The Wider Shame of Walter Reed

NYT Editorial

It is impossible not to feel fury at the shameful neglect of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed’s outpatient facilities, just a few miles from an oblivious and neglectful White House. Many have been housed in rooms coated with mold and infested with cockroaches and mice. They have been swamped with confusing paperwork and forced to take responsibility for managing their own medical care. And when they or their family members have complained, their pleas for help have been callously ignored.

In a desperate scramble to mute public outrage, President Bush yesterday named two political veterans to lead a commission charged with investigating conditions throughout the entire system of military and veterans’ hospitals. The choices seem to be good ones: Bob Dole, a veteran wounded in World War II and a former Republican Party candidate for president, and Donna Shalala, who ran the Health and Human Services Department for President Bill Clinton.

There is plenty of blame to go around. Officials at Walter Reed were egregiously negligent. The Army’s high command, and the Joint Chiefs above them, were too weak-kneed or obtuse to demand adequate resources for medical care — just as they were too fearful for their own careers to demand adequate troops to fight the Iraq war to begin with.

But the fundamental responsibility rests with the president and his former defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who stubbornly insisted on going to war without sufficient resources — and then sought to hide the costs of their disastrous mistakes from the American public.

Is it any surprise that the war’s wounded have been hidden away in the shadows of moldy buildings by an administration that refused to let photographers take pictures of returning coffins? Or a White House that keeps claiming that victory in this failed and ever more costly war is always just a few more months away?

The Walter Reed revelations once again put the lie to the president’s claim that everything is being done to support America’s troops. Just as the administration has been shockingly slow to provide the necessary body armor for troops in Iraq and notably complacent about rotating exhausted troops back into the war, so, too, has it been reluctant to confront the large casualty toll from Iraq and Afghanistan. Military doctors have been amazingly proficient about saving lives that would have been lost in earlier wars. But as we now know, the injured survivors too often fall through the cracks.

The new commission’s investigation, supplemented by the military’s own inquiries and by oversight hearings in Congress, must explore all aspects of this scandal. The revelations have flushed out disturbing complaints about shoddy treatment throughout the military and the veterans’ medical system and about a hostile process for determining disability benefits. None of this can be tolerated. The soldiers who have sacrificed their health and limbs to a misguided and mismanaged war deserve the best possible care when they return — for a lifetime, if necessary. And the president needs to learn that the horrors of this war can no longer be denied or hidden away.