Aid and Comfort

Michael Moss has a story in the NYT telling about one more way Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush have given aid and comfort to our enemies. When Rumsfeld went to Iraq
to tour the Abu Ghraib prison camp, military officials did not rely on a government-issued Humvee to transport him safely on the ground. Instead, they turned to Halliburton, the oil services contractor, which lent the Pentagon a rolling fortress of steel called the Rhino Runner.
Nothing wrong with that. The crime consists in the fact that Bush, Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld's careerist bureaucrat Generals have consistently dragged their feet on providing our troops comparable protection. The Army has known for 25 years that the Humvee is unsuited to the kind of operations we are now carrying out in Iraq. Moss gives example after example of how a slow moving bureaucracy and incompetence have slowed the delivery of adequate systems to the troops.

In addition to the deficiencies of the armored Humvee, procurement has been slowed by the fact that
The Defense Department continues to rely on just one small company in Ohio to armor Humvees. And the company, O'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt, has waged an aggressive campaign to hold onto its exclusive deal even as soaring rush orders from Iraq have been plagued by delays.
When Bush wanted torture camps, it took weeks or months to set them up. The fact that so little has happened on the armored vehicle front can only be the result of the fact that Bush and Rumsfeld don't care about our soldiers - especially if the alternative is inconveniencing a corporation that might make campaign contributions.

The procurement bureaucracy is slow, cumbersome and unresponsive, but if Bush or Rumsfeld went to Congress and said "I need this to protect our troops," I guarantee that Congress would remove any obstacles faster than you can say "Terry Schiavo." They have not. They don't care, and they are the ones who are stabbing America in the back (as Brad DeLong puts it).

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