In the recent presidential campaign, George Bush attacked John Kerry for not supporting our troops in Iraq. Now that the election is over, George Bush has allowed the sacking of Congress’s staunchest supporter of military veterans, Representative Chris Smith from New Jersey. And Bush called Kerry a flip-flopper? “What kind of message are we sending to those troops who are now coming back with arms and legs missing?” asks disabled Vietnam veteran Charles Carroll in the Trenton Times. “That’s outrageous, isn’t it? That’s a slap in the face, isn’t it?” “You go to war with the military you have,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told America last month, making it clear what is most important to the Bush Administration is the war, not the troops fighting the war. And now that the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction has ended, it is clear to all--except the Fox faithful deep in their armchair foxholes--that the war in Iraq was unnecessary.

When a nation’s leaders are indifferent to the safety of their troops, sending them into battle without proper equipment and in insufficient numbers, and, incredibly, sending them to a war that is unnecessary, something has gone drastically wrong in America. What has gone drastically wrong is we have a president who clearly does not respect and value the lives of America’s soldiers, except during the presidential campaign.

So I was not surprised yesterday when House Republicans, with the full support of the White House, demoted and humiliated the leading advocate for veterans in Congress. As our soldiers die and lose limbs in Iraq, as more disabled veterans seek assistance in Veterans Administration’s facilities, the Republican Party sacked Chris Smith, the chairman of the House Veterans’ Affairs committee. In degrading the best friend military veterans had in Washington, the Republicans degraded all military veterans.

“During his four-year tenure,” Ari Berman writes in the Nation, “Chris Smith authored twenty-two bills benefiting veterans: increasing veteran education funding through the GI bill by 46 percent, allocating $1 billion for homeless vets and $1.4 billion for expanded healthcare programs, and providing an extra $100 million in benefits for surviving spouses.”

“The leadership’s problem with Smith,” said conservative Robert Novak in the Chicago Sun-Times, “has been his insatiable desire to make life better for veterans during his 24 years on the Veterans Affairs Committee.”

Smith had angered tax-slashing-during-wartime Republicans because he did not believe stingy VA budgets were fair to those who have paid the cost to defend this nation, or fight in its follies, unlike the Republican Party leadership who are eager to slash the veterans’ budget. Because Representative Smith was defeated yesterday in the political trenches of Washington, former soldiers, and those current soldiers fighting now in Iraq and Afghanistan, will soon be paying the cost in reduced health care and benefits here in America.

According to Ari Berman, a top Republican aide justified his party’s sacking of Smith because they need someone who will tell veterans groups, “Enough is enough.”

In hearing that he lost his chairmanship of the Veterans Committee, Chris Smith told the Trenton Times, “It's almost as if no good deed goes unpunished.”

Stewart Nusbaumer is editor of Intervention Magazine. He served with the U.S. Marine Corps in Vietnam on the DMZ. You can email Stewart at Stewart@interventionmag.com

Posted Thursday, January 13, 2005