America's War Chest

by Dennis Green

This year’s “Defense” appropriation — America’s very own war chest — will total some $626 billion, including some $4.2 billion in earmarks, 1,720 little chunks of fat. It is the largest appropriations measure passed by Congress this year, and is expected to be signed by President Obama without a whisper of dissent from the GOP. These tightwads, who have blamed Obama for every penny of the deficit, including Bush’s $800 billion TARP measure of ’08, never saw a dollar of defense spending they didn’t love.

The measure also includes some $128 billion for military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, although some Republicans say that isn’t enough. Why is their sense of “fiscal responsibility” so selective?

Well, it begins with ideology. Most conservatives in America are congenital war hawks, no matter what the cause or the mission. They are unquestioning when it comes to invading other countries, and even in bombing targets in sovereign, allied countries, such as the use of Predator drones in Pakistan, regardless of the legality of such actions.

These normally law and order advocates also turn a blind eye to defense spending because of very practical reasons. Many of those billions of dollars go to defense contractors in their home districts, or to Big Money corporations such as Halliburton, who donate many hundreds of millions to their campaigns. And in all fairness, this is also the motivation for many “Neo-Liberals” or “Corporate Democrats” as well.

Rogue states and failed nations exist all over the globe, of course, and we don’t target all of them, but we do have U.S. troops in 220 nations worldwide. In some instances, such as Japan and Guam, our military bases are a source of much anti-American sentiment. The expense of such bases makes the potential costs of health care reform pale into insignificance.

“Insurgencies” opposing American forces are many, and are often nativist groups resisting our occupation or presence in their homeland. Americans’ sense of world geography and sovereignty is malleable, according to perceived threats, imagined hostilities to American interests, more often economic, rather than security interests in particular.

To the average citizen, even one who has followed and attempted to study U.S. Foreign Policy, we might just as well, as Whitman says, “write upon the doorpost ‘Whim!’” because there is nothing consistent or predictable about it, any more than there is a solid, bedrock principle in the GOP about deficit spending. “Friend or Foe, come or go, just cross my palm with silver.”

And ultimately, it’s all about power politics. No entity in America is as powerful as the Pentagon, its generals, its advisors and its contractors — such as Blackwater, no matter what its name. No president, no committee of Congress, no critic has the power to stand up to that Military/Industrial Complex.

Only the ragtag Vietcong could defeat them, and for the past eight years, the Taliban in Afghanistan. None of these insurgents had a West Point, or nuclear subs, or Navy SEALS, or the hundreds of billions of dollars in advanced weaponry available to the U.S. military, and yet their determination and cunning is often superior to our best training and supplies.

A huge war chest is no substitute for fighting to defend your homeland against a foreign invader, and though we might coat it with glorious and elaborate rhetoric, unfortunately, that is our role, as it was in North Korea, in Vietnam and it is who we are in Afghanistan and Iraq. Imagine how you would feel if foreigners invaded your hometown. You might fight back.

©2009 Dennis Green