A year after former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned, someone dumped at the Washington Post’s door an avalanche of his “snowflakes”: his term for the multiple memos he circulated within the Pentagon during his tenure. One flake in particular rises to the top of this heap. In April 2006, Rumsfeld advised staffers to respond to the growing calls from retired… return to article
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Reader Comments (1)Page 1 of 1 pagesThe “military cure,” as you put it, is, of course, the military disease. Americans never again will hear a Republican president advise them, as did Dwight Eisenhower, to “beware” our military-industrial complex; and The Golden Fleece award of the late Sen. Proxmire no longer graces us with its constructive criticisms and condemnations of Pentagonal profligacy. Alas, so deeply ingrained is the militaristic rationale that video games prepare children for combat, martial-arts instruction seems the preparatory coming-of-age ritual for blue-collar cannon fodder, and Congressional outbursts of lambaste for the social blasphemy of blank-check defense are impolitic. It seems more probable than when President Eisenhower uttered his courageous and prophetic comment on the industrial sizing of commander-in-chiefdom that we shall bury ourselves in weapons procurement and institutionalize fear stemming from the arms bazaar with which we have contaminated global relations. No longer do university and college students rail against defense department liaisons with academia, or object that the leading edge of science salutes warfare. So overwhelming has the Pentagon’s zealotry become that husbands and wives are now together deployed into harm’s way with a policy hailed for its compassionate sensitivity to the strains on a marriage that war can induce. To destructure The Pentagon is tantamount to colonizing Mars. It would appear that the latter will precede the former.
Posted by Bud Wizer on Apr 2, 2008 at 12:26 PM Page 1 of 1 pages -
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