Third World America - Arianna Huffington [13]
Historian Arnold Toynbee believed that civilizations almost always die from suicide, not by murder.74 That is, our future is dependent on the choices we make and the things we decide to value.
Partisanship pop quiz time.75 See if you can identify the bleeding-heart liberal who said this: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”
Noam Chomsky? Michael Moore? Bernie Sanders?
No, it was that unrepentant lefty five-star general Dwight Eisenhower, in 1953, just a few months after taking office—a time when the economy was booming and unemployment was at 2.7 percent.76 Yet today, while America’s economy sputters down the road to recovery and the middle class struggles to make ends meet—with more than twenty-six million people unemployed or underemployed and record numbers of homes being lost to foreclosure—the “guns versus butter” argument isn’t even part of the national debate.77 Of course, today, the argument might be more accurately framed as “ICBM nukes, predator drones, and missile-defense shields versus jobs, affordable college, decent schools, foreclosure prevention, and fixing the gaping holes in our social safety net.”
We hear endless talk in Washington about belt tightening and deficit reduction, but hardly a word about whether the $161 billion being spent in 2010 alone to fight wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq might be better spent helping embattled Americans here at home.78
Indeed, during his State of the Union speech in January 2010, President Obama proposed freezing all discretionary government spending for three years—but exempted military spending, even though the defense budget has ballooned over the last ten years.79 According to defense analyst Lawrence Korb, who served as assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, the baseline defense budget has increased by 50 percent since 2000.80 Over that same period, nondefense discretionary spending increased less than half that much.
In fact, as Katherine McIntire Peters reported on GovernmentExecutive.com, President Obama is “on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II.”81 In that time we’ve had Korea, Vietnam, the massive military buildup under Reagan, and Bush’s funded-by-tax-cuts invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, but in the most trying economic times since the Great Depression, Obama’s outgunning them all.
This is not about ignoring the threats to our national security. And it’s certainly not about pacifism. To quote then Illinois state senator Barack Obama in 2002, “I don’t oppose all wars.…82 What I am opposed to is a dumb war.” Iraq was never about making us safer. And the original rationale for going to war in Afghanistan—taking on al-Qaeda—has been accomplished, with fewer than one hundred members of the group still operating in the country.83 The irrationality of continuing to spend precious resources on wars we shouldn’t be fighting is all the more galling when juxtaposed with our urgent and growing needs at home.
According to the Los Angeles Times, before the summer 2010 surge in Kandahar (cost: $33 billion)—a surge the military claimed was as important to Afghanistan as securing Baghdad was to Iraq—Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Admiral Michael Mullen told an Afghan leader that the goals of the surge, as well as defeating the Taliban, included, in the words of the Times, “reducing corruption, making local government work and, eventually, providing jobs.”84 Talk about “mission creep”!
Is that why we are still fighting a war there nine years later, spending American blood and treasure—to provide jobs for the people of Kandahar? It’s like a very bad joke: “The good news is, the Obama administration is ramping up a multibillion-dollar