[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] We Have The Money

[Bill Totten]

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

by Chalmers Johnson

TomDispatch via Countercurrents (September 29 2008)


There has been much moaning, air-sucking, and outrage about the $700
billion that the US 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.

http://www.countercurrents.org/johnson290908.htm


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