Well, Well, Well
Army Secretary and Enron Exec Thomas White Is Fired -- But for All the Wrong Reasons
by Tamara Baker

April 25, 2003 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- Well, well, well.

I'm not just speaking of what our troops are currently guarding in Iraq -- as opposed to, say, banks, hospitals and museums.

I'm talking about Donald Rumsfeld's firing of Army Secretary Thomas White (http://www.salon.com/news/wire/2003/04/26/army_leadership/index.html).

Tom White, you may recall, is a prime example of the dark side of what President Eisenhower referred to as "the military-industrial complex." He's spent the better part of the past two decades bouncing back and forth between the Department of Defense and various corporations -- the most recent being Enron, where the unit he headed was up to its neck in cooked books and what former employees described as "illusory profits."

He's a big backer of the privatization gospel, of course. That's why he got picked to be Secretary of the Army in the first place.

Which is why it's sad for me to report that his firing is a black day for the US military.

Why?

Because he -- and Army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki -- aren't being fired for being corrupt moneygrubbers. They're fired for being right, and for being in Donald Rumsfeld's way.

White and Shinseki, along with every other Pentagon official who isn't a Rumsfeld-installed civilian chickenhawk, argued most forcefully against invading Iraq, especially with the skeleton forces Rumsfeld wanted to use. It was only after lobbying him hard that he agreed to have "extra" troops held in reserve on carriers in the Gulf -- troops that turned out to be necessary during the second week of the invasion, when sandstorms and fiercer-than-expected Iraqi resistance threatened to cut off the US and UK's supply lines, which would have forced Rummy to look up the word "Corregidor" in the history books of which he's allegedly so fond.

Of course, the troops were used -- and Rumsfeld now is pretending that it was his idea all along to have those reserve troops at the ready. He's also trying to pretend that he won't need them around to restore order, much less create a government that will be acceptable to Western eyes, so he's starting to send them home.

So he has to make White and Shinseki fall on their swords -- presumably with exit contracts to keep them from writing their memoirs.

Or from publicly saying "I told you so" when a depleted US force is unable to keep the irate Iraqis from putting Ahmad Chalabi's head on a pole as Iraq's mullahs seize power.

Well, well, well.