military – Page 2 – Hank Kalet

Quote of the day, from The Limits of Power

A quotation from Andrew Bacevich’s The Limits of Power:

Great powers wage “small wars” not to defend themselves but to assert control over foreign populations. Denominating an operation “Iraqi Freedom” or “Enduring Freedom” does not alter that reality. Historically, that is, “small wars” are imperial wars. The wars in which the United States currently finds itself engaged are no exception.

(Bacevich, The Limits of Power, p. 141)

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Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Military media matters: Tom Dispatch explains

We live in a militarized society, which is nowhere more evident than in the way our media has been colonized by hawks. Tom Dispatch’s Tom Englehardt writes about it this week in a must-read (and you can hear him talk about it on the Tom Dispatch podcast). He explains it far better than I can.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. it can be ordered here.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

Changing the deficit debate

Finally, it appears that someone in Washington is willing to take on that city’s biggest sacred cow — the military.

Dan Froomkin reported yesterday on Huffington Post that U.S. Rep. Barney Frank is convening “his own bipartisan commission” that “will specifically look at ways to reduce the bloated military budget.”

Defense cuts seems to be politically off-limits these days, but the group convened by the outspoken liberal congressman from Massachusetts shares a belief that America is “overextended and overcommitted” and that there should be a “substantial reduction in the reach of American military commitments,” Frank told HuffPost.

His likely targets: unnecessary weapons systems and overseas military bases — and a savings of $100 billion a year.

Defense spending has outpaced the need for it, he says, with weapons and bases creating their own skewed justifications.

“During the Cold War, 26 percent of military spending in the world was American; now it’s 41 percent. So we have fewer enemies and we’re spending more money.”

Lets have no illusions about what Frank’s commission is likely to produce. The military remains Washington’s biggest sacred cow for a lot of reasons — corporate profits, the need for politicians to look tough — so any real cuts proposed by Frank are likely to go nowhere, at least in the short term.

In the long run, though, Frank’s commission has the potential to alter the conversation, which could lead to defense cuts down the road. And that’s key. We spend way too much on the military, way too much to project power around the globe. The money spent on the military is money that could be, should be spent on something more productive for society, on expanding access to health care and rebuilding our bridges and modernizing our power grid and fixing our schools and hiring teachers.

So bravo Barney. Keep up the good work.

The key to defense budget cutting, Frank said, is to attack the notion that the U.S. military needs to be everywhere in the world militarily. “If you let them insist that there is a need for worldwide military engagement, we will be at a disadvantage when we fight the specific fights” to cut programs, he said.

Send me an e-mail.
Read poetry at The Subterranean.
Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.

In America, when it’s guns v. butter, butter always loses

We have no money. That is the basic argument I keep seeing from everyone across the political spectrum.

We can’t afford to provide health care, can’t afford an expanded jobs program, are willing to let state and local governments starve and slash programs — but we apparently have plenty of money to escalate a war in Afghanistan.

I’d laugh, as U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) told Rachel Maddow last night in a slightly different context, “if we weren‘t in so much trouble.”

President Barack Obama hosted a “jobs forum” at the White House yesterday at which he essentially undercut his own formerly ambitious agenda, admitting that “our resources are limited.”

The Times, in the way it framed its story, appeared to buy into this line of argument — despite some fine analysis in the paper by its own Paul Krugman. Here is how the Times framed the issue:

Mr. Obama’s jobs event captured the political and policy vise now squeezing the president and his party at the end of his first year. It came on the eve of a government report that is expected to show unemployment remaining in double digits, and two days after Mr. Obama emphasized as he ordered 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan that he did not want the financial burdens of the war to overwhelm his domestic agenda.

Both the domestic and the military demands on the administration are raising costs unanticipated when Mr. Obama took office, even as pressures build to arrest annual budget deficits now exceeding $1 trillion. Those demands are also eroding the broad support that swept Mr. Obama into office, especially among independent voters, and igniting a guns-versus-butter budget debate in his own party not seen since the Vietnam era.

While liberals are calling for ambitious job-creating measures along the lines of the New Deal and Republicans want to scale back government spending programs, Mr. Obama talked at the White House on Thursday of limited programs that he suggested could provide substantial bang for the buck when it comes to job creation. Among them was the weatherization program.

Called “cash for caulkers,” it would enlist contractors and home-improvement companies like Home Depot — whose chief executive was on the panel — to advertise the benefits, much as car dealers did for the clunkers trade-ins this year.

Yet that relatively modest proposal underscores the limits of the government’s ability to affect a jobless recovery with the highest unemployment rate in 26 years — and Mr. Obama acknowledged as much. Just as he said in Tuesday’s Afghanistan speech that the nation could not afford an open-ended commitment there, especially when the economy is so weak and deficits so high, Mr. Obama emphasized at the jobs forum that the government had already done a lot with his $787 billion economic stimulus package and the $700 billion financial bailout that he inherited.

“I want to be clear: While I believe the government has a critical role in creating the conditions for economic growth, ultimately true economic recovery is only going to come from the private sector,” he told his audience, which included executives and some critics from American Airlines, Boeing, Nucor, Google, Walt Disney and FedEx.

The key phrases are “costs unanticipated when Mr. Obama took office” — unanticipated by whom? — and “the limits of the government’s ability to affect a jobless recovery.” The assumption here — and throughout Washington — is that the federal deficit must be an impediment to domestic discretionary spending, and that there is an unlimited supply of cash for the war in Afghanistan (not to mention the war that continues in Iraq or a massive and bloated military bureaucracy with bases around the world).

The assumption is that military spending is not discretionary, and that is a dangerous assumption — not just because of the budget implications, but because it uses the budget (the place where our priorities are measured in dollars and sense) to endorse the further militarization of our nation.

Basically, our budgets show us to be a nation that prizes power and brute force over compassion, that believes we need more guns and more advance weaponry at all costs, even at the expense of making sure that our citizens have food, shelter or health care.

It is guns over butter for us and the change from Bush II to Barack Obama has done little to change that.

Don’t ask: Obama’s Bill Clinton moment

President Barack Obama has called himself a “fierce advocate” for gays and lesbians, but he has done little to advocate for gay rights since taking office in January. In fact, his choice of the Rev. Rick Warren, the evangelical and anti-gay pastor, to offer the invocation at his inauguration can be seen as a slap in the face to the gay community.

On two of the most publicized issues — gay marriage and gays in teh military — he has remained remarkably silent. His promise to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the Clinton-era compromise that The New York Times says has “caused its own kind of damage to military readiness.”

Thousands of service members have been discharged from duty at a time when the military is stretched by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The loss of highly skilled interpreters and intelligence analysts has been especially damaging.

He has gone so far as to have his adminstration argue on behalf of a policy he has publicly denounced — a manuever that would make Bill Clinton blush.

The best hope for overturning the policy, therefore, is Congress, where there is legislation pending.

Here is Rush Holt, D-NJ, the Congressman who represents much of Central Jersey and is cosponsoring the bill, on Rachel Maddow the other night, talking about “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”:

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Holt can be cautious and I think he held his tongue some in this interview, but he also made it clear that we can no longer wait. It’s 2009, after all, and the fact that there are public institutions off-limits to gays and lesbians is morally indefensible.