One of the great unreported stories -- one which should be crowed from the rooftops by Kerry and his surrogates -- is the support Kerry is receiving from retired military officers of the highest caliber, versus the noticeable lack of such heavy guns supporting Bush's candidacy this time around.
The Kerry campaign, or perhaps MoveOn.org and other 527's, needs to focus public attention not only on Kerry's own stable of generals and admirals -- which includes former members and chairs of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Central Command -- but remind the mainstream press (or at least the American public via ads) that Bush has no military support of equal caliber outside of Tommy Franks, whose own support is suspect given Senator Bob Graham's account of his conversation with Franks about the diversion of resources from Afghanistan to Iraq before the invasion. In fact, General Zinni has been quite critical publicly of Bush's military policies (as, most recently, has Lieutenant General James T. Conway, the outgoing commander of US Marines in Iraq), and General Norman Schwartzkopf has explicitly said that, although he spoke on behalf of Bush's nomination at the 2000 Republican convention, he most decidedly does not support him now.
I looked on the Bush/Cheney website for some sort of military advisory group akin to Kerry's, but found none. Moreover, the only thing I found on the site showing military officers supporting Bush was a press release gathering comments from mostly second-tier officers supporting Bush's recently-announced plan to redeploy military forces worldwide. Interestingly, the positive comments were
all limited to remarks about redeploying the Western European forces ("we're not fighting the Cold War anymore" was the refrain), which has not been the focus of Kerry's and others' criticisms of the plan. Notably, none of the Bush military supporters said
anything about the wisdom of pulling troops out of South Korea. Given the "forest fire"/"hydroelectric plant" mushroom cloud over North Korea this past weekend, Bush's idiotic scheme to withdraw troops from South Korea is even more insane and dangerous. (By the way, has anyone heard of radiation being detected? If it
was a nuclear test, civilian scientists should be picking up higher radiation levels.)
Back on point: the Bush campaign should also be called to account for its grandstanding a month ago. When the Kerry campaign announced its dozen admirals and generals the last week of July during the DNC, Bush's spokesmen said that they had over 100 high-level retired military officers supporting Bush, and that they would be releasing their names the week of the RNC. I've looked and looked, but, as Gomer Pyle would have said, "surprise, surprise, surprise": I can find no such announcement anywhere, neither on the Bush/Cheney website nor on the Web.
Let us not also forget about all the intelligence officers -- from the ones who circulated an open letter to Bush in July 2003 to the several dozen interviewed in Bob Greenwald's latest documentary -- who have cried out Cassandra-like to try to warn the U.S. about the dangers to our national security from the Bush administration's foreign policy. The support for Kerry just announced by the 9/11 widows who spearheaded the demand for an investigation provides further confirmation -- their disgust with Bush's lies, manipulations, inaction, and lack of caring are palpable.
If there were just one mainstream media outlet who cared at all about the security of this nation (not to mention caring about their own personal safety), they would have been all over this, to the point that Bush and Cheney would be castigated and/or laughed at for trying to base their reelection campaign on national security, instead of its being the focus of the RNC because it is the one area where the uninformed/misinformed American public still trusts these dangerous thugs. Maybe America's journalists, editors, and pundits want to wait until the mushroom cloud is floating above their own heads.