Building 18 and the Battle of the Bulge

It's embarassing to compare the U.S. progress against the Wehrmacht and Japanese warlords of World War II to our war in Iraq, as I did in a post in October, 2006. I don't think our lack of on-the-ground progress has anything to do with the courage of the American troops who are dying in Iraq. It has everything to do with our civilian leadership. The lies that surround this war like flies on a dead rabbit are such that it is hard for the average person such as myself to support this war and, by extension, the people who fight this war.

An example of this are the systemic failures at Walter Reed hospital. I couldn't imagine a homeside GI beefing about some mold in Building 18 when his brothers were storming the beaches of Normardy. Why? It's because then national priorities eclipsed such minutia. The press and the majority of Americans suported the goals of the administration.

But that was then.

Now your're seeing the first of many similar Pulitzer-prize making stories, a kind of passive-aggressive attack on the Bush war by highlighting the collateral damage of this war-- recruiting practices, veteran discrimination, accounting irregularities among military vendors, and the like. Such stories would be inconceivable if this were a real war, which, of course, it clearly is not.