DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA We have the money
By Chalmers Johnson
There has been much moaning, air-sucking and outrage about the US$700 billion
that the US government is 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 24, 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 Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates.
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 Central
Intelligence Agency (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, 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 George W 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 Shi'ites 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 Shi'ism 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 Shi'ite
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 Predator 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 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 Richard Nixon-Henry
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 are 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 Johnson is the author of three linked books on the crises of
American imperialism and militarism. They are Blowback (2000), The
Sorrows of Empire (2004), and Nemesis: The Last Days of the American
Republic (2006). All are available in paperback from Metropolitan Books.
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