BUSH’S WAR BUDGET: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, REPEATEDLY
By Jack A. Smith
President Bush’s proposal to increase the next military budget by $48 billion in fiscal year 2003 is preposterously out of proportion to any conceivable threat from the Al Qaeda terror network -- or all other possible enemies in unison, for that matter. For what purpose, then, is he seeking the largest hike in war spending -- 14%-- since former President Ronald Reagan’s first budget proposal in 1981 during the height of the Cold War against the Soviet Union?
Bush is not saying, other than to suggest in his State of the Union speech a week before the budget was unveiled Feb. 4, “We have been offered a unique opportunity and we must not let this moment pass.”
As a reprehensible sign of these flag-waving times, neither the Democratic Party opposition nor the corporate mass media appear to be making serious inquiries into precisely what “unique opportunity” all this money is intended to seize, even though the projected $391 billion Pentagon windfall is quite a bit larger than the defense budgets of the next nine big spending countries combined. It’s more than double the war budgets of the entire European Union. The increase alone approximates the funding UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently said would be required to be spent annually to reduce world poverty in half in the next 13 years, not that such beneficence is expected to be forthcoming in even small part from a miserly, rich Uncle Sam.
And $48 billion -- plus another $38 billion the Bush administration seeks for “homeland defense” -- is just the beginning. Within two months, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says, the Pentagon will request as yet unspecified additional billions for the current fiscal 2002 budget. This budget of $343 billion, itself representing a 10.6% increase of $33 billion, was signed into law less than two months ago. The 2003 budget, which when approved goes into effect Oct. 1, is already considered inadequate by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Richard Myers, who demands “tens of billions more.” As it is, the Bush administration plans to raise annual war spending to over $450 billion by 2007, at minimum.
Bush wants the 2003 war money in two allotments -- $38 billion for immediately earmarked purposes, and $10 billion in “war reserve” funds for the White House to dispose of unilaterally, as the “need” arises. This constitutes an abrogation of legislative functions since Congress is supposed to control such allocations. Some Democrats, while anxious to shovel the entire $48 billion into the Pentagon’s insatiable maw, have paused to express unease about the possibility of abdicating constitutional powers of the purse.
A few Democrats, such as Sen. Robert Byrd of West Virginia -- a self-described and proud war hawk -- are looking askance at Bush’s behemoth war budget. “I’m becoming a little nervous,” he said Jan. 23, when Bush first announced the amount, “as I hear that we’re going to spend more and more and more on the military. It’s going to have to come out of somewhere, out of somebody else’s hide.”
Well it certainly did. Bush’s entire $2.13 trillion 2003 budget wipes out what was left of the surplus, skimps on programs for working people and the poor and insists on further tax rebates and privileges for corporations and the wealthy. According to an editorial in the Feb. 5 New York Times, “The budget undermines ... the nation’s social safety net and the government’s ability to carry out some of its basic responsibilities over the next two decades. It jeopardizes the future of Social Security and Medicare, whose trust funds would be siphoned away to underwrite outmoded military projects and tax reductions favoring the rich.”
A giant share of the proposed war budget -- over $130 billion -- is devoted to research, development and the purchase of exotic new weapons systems, including some which earlier seemed headed for the scrapheap. For example, the Marine Corps will be given $2 billion for the accident-prone V-22 Osprey aircraft. The Navy gets $2.5 billion for the thoroughly redundant Virginia class attack submarines. The Army receives $475 million for the Crusader mobile artillery system, a howitzer experts say is too heavy for its own good. The list of new weaponry also includes $5.2 billion for 23 Raptor stealth fighter planes; $910 million for the Comanche reconnaissance helicopter fleet -- a program that keeps getting more expensive as it encounters repeated production delays; and $8 billion as next year’s tribute to that right-wing shibboleth, the “faith-based” national missile defense system for which President Bush broke the ABM treaty -- a program that will cost about $240 billion if they can ever get it to work.
Commenting on the war budget, economist Paul Krugman wrote in his New York Times column Feb. 5 that “the military buildup seems to have little to do with the actual threat, unless you think that Al Qaeda’s next move will be a frontal assault by several heavy armored divisions, We non-defense experts are a bit puzzled about why an attack by maniacs with box-cutters justifies spending $15 billion on 70-ton artillery pieces, or developing three different advanced fighters .... The administration’s new motto seems to be, ‘leave no defense contractor behind.’” With the new budget, stock prices in the “defense” industry -- already up 20-30% since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, while the rest of the market is falling or flat -- should produce record gains for the war profiteers. Viewing the extraordinary size of U.S. war budgets in recent years, Eugene Carroll, the retired Navy admiral who heads the Center for Defense Information, aptly commented, “For 45 years of the Cold War we were in an arms race with the Soviet Union. Now it appears we are in an arms race with ourselves.”
Two other factors are implicit in this latest bloating of an already obese war budget. The administration is counting on excessive military spending (along with more tax reductions for the rich), as opposed to public works and other stimuli that might benefit workers, to help spend the country out of the recession. Investment in armaments creates fewer jobs and less socially useful goods than in more people-oriented sectors of the economy, but to do so would violate sacred conservative doctrine. Also, Bush’s budget suggests he wants to emulate the 12-year practice of the Reagan-Bush administrations by spending so much on the military there was nothing left over for social programs, which was the intention. The following Clinton administration then devoted so much of its boom-time surplus to paying off the huge deficits left by this reckless spending that, once again, very little remained for the people. Now the cycle appears to be starting once again.
In first proposing funding for “homeland security” in a White House meeting of mayors Jan. 24, Bush resorted to his usual tactic of cultivating a sense of fear and hyper-patriotism in his audience. “We’re still under attack,” he warned, as though the bombs would fall any minute. “They still want to come after us. These are evil people that are relentless in their desire to hurt those who live in freedom.” The $38 billion the administration seeks is double the amount of previous spending on domestic defense. Some $3.5 billion of the new money will go to police, fire and medical workers to prepare for future terror attacks. Over $10 billion is headed to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol. The Interior Department will receive nearly $900 million to strengthen security in parks and at monuments. The Agriculture Department gets about $150 million to protect the food supply from bio-terrorism. The remainder is for inter-agency intelligence sharing, beefing up transportation safety, and other security measures.
In addition, the Pentagon requests greater authority to increase its role in “domestic defense,” it was reported Jan. 27. The military advocates a new command presided over by a four-star general, in place of several different existing commands, to coordinate Air Force planes on surveillance over the country, Navy and Coast Guard ships along the coasts, and Army and National Guard troops stationed in transportation hubs and strategic locations within the U.S. Heretofore there has been reluctance to grant the military permission to deploy troops in the nation’s cities going back to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act.
It should be fairly obvious by now that President Bush’s war on terrorism has become a pretext for pursuing the conservative administration’s strategic worldwide military, economic and political objectives. This vast increase in defense spending for major weapons systems, so absurdly inappropriate for the expressed mission of eliminating a relatively small organization of fanatical suicide terrorists, is but a symptom of Bush’s dangerous intentions.
Other symptoms abound. For instance, there’s the administration’s consistent exaggeration of the threat confronting average citizens in the aftermath of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, and its continual invocation of patriotic and martial themes. The purpose is to galvanize the American people into lock-step behind a combination Commander-in-Chief /Wrathful Savior intent on avenging the tragic deaths of some 3,069 people with a vaguely defined, endless series of wars over years and decades against people largely innocent of complicity in the attacks. The war against Afghanistan was just target number one. Now Bush has concocted an “Axis of Evil,” composed of Iraq, Iran, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, with which to frighten the population. This time he time he has resorted to fabrications about the ability of these three countries, which have no connection to Sept. 11, to construct and deliver weapons of mass destruction. Iraq in particular is being singled out for one of Bush’s promised wars against terrorism. There were several indications from the White House this week that the U.S. will attack this country, possibly in time for the Fall congressional elections. An estimated 50 or more countries are included within Washington’s definition of exporting terrorism or harboring terrorists.
Another symptom is the Bush administration’s refusal to acknowledge the root causes of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, such as Washington’s one-sided support of Israel against the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people; the sanctions against Iraq which have killed well over a million civilians during the last decade; U.S. support for right-wing satellite regimes throughout the region, and its subversion of governments which refuse to approach the White House on bended knee; the crushing poverty amidst plenty that results from American domination; and the Pentagon’s overwhelming presence in the Middle East and now Central Asia.
Question: What, then, is Bush really up to? Answer: He wants as much as he can possibly extract from the Sept. 11 episode that will advance the right-wing political and ideological agenda and his own electoral and class fortunes. Here are three big objectives that President Bush and his top associates hope the continual war on terrorism will secure for them over the next several years:
Objective 1. The election of more Republicans to Congress in November and reasserting control of the Senate, followed two years later by the president’s own reelection. Bush is painfully aware how close he came to losing the last election and how his father was turned out of office after he ended a war that made him popular. If the White House can keep the wars going, Bush will partially neutralize a Democratic opposition that salutes whenever he hoists the battle flag, and retain the high popularity associated with a successful wartime presidency.
Objective 2. The expansion of U.S. military power throughout the world by constructing an utterly overwhelming force capable of swiftly accessing every corner of the globe with armaments suitable for the circumstances and the terrain. The Afghan adventure was quite profitable in this regard. While buying off the usually squabbling warlords to do the actual fighting, the Pentagon (1) obtained an easy victory with which to intimidate future foes, and won Bush sufficient public support to launch more wars; (2) got to test an entirely new array of futuristic weaponry; and (3) succeeded in establishing permanent military bases in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the former Soviet republics of Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. This latter advances the forward projection of U.S. power into Central Asia in two important ways. First, it situates American troops and weapons at the very underbelly of Russia, not to mention the prized oil and gas deposits in the Caspian region. Second, U.S. bases are now within slingshot distance of western China which, despite the State Department’s language of détente, is actually viewed as the potential target of a major war in future decades. Thanks to the war on terrorism, Bush will now be able to build a military machine that further subordinates its allies and confines them to the peripheries of mutual decision-making. Bush and Rumsfeld both have recently indicated that allies are no longer of prime importance. This will enable Washington to act unilaterally whenever it wishes if allies differ with White House dictates on important issues.
Objective 3. Now that it has become not only the world’s wealthiest society but the only superpower -- so mighty it can break treaties at whim, scoff at the United Nations, and constantly punish small, poor countries for this or that act of insubordination -- the United States has set about to consolidate a post-Soviet empire of a new type. Such an empire, in the hands of a state possessing extraordinary technological supremacy and the ability to deliver missiles and bombs any place it chooses by remote control, puts those of Roman or British vintage to shame. America’s empire is the world as cornucopia, filled with abundant raw materials for the taking; a limitless supply of cheap labor throughout a developing world with billions of poor, oppressed people; “free” markets wherever its multinational businesses venture to exploit and profit; “free” trade agreements which cheat the workers into poverty and early graves, always favoring the U.S. banks and corporations over the locals, and whenever possible over foreign capitalist competition as well; and ever-flowing pipelines of petroleum and natural gas from around the world. And in the “homeland,” so secure despite the hysteria, it is oh-so democratic and so culturally cool, with a population largely manipulated by an education system beholden to the prevailing economic powers, and a “free” press owned by media conglomerates that impose their big-business ideology on everything they purvey; a happy land of opportunity for those with dollars stuffing their pockets, but where so many workers are underpaid and have to put in too many hours, with millions of poor children and 43 million citizens without medical care, and 31 million souls who to one degree or another are hungry, where there are 2.5 million millionaires and 298 billionaires, and where everyone is equal except when they are of color or without much money.
It is to maintain and extend this empire of empires that George W. Bush and his right-wing cohorts contrive to transform the heartbreak and fear induced in the people of the United States by the events of Sept. 11 into the mandate for militarism implicit in the new defense budget under the guise of a war on terrorism.