June 07, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

THE INSANE MILITARY BUDGET

When the Soviet Union fell in 1989, effectively ending the Cold War, we began to hear talk of a "peace dividend." All the money and resources that went into the Cold War could, theoretically, be used for more constructive things. But it didn't happen. War and the fear of war are just too profitable for some people. Fear is also an effective political tactic, as the Bush administration demonstrated for several years. In a time when we should be scaling back military spending the Pentagon budget is more bloated and wasteful than ever before. We're spending billions on weapons systems to fight a high tech enemy when our enemies use box cutters and improvised explosive devices. This commentary by Robert Dreyfuss is at www.truthout.org:

So hostile is the atmosphere in Congress to cuts of any sort in military spending that even a recent effort by traditional defense critics to suggest ways to reorient the Pentagon's budgetary priorities turned out to involve but the most modest of rebalancings. A coalition of these critics from organizations such as the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center for American Progress, and other left and left-center groups, including such experts as Larry Korb of CAP, Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives, and William Hartung of the World Policy Institute, suggested cutting $56 billion from offensive weapons systems, but then proposed to shift fully $50 billion of it into areas such as homeland security, international peacekeeping, and "nation building."

Why, exactly, we need to increase Pentagon spending even in those categories is mystifying, since no country is actually threatening us and - if the Iraqi and Afghani wars were settled - the problem of terrorism could be adequately dealt with by mobilizing relatively modest numbers of CIA officers and FBI and law enforcement agents. The fact that such respected defense critics feel compelled to put forward such a lame proposal is a sign of our crimped times; a sign that, pragmatically speaking, it is simply verboten to criticize Pentagon bloat, even given the current, Democrat-controlled Congress. It's not that the public is pro-military spending either. Indeed, in a Gallup Poll conducted in February, fully 43% of Americans said they believed that the United States is spending "too much" on defense, while only 20% said "too little." Rather, it's a sign that the political class - perhaps swayed by the influence of the military-industrial complex and its army of lobbyists - hasn't yet caught up to public opinion.

And it's important to keep in mind that the official Pentagon budget doesn't begin to tell the full story of American "defense" spending. In addition to the $650 billion that the Pentagon will get in 2008, huge additional sums will be spent on veterans care and interest on the national debt accumulated from previous DOD spending that ballooned the deficit. In all, those two accounts add $263 billion to the Pentagon budget, for a grand total of $913 billion.