It was the question heard around the world, asked by U.S. Army Specialist Thomas Wilson of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?"
There are several striking things about that question. The first for me was the insider language, "compromised ballistic glass" for example. I had to look it up. Compromised ballistic glass can be a windshield from a smashed Iraqi cop car, or a disabled and often shot-up American vehicle that had been dragged to a landfill. Imagine salvaging from the crucible of what you knew was a colleague’s death.
You would know that your fallen unmet friend would urge you on, "Harvest what is here! Protect yourselves!" But you would still sense the sacredness of the warrior’s chariot, and your instincts would battle your intellect, and your mind would go crazy.
The soldiers cabal together the sturdiest of the scrap and weld it onto various parts of their Army-issued vehicles, often on the undercarriage to mitigate roadside bombs. The added unbalanced weight causes its own host of problems though, some of which could endanger the soldiers in other ways.
If a weighed-down Humvee is ambushed and outnumbered, and high speed is paramount, a modified vehicle might not be able to mount a fast enough getaway. It’s a frustrating and terrible situation, and judging by the cheers of Wilson’s fellow soldiers when he asked the question, it has probably been pretty tough on morale for soldiers who have had to improvise armor for their fighting vehicles.
The second interesting insider jargon item in Specialist Wilson’s interrogative is the now often-quoted phrase "up-armor." Like "Humvee," "up-armor" and its various declensions have suddenly been born into the vast bog of popular American terms.
People like the sound of "up-armor" even though the whole reason the public heard of it was because we weren’t "up-armored" enough. It’s good to be "up-armored," and we should be "up-armoring" our support vehicles as quickly as possible. I’ll yellow ribbon you that and raise you a tattered antenna flag.
The man most accountable for each of the dead and wounded in Iraq responded to Specialist Wilson’s earnest question with the chimy maxim, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have." What the hell is this? Is Aesop suddenly our secretary of defense? Rumsfeld shouldn’t need fable rhetoric to appease under-equipped soldiers asking legitimate questions.
Bill Kristol, conservative editor of the Weekly Standard, recently suggested that we might not have the secretary of defense that we want or wish to have. His was probably the most succinct possible way to express the revulsion we should all feel at Rumsfeld’s arrogance in the face of a legitimate question from one of the people on the front lines of this terribly costly war.
The most obnoxious implication from Rumsfeld’s patronizing rejoinder is that this war sneaked up on the Bush administration. According to William C. Clark’s book, the neoconservatives and to a lesser degree Bush himself had every intention of doing Iraq from the first moments of having been appointed.
Seventeen U.N. resolutions had been flouted, and we invaded them 10 years previously with some unfinished business in Saddam Hussein. That plans for war with Iraq far predate Sept. 11, 2001, should be common knowledge for any hobbyist political observer.
Of course we were going to invade Iraq. If I knew it in November of 2000, Rumsfeld knew it too. For Rumsfeld to sarcastically suggest that the Bush War was a response to a suddenly gathering storm insults his own intelligence by insulting ours. If he is excusing his office with a glib little bon mot that implies the administration didn’t see this war coming, he has psychological and moral deficiencies that disqualify him from stewarding the destiny of so many of people.
How disgraceful to have volleyed back to a question like that with a trite truism. What I wonder most is whether he had envisioned such a question coming his way. Was this a carefully considered General Patton slap to the enlisted man’s head? Had Rumsfeld considered this question coming his way and having ruminated over that possibility, did he arrive at the conclusion that these words would be the best way to respond to a soldier’s consternation over lack of materiel?
Rumsfeld went on to say "You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored Humvee and it can be blown up." What lesson should we learn from this arrogant bastard’s dissociative rhetoric? We learn first that he doesn’t much care about the men and women swallowing the bitter pill of war, but that he has a rock-steady commitment to the imagined cure.
Can you say "Iraq rhetoric" three times fast? Rumsfeld can. Rumsfeld can and does every day. Sometimes he slips up, usually not too badly. This time he slipped up badly; he let his essence through, and for a public person as loathsome as Donald Rumsfeld, letting one’s vile essence through is a tactical error on his part and hopefully a wake-up call to anyone curably hypnotized by the Bush administration’s tragic decisions.
People are up in arms over what Rumsfeld said. My question is why aren’t people irate about what he has done? A parallel can be drawn to James Watt’s termination as secretary of the interior under Reagan. Watt savaged the environment with impunity for years at the behest of American corporations. He was finally fired when in response to an accusation of a lack of diversity in his cabinet he said, "I have a black, two Jews and a cripple (on my staff)." Whatever it took, I was fine with Watt’s rustication, but like Rumsfeld, there was a lot more to object to than him having said this one incredibly stupid thing.
Chris Elliott can be reached at CDElliott009@aol.com
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