During their tenure, the "neo-con man" civilian leadership of the Department of Defense (especially Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz) have treated the military leadership with contempt and arrogance. For example, the public humiliation of U.S. Army General Shinseki, as described by
James Fallows in an interview with Frontline:
Q: Three weeks before the war, Shinseki testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Describe what happened.
A: Shinseki has been, through his career, a real by-the-book guy. So he would not go out of his way to make public disagreements that were clearly going on inside the Pentagon. But in the hearing where Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan was sort of drawing him out on what he expected the troop levels to be, Shinseki finally said, based on his own past experience, that he thought it would be several hundred thousand troops. This became a real arcane term about, what did several hundred thousand mean? But let's say 300,000 and up. His real level, internally, had been in the 400,000 range.
Several days later, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, appeared before a different committee. [He] went out of his way essentially to slap Shinseki in the face, to say there had been some recent estimates that had been wildly off the mark -- using the term, "wildly off the mark." Then he went on to say that it was almost impossible to imagine that it would be harder, and take more troops, to occupy Iraq than it had taken to conquer them; whereas that point, that it would be harder to occupy than conquer, was in fact the central theme the Army had been advancing before the war.
In Friday's featured center-column article
"We Lost" on Daily Kos,
Sidney Blumenthal's Guardian commentary quotes numerous retired Generals and policy experts. In particular,
General Odom remarked that the tension between the Bush administration and the senior military officers over Iraqi was worse than any he has ever seen with any previous government, including Vietnam. "I've never seen it so bad between the office of the secretary of defence and the military. There's a significant majority believing this is a disaster....
The disregard that the Bush-appointed civilian DoD leadership has for the military could be a weakness that Kerry and the Democrats could exploit, and could potentially bring veterans or currently-serving military to Kerry's side (or at least to the anti-Bush side).
At a time of danger and conflict, it is essential for our civilian and military leaders to respect and trust each other. Each side must feel they are able to speak their mind and "commit truth telling" without being embarrassed, ignored, or reassigned. In order to change the tone at the Pentagon and in the military, we must elect John Kerry and get rid of the "neo-con men" that currently occupy the top of the Defense Department.
If you know of other examples of how Bush, Rumsfeld and their gang have abused our military leaders, please provide them here, write LTEs, etc.