IT would be good to think that the Americans will be brought up short by the revelations of the appalling way in which the US military has treated its soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. But will they in fact ask themselves the key question: If this is how our generals are treating our own, how must they be treating the people of Iraq whose country we invaded to bring democracy, peace and stability?
The danger of course is that the disclosure of at least four years of neglect and indifference by those running the US military’s main Walter Reed Hospital will be seen purely in domestic terms. The Bush administration’s rapid firing of two top figures responsible for running the medical center — which is part of the nationwide Walter Reed Health Care System with nine other major facilities — demonstrates a concern that the discovery will further fuel fast rising anti-war fervor. Congressmen who enthusiastically backed the Iraqi invasion — nearly all of them — will now use the US military’s neglect and maltreatment of its wounded soldiers as a further excuse for distancing themselves from their earlier folly. Some will no doubt thunder that while the administration was still insisting the US was triumphing over the insurgents, wounded heroes only a few miles away from the White House were suffering in squalid rat- and cockroach-infested wards.
But how many legislators, if any, will learn the wider and subtler lesson that the reprehensible treatment of US soldiers by US soldiers is symptomatic of a deep and destructive malaise, which underpins America’s foreign failures and has contributed so massively to the tragedy now being endured by the Iraqi people? US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has blamed the Walter Reed scandal on “a lack of leadership” and he could not have spoken any words that are truer. It is indeed abysmal leadership from the Oval Office on down which has led to the US disaster in Iraq. The virtually total neglect of postwar invasion planning; the administration’s stunning ignorance of the culture and tensions within Iraq; the belated half-hearted attempts to win Iraqi “hearts and minds” and the recourse to brute force when the feeble efforts failed — are all consequences of not only a lack of leadership but also of a shockingly ignorant one.
Just as they were in Vietnam some 30 years ago, US soldiers are far from home in a conflict they barely understand. Their main concern is not to save Iraq for democracy, but to save their own lives long enough to get home in one piece. Their morale was long ago damaged by the failure of their high-tech weaponry to sweep away the insurgency. Every Iraqi is now seen as an enemy just as every Vietnamese came to be viewed as a “gook.” The news that once flown back home, their injured comrades have been treated like dirt will do nothing for their confidence in their commanders. Preoccupied with their own fate, such men will care even less about the Iraqis that the blundering and uninformed Bush sent them to liberate.
