--------------------------------------------------------------------------------- HAPPY WAR YEAR!
By Jack A. Smith
Happy War Year 2002, President Bush declared in effect to the American people just before the departure of War Year 2001, even though he has yet to reveal the names of Washington’s new post-Afghan enemies. “Above all,” said Bush, indicating it was the administration’s top priority, “this coming year will require our sustained commitment to the war against terrorism.”
Whatever happens, keep your checkbook handy. At minimum, the cost to U.S. taxpayers this year will be well over $1 billion a day just to finance the Defense Department and the CIA, regardless of what countries the Bush administration decides to bomb next. This figure does not include expected supplementary military appropriations during the year to cover additional costs that will inevitably accompany the new campaigns, or the ongoing disbursements for former wars, such as veterans benefits and interest on the $5.9 trillion national debt, up to 80% of which results from military spending, according to the War Resisters League.
Bush signed the $343 billion Pentagon budget for fiscal year 2002 on Dec. 28. nearly three months after the “year” actually began Oct. 1. This amount represents a 10.6% increase, or $33 billion, over last year. The administration’s pet project, the ABM-Treaty-busting missile defense network, enjoyed an increase of $3.1 billion, bringing this year’s outlay to $8.3 billion.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is already agitating for a minimum hike of over $20 billion for the 2003 budget, beginning in nine months, to purchase an enormous array of exotic weaponry for Bush’s evidently unending wars. Among the new weapons, according to the New York Times Jan. 1, are “munitions that can penetrate caves and hardened, deeply buried bunkers .... North Korea and Iraq are thought to have built many such bunkers for command centers and storage sites for biological and chemical weapons.” This is a particularly ominous indication that Iraq and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea remain the prime targets in Bush’s new wars on terrorism, even though neither country has been implicated in the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S. Former UN Special Commission chief inspector Scott Ritter disclosed Oct. 19 that Iraq’s chemical-biological weapons programs “had been dismantled, destroyed, or rendered harmless during the course of hundreds of no-notice inspections.” And there has never been proof that the DPRK was concealing chemical-biological weapons. The Times also reported that Rumsfeld “seeks to strengthen conventional forces to counter threats from nations like Iraq and North Korea.” The notion that either of these small, troubled countries is issuing “threats” to the U.S. or anyone else is preposterous.
Along with the new Pentagon budget, the president also signed a bill hiking “intelligence” spending, but the amount these agencies will receive is kept secret from the American people. The cost of the CIA alone is over $30 billion a year, according to the Federation of American Scientists, which sued to get the figures for 1997-98 and is projecting from this information. Multi-billions in further military costs are embedded in other parts of the federal budget. For example, the $2 billion or more Israel will receive in outright “military grants” this year will be listed in the foreign aid expenditures. The billion-plus going to Colombia for counterinsurgency is identified as part of the “war on drugs.”
Reviewing the budget amounts, the Center for Defense Information revealed that “Pentagon spending now accounts for 51.3% of all federal discretionary spending -- i.e., those funds that the administration must request and Congress must act on each year.” Actually, when present and past war expenditures are compiled, just over half of all the income taxes Uncle Sam collected in 2001 will go to the military. (Washington uses deception to claim the percentage is much lower. It includes trust funds such as the huge Social Security account along with income taxes in calculating the Pentagon’s portion, while it excludes the military aspect of the national debt.)
The new war budget means the U.S., with 4% of the world’s population, is responsible for nearly 40% of all world military expenditures, including upkeep on some 70 major foreign bases (about 100,000 troops are permanently stationed in South Korea and Japan alone, poised to strike at the DPRK if Bush gives the nod) out of about 800 Pentagon outposts abroad. By comparison, People’s China, with over four times the U.S. population, has a military budget of about $40 billion a year -- and no such outposts. All told, the United States, its NATO clients and Washington’s Japanese-Israeli-South Korean satellites account for over 80% of global war spending.
The White House is the principal purveyor of war materiel to the rest of the world, by far exceeding other suppliers. Indeed, about 25% of U.S. gross domestic production is given over to military-related goods, for consumption at home and abroad. This is the one sector of the U.S. economy that is doing spectacularly well during the recession. Stock prices for the major military manufacturers have shot up 20-30% since the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center. The Bush administration is obviously counting on military spending to contribute strongly toward extricating the U.S. from the economic doldrums.
As more and more money for militarism bloats profits for the masters of war, many states in the union are cutting back on already flimsy social service budgets due to the recession and tax cuts for the wealthy. The federal budget, which has seen its social services component shrink markedly in recent decades, contains little more than rhetoric for the hard-pressed working class, which has just experienced another jump in unemployment to 5.8%. At the same time, poverty and hunger are quickly spreading throughout the country, according to all indicators.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, where he is vacationing at this writing, President Bush is thought to be pouring over an assortment of military world maps, contemplating where next after Afghanistan to stick the little U.S. flag pins so generously supplied to him by the Pentagon brass as a New Year’s present. Baghdad? Pyongyang? Mogadishu? Khartoum? Beirut? Tripoli?
Whatever Bush decides, he’s aware a large majority of the American people -- and the entire leadership of the Democratic Party -- are behind his wars and will likely remain that way for a few more months, at least. The Gallup organization reported Jan. 2 that “67% of Americans believe military action should continue in other countries even if [Osama] bin Laden is killed and his terrorist network in Afghanistan is destroyed.” And 70% “say they think U.S. war efforts would be as successful in Iraq as they have been in Afghanistan.”