Military squeezes real needs

By Tom Maertens
Mankato Free Press

By most calculations, the United States spends more on national security than the rest of the world combined, and six times what second-place China spends on its military.

We presently station 300,000 troops abroad in more than 800 sites in 39 nations, plus 90,000 sailors and marines at sea, a world-wide military empire. The Pentagon budget is $700 billion per year but the late Chalmers Johnson calculated the true cost at over a trillion dollars, including the nuclear weapons complex (run by the Department of Energy), the intelligence community (16 agencies, 80 percent controlled by DOD) the Coast Guard, customs, border patrol, DEA, FBI, and other security agencies which collectively spend hundreds of billions.

The Washington Post investigative project, “Top Secret America,” reported that the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations since 9/11 and that intelligence spending has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion, since then.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost more than a trillion dollars in direct costs, not including veterans’ benefits and disability, interest on war-related debt, replacement of military equipment, or assistance to allies. Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes calculate that long-run costs will total at least $5 trillion and could reach $7 trillion.

We are spending $10 billion per month on foreign wars while our domestic infrastructure crumbles. Despite all the money and the thousands of casualties, an ABC News/Washington Post poll released last fall shows that the percentage of people who say that the country is safer now from terrorism compared with before Sept. 11, 2001 has reached a new low.

This growing National Security State benefits principally the military industrial complex and its high-paid executives and lobbyists, along with elected and appointed officials who get the grease; the military services and the functionaries who staff the national security apparatus; flag and general officers who retire early to work in the war-based industrial complex; the propaganda mills (“think tanks”) and “Beltway Bandits” (consultants) who depend on the Pentagon gravy train; and the research organizations, policy intellectuals and commentators who make their living by uncovering ever more “threats” to justify ever larger military spending.

This is the complex that supported Bush’s trumped-up “retaliation” against Iraq, led by the bellicose, militaristic Neocons. General Wesley Clark (Winning Modern Wars) reported that Iraq was only the first of seven countries they intended to invade over five years (following 9/11), which included Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Libya and Somalia — seven Muslim countries — in what could only be seen as a plan to make the Middle East safe for Israel.

Not coincidentally, the U.S. or Israel have bombed all but one of those countries plus Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, ensuring more radicalized Muslim terrorist recruits. Now we have lurched into another war on behalf of an unknown, rag-tag band of rebels, with barely a wave in the direction of Congress by a president who taught constitutional law. The purported humanitarian mission has already experienced major “mission creep,” with military officials now suggesting we might need troops on the ground.

This is the usual tar baby argument: any outcome that leaves Gaddafi in power will be a serious setback for the U.S.; our national prestige is now at stake; we can’t just walk away. James Madison wrote that: “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germs of every other. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual war.”

And indeed, the 10-year assault on individual liberties and the Constitution, begun under Bush to fight “terrorism” and mostly left intact by Obama, continues to expand. Some 30,000 people are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications in the United States, according to the Washington Post.

In order to pay for these decade-long wars and to feed the National Security State, we are running up huge deficits and shortchanging productive investment in education, transportation, and research and development. Our national security posture is propelling us towards perpetual war, insolvency and the loss of our freedoms.

A few months ago Washington enacted $1 trillion dollars of tax cuts, with $200 billion going to millionaires. Now Congress is arguing over a fraction of that amount, and Republicans are proposing to cut Head Start, Community Health Centers, and funding for clean air and water. But somehow, military-related spending is off the table.

Congress needs to shrink this bloated trillion-dollar sinkhole instead of cutting programs that help people.

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