BernieHund: The Political Watchdog

According to CNN

Casualties could have been reduced by half among Marines in Iraq if specially armored vehicles had been deployed more quickly in some cases, a report to the Pentagon says.

Marine Corps spokesman Col. David Lapan said the Defense Department’s inspector general wants to investigate the report’s claims that bureaucratic delays undermined the program to develop the armored vehicles.

Well, don’t you think you would be stressed if you were sent out to work every day with no tools?  Can you imagine a carpenter with no hammer?  Or, a computer programmer with no computer?

Think about it.  Our government is funding between $10 and $12 BILLION a month to wage war in Iraq and our Marines are in hostile territory with unarmored vehicles. 

“If the mass procurement and fielding of MRAPs had begun in 2005 in response to the known and acknowledged threats at that time, as the USMC is doing today, hundreds of deaths and injuries could have been prevented,” Gayl wrote in the report.

The report concluded that bureaucratic delays plagued the program at the height of the insurgency, when U.S. troops were regularly being attacked and killed by roadside bombs.

The fact is that Rumsfeld, Bush and Cheney were willing to send our Marines and other military services into “harm’s way” without the tools they needed.  Rumsfeld on more than one occasion said that we went to war with the military we had, not the one we wished we had or wanted.  And, with Rumsfeld now out to pasture, the war continues without the tools needed to protect our military from the insurgents.

I would like to put the entire blame on the administration.  It would be so simple, but the truth is that the Senate and House continue to fund this war, wasting billions of dollars a month, to fight a war that should have never begun (and they all know it).  And, if we aren’t using that money to protect our service men and women or give them the care they deserve when they come home, where is the money going?