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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Financing the imperial armed
forces By Robert Dreyfuss
War critics are rightly disappointed over
the inability of Democrats in the US Congress to
mount an effective challenge to President George W
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 Bush
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 hardline exponents of
neo-conservative-style empire-building more than
the Washington consensus that the United States
needs to expand the defense budget without end,
while increasing the size of the armed forces.
In addition, spending on the 16 agencies
and other organizations that make up the official
US "intelligence community" - including the
Central Intelligence Agency (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 in essence non-existent. Among
presidential candidates, only Congressman 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 expanding the US Armed Forces. Both are
supporting manpower increases in the range of
80,000-100,000 troops, mostly for the US Army and
US Marine Corps. (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.)
How astonishing are the
budgetary numbers? Consider the trajectory of US
defense spending over the past nearly two decades.
From the end of the Cold War into the mid-1990s,
defense spending actually fell significantly. In
constant 1996 dollars, the Pentagon's budget
dropped from a peacetime high of $376 billion, at
the end of president Ronald Reagan's military
buildup in 1989, to a low of $265 billion in 1996.
That compares with post-World War II wartime highs
of $437 billion (corrected) in 1953, during the
Korean War, and $388 billion in 1968, at the peak
of the Vietnam War.
After the Soviet
empire peacefully disintegrated, the 1990s decline
wasn't exactly the hoped-for "peace dividend", but
it wasn't peanuts, either. However, since
September 12, 2001, defense spending has exploded.
For 2008, the Bush administration is
requesting a staggering $650 billion, compared
with the already staggering $400 billion the
Pentagon collected in 2001. Even subtracting the
costs of the ongoing "global war on terrorism" -
which is what the White House likes to call its
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - for fiscal 2008,
the Pentagon will still spend $510 billion.
In other words, even without Bush's two
wars, defense spending will have nearly doubled
since the mid-1990s. Given that the United States
has literally no significant enemy state to fight
anywhere on the planet, this represents a
remarkable, if perverse, achievement. As a famous
Democratic politician once asked: Where is the
outrage?
Neo-cons, war profiteers, and
hardliners of all stripes still argue that the
"enemy" the US faces is a non-existent bugaboo
called "Islamofascism". It's easy to imagine them
laughing into their sleeves while they continue to
claim that the way to battle low-tech, rag-tag
bands of leftover al-Qaeda crazies is by spending
billions of dollars on massively expensive,
massively powerful, futuristic weapons systems.
As always, a significant part of the US
defense bill is eaten up by these big-ticket
items. According to the Center for Arms Control
and Nonproliferation, there are at least 28 pricey
weapons systems that, just by themselves, will
rack up a whopping $44 billion in 2008. The
projected cost of these 28 systems - which include
fighter jets, the B-2 bomber, the V-22 Osprey,
various advanced naval vessels, cruise-missile
systems, and the ultra-expensive aircraft carriers
the US Navy always demands - will, in the end, be
more than $1 trillion. And that's not even
including the Star Wars missile-defense system,
which at the moment soaks up about $11 billion a
year.
By one count, US defense spending in
2008 will amount to 29 times the combined military
spending of all six so-called rogue states: Cuba,
Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria. The
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