Joseph L. Galloway
is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist.
One of America's preeminent war correspondents,
with more than four decades as a reporter
and writer, he recently concluded an assignment
as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell
at the State Department.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent
22 years as a foreign and war correspondent
and bureau chief for United Press International,
and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and
senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
magazine. His overseas postings include tours
in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore
and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow
in the former Soviet Union. During the course
of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served
four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam
and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War
and half a dozen other combat operations.
In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert
Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division
(Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The
finest combat correspondent of our generation
-- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on prisoner abuse in Iraq. CHUCK KENNEDY, Knight Ridder Tribune.
WASHINGTON - When the people of power in this town find it necessary to issue ringing declarations of overwhelming support for one of their own, as they've done all week for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, it usually means that the object of their affection is toast.
President Bush visited the Pentagon and was shown new, even worse photos of prisoner abuse that are a harbinger of bad news still to come, then declared of Rumsfeld: "You are a strong secretary of defense, and our nation owes you a debt of gratitude." Rumsfeld's good friend Vice President Dick Cheney already had called him "the best secretary of defense the United States has ever had."
That doesn't mean Rumsfeld is out of the woods or the woodshed. Au contraire. Around here, that's usually interpreted as a sure sign that it's time to hire a moving van.
What strikes terror in the hearts of the administration isn't just the squalid photographs of the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison, but also a fear that a slumbering, complacent Congress might awaken and begin doing its job for the first time since Sept. 11, 2001.
Having gotten a taste for the spotlight, and watching executive branch big shots squirming under even the most inane of questions, what's to stop the committees of the House and Senate from examining the administration's rationales and planning for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their conduct of both?
The Bush administration has gotten a free ride from Congress and the American public since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. They demanded wartime powers, wartime secrecy, a wartime constriction of personal liberties and a wartime blank check from the public treasury.
With great freedom and great power, however, come great responsibility. What have they done with this? What are their successes? What are their failures?
Perhaps the time has come for a full accounting. Rumsfeld would not fare very well.
His penchant for micromanaging the deployment and use of the military was evident from the beginning of the campaign in Afghanistan, with dangerously low ceilings on the numbers of American troops that could be deployed there, and a ban on artillery in favor of close air support.
With securing Afghanistan and finding and defeating al-Qaeda still far from complete, the administration diverted its attention to Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
When the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency couldn't find evidence that Saddam posed a real threat, neo-conservatives in the administration began working with their good friend Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress to salt the mine.
Weapons of mass destruction. Saddam's push for nuclear weapons. Chalabi produced so-called Iraqi defectors who revealed it all. No evidence has been found to substantiate the defectors' allegations. Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress denies that it knowingly provided defectors who had bad information, but some of the defectors didn't fare well on lie-detector tests. Nevertheless, their tales were widely used by the administration as evidence that war was necessary.
Even worse, perhaps, the administration also accepted Chalabi's assurances that American troops would be welcomed with flower petals by a grateful Iraqi citizenry. That, coupled with Rumsfeld's desire to prove that when it comes to the military, lighter is better, meant there were never enough troops to defeat the bloody insurgency that's surprised Pentagon planners, or even to safeguard supply lines and guard prisoners.
Rumsfeld demanded and got total control of the American effort in Iraq, including the civilian administration and the reconstruction budget. With total control comes total responsibility. So we know where the buck stops when things go wrong in Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere in Iraq, even if those in the administration are in denial.
The 130,000 American troops on the ground today - half of them Army Reserve and National Guard - have done everything asked of them. Our secretary of defense recently described them as "fungible," which the dictionary defines as: interchangeable. Kind of like the parts in an engine.
Of all the descriptions of the American soldier I have ever heard or written - brave, selfless, weary, tired, proud or weeping - I've never heard "fungible."
Seven hundred seventy-four of them have died in Iraq; an additional 121 have died in Afghanistan and elsewhere. They and we deserve an accounting from the civilian leaders who sent them there.
