Charles
BUSH'S WAR BUDGET: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, REPEATEDLY
The following article appears in the Feb. 15, 2002, issue of the Mid-Hudson (N.Y.) Activist Newsletter / Action Calendar.
By Jack A. Smith
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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."
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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."
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.
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9/11 does not justify establishing the Fourth Reich. Bush's demogogy exposed.
A different perspective
By Robert Macklin, Canberra Times. Friday February 8, 2002
AUSTRALIA S toll in the World Trade Centre tragedy has fallen markedly from the 96 estimated killed in those first terrible days. On his visit to New York last week Prime Minister John Howard revealed that there were 17 Australian casualties. And the total deaths, once thought to be in the tens of thousands, has now fallen to below 3000.
To the families affected such numbers are meaningless. But politicians have not been beyond using them to their advantage. So the New Internationalist magazine has just published some figures to provide a different perspective.
On that same September 11, it reveals:
24,000 people died of hunger,
6020 children were killed by diarrhea,
2700 children were killed by measles,
1411 women died in childbirth
3288 children were made homeless by war.
Time for a war on poverty perhaps?