Monday, December 13, 2004
Joe Conason
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When a courageous Army specialist confronted Donald Rumsfeld over the insufficient armor on military vehicles at a "town hall" meeting in Kuwait on Dec. 8, the secretary of defense may well have felt an unpleasant twinge of déjà vu.
Perhaps Rumsfeld recalled (as the reporters accompanying him on last week's trip apparently did not) that he had heard precisely the same complaint at a similar town hall meeting in Baghdad -- seven months ago.
That May 13 assembly was the last stop on a lightning visit to Iraq by the defense secretary that featured a speech at the Abu Ghraib detention camp. Aiming to preserve morale as well as his own job, he was no doubt preoccupied by the prisoner abuse scandal. Critics at home were already demanding his resignation, but the American troops seemed glad to see their civilian chief when he showed up to talk with them at one of Saddam Hussein's palaces.
In contrast to the strange answer he offered last week, when he provoked a national uproar by snappishly informing the troops that armor doesn't always work, Rumsfeld reacted quite differently last May. Back then, in fact, he offered no answer at all. But there's no doubt he was listening when the issue of inadequate armor came up in Baghdad. (There is also little doubt that, whatever he may think about armor's efficacy against roadside bombs, the secretary doesn't lack for hard protection when traveling in Iraq and Kuwait.)
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