'Tomgram: Robert Dreyfuss, The Pentagon's Blank Check
Soon after the invasion of Iraq was launched, war supporters and critics alike, in a bow to the Vietnam era, began to speak referentially of the "Q-word" -- for "quagmire," of course. By now, Iraq has had that administration-inspired "Q" hung firmly around its neck, but what of the engine pushing it, the Pentagon? Perhaps the "S-word" (for financial "sinkhole") is in order. Is there anything stranger, for instance, than the fact that, post-9-11, we have -- and are financing -- two official "defense departments," both with rising budgets? There's the Pentagon, of course, but also the hapless Homeland Security Department (not to speak of the lucrative "homeland security" business that has formed around it and is already a $59 billion thriving global concern). And don't even get me started on the 16 official "members" of the U.S. "intelligence community." You couldn't make this sort of thing up -- and yet we're all paying for it.
As Robert Dreyfuss, Rolling Stone's national security correspondent and author of the unnervingly prophetic Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, indicates below, our trillion-dollar-a-year homeland security state is still not seen in the White House or most of Congress as enough of enough. Naturally, the one foreign-policy course that might dramatically reduce our astronomical "defense" spending would be cutting back on the American imperial mission to the planet. But with two wars already underway, a garrisoned world, and U.S naval forces flooding the Persian Gulf (and now shelling Somalia), that option makes so little sense in Washington that just about no one even bothers to bring it up. So let the good times roll. Tom
Financing the Imperial Armed Forces
A Trillion Dollars and Nowhere to Go but UpBy Robert Dreyfuss
War critics are rightly disappointed over the inability of congressional Democrats to mount an effective challenge to President Bush's Iraq adventure. What began as a frontal assault on the war, with tough talk about deadlines and timetables, has settled into something like a guerrilla-style campaign to chip away at war policy until the edifice crumbles.
Still, Democratic criticism of administration policy in Iraq looks muscle-bound when compared with the Party's readiness to go along with the President's massive military buildup, domestically and globally. Nothing underlines the tacit alliance between so-called foreign-policy realists and hard-line exponents of neoconservative-style empire-building more than the Washington consensus that the United States needs to expand the budget of the Defense Department without end, while increasing the size of the U.S. Armed Forces. In addition, spending on the 16 agencies and other organizations that make up the official U.S. "intelligence community" or IC -- including the CIA -- and on homeland security is going through the roof.
The numbers are astonishing and, except for a hardy band of progressives in the House of Representatives, Democrats willing to call for shrinking the bloated Pentagon or intelligence budgets are essentially nonexistent. Among presidential candidates, only Rep. Dennis Kucinich and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson even mention the possibility of cutting the defense budget. Indeed, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are, at present, competing with each other in their calls for the expansion of the Armed Forces. Both are supporting manpower increases in the range of 80,000 to 100,000 troops, mostly for the Army and the Marines. (The current, Bush-backed authorization for fiscal year 2008 calls for the addition of 65,000 more Army recruits and 27,000 Marines by 2012.)'
As Robert Dreyfuss, Rolling Stone's national security correspondent and author of the unnervingly prophetic Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, indicates below, our trillion-dollar-a-year homeland security state is still not seen in the White House or most of Congress as enough of enough. Naturally, the one foreign-policy course that might dramatically reduce our astronomical "defense" spending would be cutting back on the American imperial mission to the planet. But with two wars already underway, a garrisoned world, and U.S naval forces flooding the Persian Gulf (and now shelling Somalia), that option makes so little sense in Washington that just about no one even bothers to bring it up. So let the good times roll. Tom
Financing the Imperial Armed Forces
A Trillion Dollars and Nowhere to Go but UpBy Robert Dreyfuss
War critics are rightly disappointed over the inability of congressional Democrats to mount an effective challenge to President Bush's Iraq adventure. What began as a frontal assault on the war, with tough talk about deadlines and timetables, has settled into something like a guerrilla-style campaign to chip away at war policy until the edifice crumbles.
Still, Democratic criticism of administration policy in Iraq looks muscle-bound when compared with the Party's readiness to go along with the President's massive military buildup, domestically and globally. Nothing underlines the tacit alliance between so-called foreign-policy realists and hard-line exponents of neoconservative-style empire-building more than the Washington consensus that the United States needs to expand the budget of the Defense Department without end, while increasing the size of the U.S. Armed Forces. In addition, spending on the 16 agencies and other organizations that make up the official U.S. "intelligence community" or IC -- including the CIA -- and on homeland security is going through the roof.
The numbers are astonishing and, except for a hardy band of progressives in the House of Representatives, Democrats willing to call for shrinking the bloated Pentagon or intelligence budgets are essentially nonexistent. Among presidential candidates, only Rep. Dennis Kucinich and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson even mention the possibility of cutting the defense budget. Indeed, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are, at present, competing with each other in their calls for the expansion of the Armed Forces. Both are supporting manpower increases in the range of 80,000 to 100,000 troops, mostly for the Army and the Marines. (The current, Bush-backed authorization for fiscal year 2008 calls for the addition of 65,000 more Army recruits and 27,000 Marines by 2012.)'
Lees verder: http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=202057
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten