All hail the chief as he brings home the troops from Iraq — but don’t say anything about the growing use of robot drones on the expanding battlefield of the war on terror.
The defense lobby is playing offense, pushing an argument that cutting defense will cost the economy jobs.
It’s an interesting argument, but one that ultimately fails the test of logic — as Dean Baker pointed out yesterday:
During a downturn where there are lots of unemployed workers, any government spending will create jobs, regardless of whether or not it is on the military. In fact, military spending is likely to create fewer jobs than spending in most other areas (e.g. education, health care, conservation) because it is more capital intensive.
When the economy is near full employment, military spending is a drag on the economy. It pulls resources away from private sector uses, lowering investment and increasing the trade deficit. This leads to job losses, which are likely to be felt most severely in manufacturing and construction.
In short, for those who do not believe in the military spending fairy, military spending will cost jobs in either the short-term of long-term. If the spending doesn’t make sense in terms of advancing national security, then it doesn’t make sense period: end of story.
The lesson here? We need a real jobs plan that includes public investment, but we shouldn’t look to the Defense Department to create those jobs.
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The end is near, finally, but only after thousands were killed in Iraq, civilians and soldiers both, the nation’s standing was damaged and our democracy was irreparably damaged.
The end of the war in Iraq, however, does not end the American imperial project. We remain entrenched in Afghanistan, with that war bleeding — literally — into Pakistan, and new military efforts taking place in Africa.
So, the president might deserve applause for ending the Iraq War, but let’s not fool ourselves into believing he has suddenly transformed into a peacenik. Bring the rest of the troops home and then we can talk.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who had been advocating cuts in military spending, is now counseling against significant cuts saying that reductions would leave the nation vulnerable.
Is he kidding? United States military spending accounts for 43 percent of all military spending world wide and more than the next 14 countries combined. In fact, we could cut our spending by a third and still outspend the next biggest spender by a 5-to-1 ratio, while accounting for $1 of every $3 spent on defense world wide.
The Gates comments, made at the University of Notre Dame commencement, have nothing to do with maintaining an adequate level of defensive readiness and everything to do with fear — fear on the part of the military-industrial complex that it will lose its privileged place in Washington and its access to American tax dollars, fear on the part of politicians who count on defense contractors for campaign funding and the need to sow fear among voters who otherwise would prefer to see defense spending cut and social programs left in place.
Gates’ comments unfortunately signal a likelihood that defense spending is going to be left at historically high levels even as our friends in Washington talk about shrinking government and the programs that help those of us who live in communities like South Brunswick, Princeton and New Brunswick will be gutted to make the bond markets happy.
The last few decades offer a depressing fact: We are addicted to military force. Presidents of both political parties have shown they’re unwillingness to take the military option off the table. Hell, they won’t even relegate the use of force to a last-resort option.
Even Barack Obama, who won the peace vote based on one speech made in opposition to the Iraq War back in 2002, has proven to be just as addicted to the military option as his predecessors.
The Iraq War has been declared over, but we’re still there. Afghanistan has been amped up and now we are fighting with the French and British in Libya in an ill-defined mission — we talk about protecting civilians but are most likely engaged in an effort to remove the despicable and murderous Qaddafi regime from power.
Protection of civilians, of course, is a ruse — if it were our primary objective, we would have gone into the Ivory Coast to back a legally elected president and end a civil war that has seen atrocities committed on both sides.
So why Libya? The only reason I can come up with is that Qaddafi’s hold on the western imagination was on a par with Saddam Hussein’s — unstable, violent and brutal with a long history of thumbing his nose at the west.
Hank Kalet 