Time: Firing the Wrong General

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

As the Iraq war prepares to enter its fifth year — a war that the Bush administration and its backers contended would be a cakewalk — the first senior military officer has finally had to walk the plank for screwing up.

But critics who have been long calling for some accountability aren't likely to be appeased. The officer taking the fall, after all, wasn't Tommy Franks, the Army general who as chief of Central Command scuttled Anthony Zinni's more robust war plan and agreed with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that invasion-lite was the way to go. Nope, he got the Presidential Medal of Freedom. So did former CIA chief George ("Slam Dunk") Tenet and L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, who as Iraqi viceroy fired the entire Iraqi army, a move now widely seen as laying the groundwork for a sustained insurgency.

And it wasn't the fellow who replaced Franks, John Abizaid, a fine Army officer by all accounts but one who also stressed the need for a "light footprint" inside Iraq that merely dragged out the death and dying on both sides. He'll retire soon to praise and pension. And General George Casey, Abizaid's underling and overall commander inside Iraq for the past 30 months, has just won promotion to Army chief of staff.

That's why the firing of Major General George Weightman — the guy running Walter Reed Army Medical Center for the past six months — seems so out of line. The Army brass ousted him 10 days after the Washington Post exposed the squalid living conditions — and lassez-faire attitude from hospital staff — that many outpatients experienced. Weightman was replaced, at least temporarily, by Lieutenant General Kevin Kiley, the commander of U.S. Medical Command. But there are two things wrong with that, Army insiders say. Weightman was actually trying to fix problems that arose during the tenure of his predecessor in the job — and that man was none other than Kiley.

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