Two Wars Down: An Ungrateful Nation Now Turns on Its Veterans

- We can afford wars, but not the people who fight and serve, say Alan Simpson, James Webb, ... -

By Gordon Duff in Veterans Today

A week ago, we marched out of Iraq, leaving 50,000 'administrative' troops and tens of thousands of contractors behind. They perform no useful purpose of any kind, no more than the original attack which Secretary of Defense Robert Gates now openly refers to as unnecessary and wrong.

The war that never should have started cost America 3 trillion dollars, much of it unaccounted for. Along with the thousands of American dead and the untold devastation in Iraq, the war also cost America the health and welfare of up to 400,000 of her veterans, America's children. A generation of young adults, another generation of our best and bravest stand betrayed.

We have money for fraud of every kind, projects paid for but never finished, weapons stolen, defective or never delivered, buying poisoned water for our troops at five times the cost of French Wine, I could go on for hours, the list is endless.



This week, when Senator's Alan Simpson, the wild-talking Wyoming Republican and now formerly a stalwart veterans' advocate Daniel Akaka talk about saving money, it is to come from payments to veterans for "presumptive" illness.

Don't believe it's just these two, its the whole gang of them, with few exceptions, and its not the first time. When Bush gutted funding for Veterans and up to nine-million disability claims related to war wounds and the endless environmental crimes against our troops shredded or shelved, even our mainstream veterans organizations stood behind him.

I spent two hours on the phone with a Vietnam veteran I have known for 35 years. He has both a son and son-in-law seriously wounded from Iraq. His 30 years in government and 28 years in the military, many years working with veterans, gave him the skills to help his own family negotiate the minefield of bureaucratic insanity servicemen and women are faced with when returning from war, used up, smashed, maimed or poisoned, discarded and left to die.

How many veterans died with claims in processing? How many died of undiagnosed poisonings or waiting for that medical appointment that never comes? It isn’t thousands or tens of thousands. Is the number as high as a million? It may be, we aren’t allowed to know.