Did VA Hide Figures Showing 1 in 4 US Veterans
of Iraq and Afghanistan Disabled From Service?

From Democracy Now:

PAUL SULLIVAN: It means, in simple terms, that it appears the administration was playing a definitions game. Right now, if you read the report, Amy, from the Veterans' Benefits Administration, it says that there is actually no official definition for the global war on terror. The global war on terror, or GWOT, has several other names: the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom. So, depending upon how a reporter asked the question, the administration has a tremendous amount of flexibility in what kind of answer they want to provide.

Let me give you an example. Right now, the Department of Defense, if you ask them how many service members are in Iraq, they’ll answer 150,000. However if you ask the question, “How many service members are now deployed to the global war on terror, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?” the number is actually 250,000. The higher number takes into account service members in places like Kuwait, Qatar, Diego Garcia and the nations surrounding Iraq and Afghanistan and aboard ships. So, what VA and DOD are doing is they’re playing a definition game. If someone doesn’t ask for exactly the right kind of report and the right kind of statistic, then the Department of Defense or the Department of Veterans’ Affairs can simply say the report doesn’t exist.

AMY GOODMAN: Paul Sullivan, what does this mean for costs? What does it mean for all of the disability costs?

PAUL SULLIVAN: What it means is, in terms of how much money the Iraq and Afghanistan war will cost taxpayers, the war will cost billions per year well out into the future.

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The conventional wisdom is that the lessons coming out of the Vietnam are something along these lines: have clear, achievable goals, use massive force, don't attempt to "nation build," and have a full understanding of what you're getting into. Or something to that effect. The White House, however, clearly is working out of a different textbook. Their Vietnam lessons: don't let the US public know how bad it really is by keeping the press far away from actual fighting or the returning bodies of dead soldiers, playing numbers games with dead and wounded, and plain old fashioned Nixonian lying. This report from Democracy Now isn't surprising at all. In fact, it's totally in keeping with what we've seen from the Oval Office thus far.

What surprises me is the figure: one out of every four Iraq/Afghanistan vets is now disabled. One out of four. That boggles my mind. I've seen a few TV reports about how field medicine is so advanced nowdays, that hundreds of soldiers who would have died on the battlefield in past conflicts actually survive in this one. But the other side of that success seems rarely discussed: they live, yes, but they're coming back home with disabilities. That's just not acceptable. We're crippling--what?--thousands of young men. What, exactly, are the numbers on this?

Maybe the anti-war movement should start talking about all these disabled vets when they're talking about how many soldiers we've lost. It seems significant.

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