Katrina Vanden Heuvel: Defense Budget Follies (continued)

[marmar]

From the Nation:


BLOG | Posted 02/06/2007 @ 5:29pm
Defense Budget Follies (continued)


With President Bush's latest budget request of $245 billion for the "global war on terror" (and a warning from administration officials that there are more funding requests to come), the staggering total has now reached $745 billion. And even that is probably too low.

"There's going to be real sticker shock when we get down to what the truth is about the cost of this war," Senator Kent Conrad ?, Chair of the Senate Budget Committee, told the Washington Post. "It's going to be way beyond what anybody has fessed up to."

Which is exactly the point Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has made time and again, saying that the war could end up costing over two trillion dollars. Not to mention what Speaker Pelosi understatedly calls an "opportunity cost" sapping the ability of the US to undertake important domestic initiatives – not only now, but for future generations when the bill for the borrowing required to fight this war comes due (in contrast to past wars, this one has been paid for on a "credit card" while taxes for the wealthy are slashed).

It is critical that Congress not only reassert its power of the purse (and use that power to protect the troops and bring them home), but also begin to rethink what an effective, rational foreign policy and defense budget means in these times. Instead of squandering our resources on the Bush course of increased militarization we should be changing course to address national security issues that this administration has avoided like a pre-war intelligence report it doesn't want to hear. For example, global warming should be considered a national security issue. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, with hundreds of scientists drawn from 113 nations (including the US), has just concluded based on six years of research that "there is an overwhelming probability that human activities are warming the planet at a dangerous rate, with consequences that could soon take decades or centuries to reverse." ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?bid=7&pid=163711

[acmavm]

1. I have a problem with this 'global' shit. Does anyone really believe that

we have to worry about some poor aborigines from Tonga blowing up Grand Central Station? How about some very cold people from Antarctica? They got a problem with us to the extent that we need to spend a few billion keeping tabs on them, reading their mail, listening in on their phone calls?

There would be no 'terra' war anyway except for bush** and the criminals he fronts for.

[marmar]

2. It's a sham....

A faux raison d'etre to keep the military-industrial complex going.

[classysassy]

3. Bush and the neo cons

sold a bogus war on terror to the american public.We should have fought a war on error,when bush and his thugs stole the 2000 election.