Brain injuries are becoming the signature injury of the Iraq war. As of March 31, the Pentagon reported about 1,200 traumatic brain injuries sustained in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But when the Pentagon submitted its budget request for next year it cut the funding for the Defense and Veterans Brain injury Center from $14 million to $7 million, and never adequately responded when congressional staffers asked whether it needed more money. The center had sought $19 million to care for the growing numbers of brain injury cases.
Sgt. Maj. Colin Rich, a Fort Bragg, N.C. soldier who has been legally blind since he was shot in the head while serving in Afghanistan derided the decision:
It’s just rediculous. Whoever is cutting the budget must have a head injury themselves. With all the gunshot wounds and everything else, their plate is full. They need that money.
No one with the brain-injury center was allowed to comment.
While the Bush administration war hawks make political milage urging people to support our troops, their actions betray anything but support.
Senior Pentagon officials privately refer to Bush as “numnuts” and call his actions “nitshit.” Some worry openly about the President’s mental capability. It has become so bad that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs recently called a number of senior officers on the carpet and told them to tone down the rhetoric.
“The President’s administration is coming apart at the seams,” says a longtime GOP consultant. “He lost the support of the American people long ago and more and more Republicans are jumping off the good ship Bush.”
The Bush Administration boasts that arrest of the number two al-Qaida leader (the 39th time #2 has been caught) in Iraq will stem growing violence and the country’s continued slide into civil war. But Military professionals as “just another sham” by a President who has lied repeatedly about the unpopular and failed war that will forever mark his Presidency as a monumental failure.
“Al-Qaida is not the dominating influence in Iraq,” says one top Pentagon planner. “They’re just bit players.”
We face two more years of downward spiral unless the courageous, stand-on-principle Democrats in Congress can wrest control from Bush.
Don’t hold your breath.