Page 2 of 2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Financing the imperial armed
forces By Robert Dreyfuss
United States accounts for almost half -
about 48% - of the entire world's spending on what
Americans like to call "defense".
Again
according to the Center for Arms Control and
Nonproliferation, US defense spending this year
amounts to exactly twice the combined military
spending of the next six biggest military powers:
China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Japan
and Germany.
Despite this, the Democratic
Leadership Council is pushing hard
to
tie the party to increased military spending.
Writes journalist Aaron Glantz:
"America needs a bigger and better
military," reads an October report by Will
Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute,
the policy arm of the centrist Democratic
Leadership Council that counts Democratic
Senators Hillary Clinton and Evan Bayh among its
members.
"Escalating conflicts in Iraq
and Afghanistan have stretched the all-volunteer
force to the breaking point," the report says.
"Democrats should step forward with a plan to
repair the damage, by adding more troops,
replenishing depleted stocks of equipment, and
reorganizing the force around the new missions
of unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency and
civil reconstruction."
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
(CAP), and other leftist 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
Americans 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 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 was 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 US
"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 Defense Department spending that
ballooned the deficit. In all, those two accounts
add $263 billion to the Pentagon budget, for a
grand total of $913 billion.
Then there
are the intelligence and homeland-security
budgets. Back in the 1990s, when I started
reporting on the CIA and the rest of the US
intelligence community, its entire budget was
about $27 billion. Although the number is supposed
to be top-secret, last year the Bush
administration revealed that intelligence spending
had reached $44 billion. For 2008, according to
media reports, Congress is working on an
authorization of $48 billion for America's various
spies.
Again, when I first wrote about
"homeland security" in the late 1990s - it was
then called "counter-terrorism" - the
administration of president Bill Clinton was
spending $17 billion in inter-agency budgets in
this area. For 2008, the budget of the Department
of Homeland Security - that mishmash, incompetent
agency hurriedly assembled under pressure from
ueber-hawk Joe Lieberman (even the Bush
administration was initially opposed to its
creation) - will be $46.4 billion.
To a
rational observer, such spending - totaling more
than $1 trillion in 2008, according to the figures
I've just cited - seems quite literally insane.
During the Cold War, hawks scared Americans into
tolerating staggering but somewhat lesser sums by
invoking the specter of Soviet communism. Does
anyone, anywhere, truly believe that we Americans
need to spend more than a trillion dollars a year
to defend ourselves against small bands of
al-Qaeda fanatics?
Robert
Dreyfuss, an independent journalist in the
Washington, DC, area and Rolling Stone magazine's
national-security correspondent, is the author
of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped
Unleash Fundamentalist Islam. He writes
frequently for Rolling Stone, The American
Prospect, The Nation, Mother Jones and the
Washington Monthly. His website is
RobertDreyfuss.com.
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