[Marxism] We Have the Money, by Chalmers Johnson

[Greg McDonald]

We Have The Money- If Only We Didn't Waste It on The Defense Budget

By Chalmers Johnson

29 September, 2008
Tom Dispatch

There has been much moaning, air-sucking, and outrage about the $700  
billion that the U.S. government is thinking of throwing away on rich  
New York bankers who have been ripping us off for the past few years  
and then letting greed drive their businesses into a variety of  
ditches. In fact, we dole out similar amounts of money every year in  
the form of payoffs to the armed services, the military-industrial  
complex, and powerful senators and representatives allied with the  
Pentagon.

On Wednesday, September 24th, right in the middle of the fight over  
billions of taxpayer dollars slated to bail out Wall Street, the  
House of Representatives passed a $612 billion defense authorization  
bill for 2009 without a murmur of public protest or any meaningful  
press comment at all. (The New York Times gave the matter only three  
short paragraphs buried in a story about another appropriations  
measure.)

The defense bill includes $68.6 billion to pursue the wars in Iraq  
and Afghanistan, which is only a down-payment on the full yearly cost  
of these wars. (The rest will be raised through future supplementary  
bills.) It also included a 3.9% pay raise for military personnel, and  
$5 billion in pork-barrel projects not even requested by the  
administration or the secretary of defense. It also fully funds the  
Pentagon's request for a radar site in the Czech Republic, a hare- 
brained scheme sure to infuriate the Russians just as much as a  
Russian missile base in Cuba once infuriated us. The whole bill  
passed by a vote of 392-39 and will fly through the Senate, where a  
similar bill has already been approved. And no one will even think to  
mention it in the same breath with the discussion of bailout funds  
for dying investment banks and the like.

This is pure waste. Our annual spending on "national security" --  
meaning the defense budget plus all military expenditures hidden in  
the budgets for the departments of Energy, State, Treasury, Veterans  
Affairs, the CIA, and numerous other places in the executive branch  
-- already exceeds a trillion dollars, an amount larger than that of  
all other national defense budgets combined. Not only was there no  
significant media coverage of this latest appropriation, there have  
been no signs of even the slightest urge to inquire into the  
relationship between our bloated military, our staggering weapons  
expenditures, our extravagantly expensive failed wars abroad, and the  
financial catastrophe on Wall Street.

The only Congressional "commentary" on the size of our military  
outlay was the usual pompous drivel about how a failure to vote for  
the defense authorization bill would betray our troops. The aged  
Senator John Warner (R-Va), former chairman of the Senate Armed  
Services Committee, implored his Republican colleagues to vote for  
the bill "out of respect for military personnel." He seems to be  
unaware that these troops are actually volunteers, not draftees, and  
that they joined the armed forces as a matter of career choice,  
rather than because the nation demanded such a sacrifice from them.

We would better respect our armed forces by bringing the futile and  
misbegotten wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to an end. A relative degree  
of peace and order has returned to Iraq not because of President  
Bush's belated reinforcement of our expeditionary army there (the so- 
called surge), but thanks to shifting internal dynamics within Iraq  
and in the Middle East region generally. Such shifts include a  
growing awareness among Iraq's Sunni population of the need to  
restore law and order, a growing confidence among Iraqi Shiites of  
their nearly unassailable position of political influence in the  
country, and a growing awareness among Sunni nations that the ill- 
informed war of aggression the Bush administration waged against Iraq  
has vastly increased the influence of Shiism and Iran in the region.

The continued presence of American troops and their heavily  
reinforced bases in Iraq threaten this return to relative stability.  
The refusal of the Shia government of Iraq to agree to an American  
Status of Forces Agreement -- much desired by the Bush administration  
-- that would exempt off-duty American troops from Iraqi law is  
actually a good sign for the future of Iraq.

In Afghanistan, our historically deaf generals and civilian  
strategists do not seem to understand that our defeat by the Afghan  
insurgents is inevitable. Since the time of Alexander the Great, no  
foreign intruder has ever prevailed over Afghan guerrillas defending  
their home turf. The first Anglo-Afghan War (1838-1842) marked a  
particularly humiliating defeat of British imperialism at the very  
height of English military power in the Victorian era. The Soviet- 
Afghan War (1979-1989) resulted in a Russian defeat so demoralizing  
that it contributed significantly to the disintegration of the former  
Soviet Union in 1991. We are now on track to repeat virtually all the  
errors committed by previous invaders of Afghanistan over the centuries.

In the past year, perhaps most disastrously, we have carried our  
Afghan war into Pakistan, a relatively wealthy and sophisticated  
nuclear power that has long cooperated with us militarily. Our recent  
bungling brutality along the Afghan-Pakistan border threatens to  
radicalize the Pashtuns in both countries and advance the interests  
of radical Islam throughout the region. The United States is now  
identified in each country mainly with Hellfire missiles, unmanned  
drones, special operations raids, and repeated incidents of the  
killing of innocent bystanders.

The brutal bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Pakistan's capital,  
Islamabad, on September 20, 2008, was a powerful indicator of the  
spreading strength of virulent anti-American sentiment in the area.  
The hotel was a well-known watering hole for American Marines,  
Special Forces troops, and CIA agents. Our military activities in  
Pakistan have been as misguided as the Nixon-Kissinger invasion of  
Cambodia in 1970. The end result will almost surely be the same.

We should begin our disengagement from Afghanistan at once. We  
dislike the Taliban's fundamentalist religious values, but the Afghan  
public, with its desperate desire for a return of law and order and  
the curbing of corruption, knows that the Taliban is the only  
political force in the country that has ever brought the opium trade  
under control. The Pakistanis and their effective army can defend  
their country from Taliban domination so long as we abandon the  
activities that are causing both Afghans and Pakistanis to see the  
Taliban as a lesser evil.

One of America's greatest authorities on the defense budget, Winslow  
Wheeler, worked for 31 years for Republican members of the Senate and  
for the General Accounting Office on military expenditures. His  
conclusion, when it comes to the fiscal sanity of our military  
spending, is devastating:


"America's defense budget is now larger in inflation-adjusted dollars  
than at any point since the end of World War II, and yet our Army has  
fewer combat brigades than at any point in that period; our Navy has  
fewer combat ships; and the Air Force has fewer combat aircraft. Our  
major equipment inventories for these major forces are older on  
average than any point since 1946 -- or in some cases, in our entire  
history."

This in itself is a national disgrace. Spending hundreds of billions  
of dollars on present and future wars that have nothing to do with  
our national security is simply obscene. And yet Congress has been  
corrupted by the military-industrial complex into believing that, by  
voting for more defense spending, they are supplying "jobs" for the  
economy. In fact, they are only diverting scarce resources from the  
desperately needed rebuilding of the American infrastructure and  
other crucial spending necessities into utterly wasteful munitions.  
If we cannot cut back our longstanding, ever increasing military  
spending in a major way, then the bankruptcy of the United States is  
inevitable. As the current Wall Street meltdown has demonstrated,  
that is no longer an abstract possibility but a growing likelihood.  
We do not have much time left.

Chalmers Johnson is the author of three linked books on the crises of  
American imperialism and militarism. They are Blowback (2000), The  
Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American  
Republic (2006). All are available in paperback from Metropolitan Books.