I notice the article doesn't even mention the use of depleted uranium and its after-effects. The monetary legacy of DU will, in all likelihood, be at least two-fold: increased illness for American vets exposed to DU, but also increased illnesses for people living in Iraq. (to say nothing of increased incidences of birth defects for the children of persons in both groups.)

2 trillion dollars worth of hundred dollar bills, stacked, would be about 546 miles of hundred dollar bills. Some nice pocket change.

It's tragic but not particularly surprising.

Many chicken hawks, from Cheney and Bush on down, have always been eager for other people's kids to fight fictitiously rationaled, optional wars. These same people, enriched off the government trough, then tighten the screws on the working families from which most of the armed forces come from.

Why would health care be any different? They have lifetime, state-of-the-art, no-expense care, paid by the government. Private health care - that's for suckers.

The fact that they are now slashing care promised to military personnel and their families isn't really unexpected, is it?

It's funny - conservatives SAY they're pro-military, but why is it the left that, with few exceptions, try to support them in concrete ways?

Any government official that tries to restrict health care to veterans should have to waive their to-the-grave, no-expense-spared government-provided health care. I would LOVE to see the Dems try pushing something like this through - just to make the Republicans squirm. Would be a great "red meat" issue for progressives to stick it to the conservatives with.

That this Iraq war has probably the highest ratio of battlefield and related severe survivable injuries to deaths. This has resulted in a medical care and VA system that is completely overwhelmed. The sad fact is that more and more severe injuries while survivable now leave in their wake huge numbers of wounded soldiers who are left with little to no after care. I don't have any other message than this simple statistical fact that should have been shouted from the rooftops years ago.

How does cutting veterans' coverage differ from the national corporate rush to abrogate defined benefit pension plans? The military's only reaching the same conclusions that the wise managers at Delphi, United, IBM, and others have: they can't put a competitive product on the world market hampered by outrageously costly ongoing commitments to a bunch of pampered American workers. To paraphrase Thomas Friedman, who is Right About Everything, the 'gold-plated' benefits packages delusional American workers expect as a birthright are a thing of the past. There's no sense whining about broken promises. It's just economic reality that these costs are unsustainable.

Who's stupid idea was it to pay people after they stop working anyway? Only a moron would have thought that made any sense.

Maybe something good will come out of all of this. After all, we live in a society driven by capitalism, by an economic mindset concerned with profits exceeding costs. Modern medicine is now so effective, soldiers survive wounds they never would have and live long, difficult, disabled lives. Bullets, bombs, and body armor are increasingly expensive - we actually ran out of Tomahawk missiles during the Kosovo conflict. Training a soldier for the modern battlefield is significantly more expensive than it was fifty, or even twenty, years ago. And with the modern media, the reality of these costs can be shared by one and all, and not just those personally affected. One day, perhaps even in our lifetimes (possibly with this war), we will see the cost of war rise higher than a nation can afford monetarily, economically, physically, and spiritually. The cost-benefit ratio will simply be too prohibitive.

Unless they put cameras on the soldiers, planes, and tanks and start broadcasting on pay per view television. Then the vicariously nihilistic consumers will pay for war in one more way. Who knows, maybe war would even become profitable then. A scary thought.

Just like a crimninally negligent mine operator or any other rapacious corporate criminal, Rumsfeld is desperate to "externalize" as much of the cost of this war as possible. This means that serving military personnel are forced to buy their own body armor - or be killed; forced to buy their own vehicular armor - or be killed; forced to accept intentionally erroneous medical diagnoses, and forced to absorb the Pentagon's intentional shortfalls - AND be killed.

Rumsfeld's criminal malfeasance should be investigated and prosecuted.

The cut of veternas' benefits is not the worse thing. The really scare is the calculation that leaving a solder to die is a very cost effective way to run a war. In fact, saving a badly injured solder has a tag of several millions of later medical treatment for government and society. We live in a rational capitalistic world, aren't we?

I think I heard on the BBC that we are dropping 6 times as many bombs these days as we were a while back. Maybe this is why? I guess we could put all our forces in an underground bunker and lob bombs at various targets. But we are also told that one of the problems with the training of Iraqis is that no one is quite sure if an Iraqi commander, on his own, requested air support, that the request wouldn't be to settle a score.

I remember, back in 2003, seeing a boy in the store with a tee-shirt. The slogan on the T-shirt said something about his Dad being off somewhere, in the Army. The kid was clearly unhappy. I don't have much of a stomach for even this aspect of war, so reading that it will cost a trillion for ongoing medical expenses? What sorts of lives will these be?

The fundamentalists say the West will not fight. Bush says that what we have done in Iraq proves that we will. We 'brought it on'. Well, we could have taken two trillion dollars and built alternative energy. We could have suggested to bin Laden that we would not care so much about what he did in Saudi Arabia, and fairly soon. We are sending billions and billions to Iran and Russia. Neither is stable or democratic.

I was completely against the war. We need to define economic interests in some enlightened way. Would it be our responsibility to 'fix' the Middle East if we didn't need the oil? Nixon decided, after Vietnam, that we needed a well-armed Iran to defend our interests in the Middle East, against the Soviets. The Shah was our guy, recycling petro-dollars to buy arms. Now the Iranians still want to be well armed, by going nuclear. Can we be nuclear, if they can't? We just can't get clear of these situations.

I wish, for all our sacrifices, the Iraqis would find the center. Today we are told of the dominant Shi'a party is backing off of concessions to broaden the constitution. We don't really know what feeds the insurgents. We really don't know whether we are being used, scammed, by people aligning a situation that will emerge on their terms. It's a murky process. For this, our young people are dying and being maimed.

Bush will say I am helping the enemy. I truly wish I knew who the enemy was in Iraq, and how you form a center where none has existed, and none is emerging.