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The Wider Shame of Walter Reed
The New York Times | Editorial
Wednesday 07 March 2007
It is impossible not to feel fury at the shameful neglect of wounded soldiers
at Walter Reed's outpatient facilities, just a few miles from an oblivious
and neglectful White House. Many have been housed in rooms coated with mold
and infested with cockroaches and mice. They have been swamped with confusing
paperwork and forced to take responsibility for managing their own medical care.
And when they or their family members have complained, their pleas for help
have been callously ignored.
In a desperate scramble to mute public outrage, President Bush yesterday named
two political veterans to lead a commission charged with investigating conditions
throughout the entire system of military and veterans' hospitals. The
choices seem to be good ones: Bob Dole, a veteran wounded in World War II and
a former Republican Party candidate for president, and Donna Shalala, who ran
the Health and Human Services Department for President Bill Clinton.
There is plenty of blame to go around. Officials at Walter Reed were egregiously
negligent. The Army's high command, and the Joint Chiefs above them, were
too weak-kneed or obtuse to demand adequate resources for medical care -
just as they were too fearful for their own careers to demand adequate troops
to fight the Iraq war to begin with.
But the fundamental responsibility rests with the president and his former
defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who stubbornly insisted on going to war
without sufficient resources - and then sought to hide the costs of their
disastrous mistakes from the American public.
Is it any surprise that the war's wounded have been hidden away in the
shadows of moldy buildings by an administration that refused to let photographers
take pictures of returning coffins? Or a White House that keeps claiming that
victory in this failed and ever more costly war is always just a few more months
away?
The Walter Reed revelations once again put the lie to the president's
claim that everything is being done to support America's troops. Just
as the administration has been shockingly slow to provide the necessary body
armor for troops in Iraq and notably complacent about rotating exhausted troops
back into the war, so, too, has it been reluctant to confront the large casualty
toll from Iraq and Afghanistan. Military doctors have been amazingly proficient
about saving lives that would have been lost in earlier wars. But as we now
know, the injured survivors too often fall through the cracks.
The new commission's investigation, supplemented by the military's
own inquiries and by oversight hearings in Congress, must explore all aspects
of this scandal. The revelations have flushed out disturbing complaints about
shoddy treatment throughout the military and the veterans' medical system
and about a hostile process for determining disability benefits. None of this
can be tolerated. The soldiers who have sacrificed their health and limbs to
a misguided and mismanaged war deserve the best possible care when they return
- for a lifetime, if necessary. And the president needs to learn that
the horrors of this war can no longer be denied or hidden away.
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