Leadership? What’s That?

Most of you have heard by now that Francis J. Harvey, the current Secretary of the Army, has just lost his job as a result of the Walter Reed scandal. 

Now, note this passage of the AP story on Harvey’s forced resignation:

Harvey has been Army secretary since November 2004.

.

He is the second consecutive Army secretary to be removed abruptly from office. In April 2003, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld fired Thomas White, who had engaged in public disputes with Rumsfeld.

Got that?

From April of 2003, when Thomas “Enron” White was removed, to November of 2004 — during the first nineteen months of our invasion and occupation of Iraq — there was no one serving as Secretary of the Army.  

Then again, Donald Rumsfeld — the PNAC Platoon goon who was SecDef until recently — has always favored eliminating the separate branches of the US armed forces and putting them all into one conglomerate, so it shouldn’t surprise me that he didn’t think the Army Secretary’s job rated immediate filling even during wartime.

Oh, and by the way: 

The reason White was removed was that he opposed Bush and the PNAC Platoon on the question of Iraq.  He may have been corrupt as the day was long — he came to Rumsfeld’s Pentagon straight from Enron, where he ran a division of the company that specialized in “illusory” profits — but he drew the line at Iraq.