The American Empire's $650 Billion
Bailout Already Passed Congress
[Pentagon 2009 budget]
by Chalmers Johnson, Tomdispatch.com
www.alternet.org, September 29,
2008
If we don't cut back our ever-increasing
military spending in a major way, the bankruptcy of the United
States is inevitable.
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
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