civilian attire. But Bush routinely coopts martial glory like it's cool.

This morning I read that many of our veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are returning to the US to live in the streets. This is not new, certainly, but at a time when Republicans are labeling multiply decorated Marine John Murtha, who served in two wars, as a "cut and run" Democrat, it underscores a tremendous audacity. The Republican Party has held both houses of Congress for the better part of both the Clinton and Bush Administrations. Is this the best they can do by the warriors they so love to lionize when it suits their purposes?

Thousands of veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan are facing a new nightmare -- the risk of homelessness. The government estimates that several hundred vets who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are homeless on any given night around the country, although the exact number is unknown.

The reasons that contribute to this new wave of homelessness are many: Some are unable to cope with life after daily encounters with insurgent attacks and roadside bombs; some can't navigate the government red tape; others simply don't have enough money to afford a house or apartment.

Homelessness is one of the many problems a tragically underfunded VA is saddled with. Another is the underlying cause of a good deal of that homelessness; post traumatic stress disorder.

About one-fourth of all homeless adults in America have served in the military -- most of them minority veterans.

There are now about 200,000 homeless vets in the United States, according to government figures.

"In recent years, we've tried to reach out sooner to new veterans who are having problems with post-traumatic stress, depression or substance abuse, after seeing combat," said Dougherty. "These are the veterans who most often end up homeless."

Earlier this week Knight Ridder reported that combat stress cases are well above anticipated numbers and the VA cannot cope.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is on a pace to see nearly 20,000 new cases of post-combat stress this year among service members who've served in Iraq or Afghanistan, more than six times the number of cases that officials had expected.

The reason for such high numbers is not mysterious.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been particularly stressful because they involve urban warfare amid civilians who are hard to distinguish from the enemy. There are no front lines or safe areas, and the enemy uses improvised bombs and ambushes.

Remember those heady days when we were told our troops would be greeted with flowers by the Iraqi people? Our troops are paying the price for that total lack of foresight, both here and at home, and without the support they need from the government that dispensed them into that nightmare.

A statement from the Democratic members of the House VA Committee said that even as the number of post-traumatic stress disorder cases increased, the VA had cut back the number of PTSD therapy sessions for veterans by 25 percent in the past 10 years.

In a related issue, the Government Accountability Office recently found that the Pentagon didn't seek further mental-health treatment for eight out of 10 soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan who showed signs of post-combat stress.

William Winkenwerder Jr., the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, responded that the GAO report was "flawed."

Well that flawed report seems to have forced the hand of the DOD which subsequently announced it will form a Mental Health Task Force. I'll withhold judgment until I see what remedies are prescribed by said task force, but the recent history of the Republican run executive and legislative branches gives little reason for optimism.

This country has a long history of treating our fighting men and women like so much disposable flesh. But the cynicism of a "war time president" who cuts back on services for veterans at the precise time it is creating so many of them is hard to overstate.

Republicans love to slap magnetic yellow ribbons on their SUVs and scold the left for not "supporting the troops" but as a party they can be counted on to "cut and run" when our troops need them most.

Cut and Run Republicans

My husband informs me he nearly drove his car off the road yesterday listening to Diane Rehm's news roundup. The reason for his shock and outrage? An email Rehm received from one of her listeners named Carol. The podcast is available on the WAMU website. Here is my attempt at a transcript of the pertinent portion of the broadcast:

My son is an Army PFC assigned to Military Intelligence based in Fort Hood, Texas. He's going to deploy to Iraq in early August. Last week his unit was informed that due to budget cutbacks, they would have to buy some of the equipment they'll need. He is infantry assigned to an M1 [probably Rehm's misreading of MI: Military Intelligence] unit and need ammo bags, a scope, rails, magazines for his rifle, and a holster for his issued handgun. He was told the Army will eventually issue magazines but they would be old and used and might not work properly so they should buy their own if they could. They were advised to look in pawn shops and Ebay for gear. [Emphasis added] The total for these items will be around a thousand dollars. My son brings home less than eleven hundred dollars a month.

Carol goes on to explain that she and her husband will foot the bill for their son's proper armament, but expresses concern for those families and soldiers who are not as well heeled. Why, she wonders, is Congress wasting its time on petty bickering, when we are sending our troops into battle without the proper equipment.

The bigger question is why they simultaneously look the other way while companies like Halliburton blow billions on no-bid contracts. Just this week a Republican majority tabled an amendment that would have called for oversight of the company with a notorious record of waste, mismanagement, and worse. So the message from Republicans is that taxpayers can eat losses of billions of dollars to a company which has been discovered supplying our troops with expired food products and contaminated water, and, on top of that, military families have to pay out of pocket for the basic equipment they will need to fight in an increasingly dangerous war.

One arcane detail raised by Carol's email is that her son has been issued a sidearm, which is not de rigueur for enlisted ranks, but rather for officers. Those units that are receiving them are most likely those that are being deployed to urban regions and doing some of the most dangerous fighting in Iraq. Pistols are generally used for close quarter combat. This is informed conjecture, on my part. It could just be that their supply office had a glut of pistols without holsters and are just throwing them whatever they have in lieu of what they actually need.

It seems to me that the only "cut and run" that's occurring is Republicans abandoning our troops while they are on the ground in an ill-advised war that is spiraling out of control. Hawkishness and jingoism will only take you so far and seems increasingly deficient against the backdrop of escalating bloodshed in Bagdad where a state of emergency has been called more than three years after this mission was declared accomplished. The military serves this Administration very well, providing air craft carriers to use as props for photo ops and as recipients for services that poison them while enriching White House cronies.