Mark Shields’s Our ‘Best Equipped’ Army? Baloney! exposes Bush and Co.’s “the best trained, best equipped” rhetoric for the cold-blooded lie that it’s been.
USA Today‘s Those Who Led Must Return reveals that “lighter and faster” is now “different, but not light.”
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s goal for the Army is to be lighter, faster and more deadly, rather than slow and armored. In the past year, the 3rd ID has become the first of the Army’s 10 active-duty divisions to be reorganized as “modular,” easily divided into smaller, more self-sufficient units the Pentagon can plug into place quickly when emergencies arise.
But the demands of Iraq — where insurgents attack U.S. convoys with roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and suicide vehicles — mean the 3rd ID is going there anything but light. It’s bringing its 70-ton Abrams tanks and its armored Bradley troop carriers, the kind of bulk the Pentagon was pulling out of Iraq a year ago in favor of quicker, lighter vehicles. The division’s convoy trucks and Humvees sport new steel cladding. Maj. Russ Goemaere, the 2nd Brigade spokesman, says troops will drive no unarmored vehicles in Iraq except for those that never leave military compounds.
The division’s vehicles are so heavy they would destroy roads if they drove. Rail lines taking them to port offer an intimidating display. Fresh desert-tan paint can’t hide the heft riding on hundreds of flatbed cars.
Rumsfeld, who will never be seriously challenged or relieved of his duties, allegedly because you can’t change horses in midstream even when all around you are drowning, is not quoted.
Rumsfeld is more, not less powerfull, than he’s ever been. If his influence over those arguing the particulars of the intelligence bill, and this bid for even more micro-managing powers, aren’t proof enough, then consider the obvious that the only Republicans calling for his head are those jockeying for position in the ’08 presidential show or have long-ago fallen from grace.
Bottom line, Rumsfeld isn’t going anywhere, as his descent to the bottom would reflect badly upon George. And nothing will be allowed to tarnish the illusory beatification of Time Magazine‘s “Person of the Year”, a publication that in an effort to boost sagging sales apparently, threw whatever remains of their journalistic integrity, out the window, by glorifying and saluting the power of propaganda in their reason for crowning the well-heeled serial liar.