An Orgy of Defense Spending
Bush's 'axis of evil' rhetoric fabricates a need.
Los Angeles Times
February 5, 2002
E-mail story
By Robert Scheer:
An Orgy of Defense Spending
Bush's 'axis of evil' rhetoric fabricates a need.
Now we get to see just how cowardly the
Democrats in Congress can be. President Bush has
proposed the most preposterous military buildup in
human history--annual spending of $451 billion by
2007--and nary a word of criticism has been heard
from the other side of the aisle. The president is
drunk with the popularity that his war on terrorism
has brought, and those sober Democrats and
Republicans, who know better, are afraid to
wrestle him for the keys to the budget before he
drives off a cliff.
The red ink that Bush wants us to bleed to line the
pockets of the defense industry, along with the tax
cuts for the rich, will do more damage to our
country than any terrorist. The result will be an
economically hobbled United States, unable to
solve its major domestic problems or support
meaningful foreign aid, its enormous wealth
sacrificed at the altar of military hardware that is
largely without purpose.
Why the panic to throw billions more at the military
when even the Pentagon brass have told us it is not
needed? Our military forces, much maligned as
inadequate by Bush during the election campaign, proved to be lacking in
nothing once the administration decided to stop playing footsie with the Taliban
and eliminate those monsters of our own creation. It was obviously not a lack
of hardware that made us vulnerable to the cruelty of Sept. 11 but rather a
failure of will by President Clinton, and then Bush, to brand the Taliban as
terrorists and then to take out the well-marked camps of Al Qaeda with the
counterinsurgency machine we have been perfecting since the Kennedy
administration.
Clinton authorized the elimination of Osama bin Laden in 1998, but the spy
agencies simply failed to execute the order. Neither, apparently, were they
competent enough to track Al Qaeda agents from training camps in Afghanistan
to flight schools in Florida. All this even though these agencies possess secret
budgets of at least $70 billion a year, combined.
Despite the ability to read license plates from outer space and scan the world's
e-mail, our intelligence agencies lost the trail of terrorists who easily found
cover with lap dancers in strip joints.
The bottom line is that we need sharper agents, not more expensive equipment.
There is not an item in the Bush budget that will make us more secure from the
next terrorist attack.
That being obvious, Bush is now resorting to the tried and true "evil empire"
rhetorical strategy, grouping the disparate regimes of Iraq, Iran and North
Korea as an "axis of evil."
This alleged axis then becomes the rationale for a grossly expanded military
budget, the idea being that the United States must be prepared to fight a
conventional war on three fronts.
However, no such axis exists. North Korea is a tottering relic of a state whose
nuclear operation was about to be bought off under the skilled leadership of the
South Korean government when Bush jettisoned the deal. Iraq and Iran have
been implacable foes for 25 years, and both were despised by the Taliban and
Al Qaeda.
Meanwhile, a key Muslim ally of the United States, Saudi Arabia, produced 15
of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers--and Bin Laden. Saudi Arabia is also where Al
Qaeda does its biggest fund-raising and yet, inexplicably, it is excluded from
the new enemies list.
Even if the accepted goal were the overthrow of the three brutal regimes
targeted by President Bush, that would hardly requirean expansion of a war
machine built to humble the Soviet Union in its prime.
Is Bush the younger now telling us that his father failed to topple Saddam
Hussein because he lacked sufficient firepower? The road to Baghdad was
wide open after we obliterated the vaunted Iraqi tank army in a matter of
weeks. Or does Bush the younger have even more grandiose plans in mind?
His astonishing budget makes sense only if we are planning to use our mighty
military in a pseudo-religious quest to create a super-dominant Pax Americana.
Bizarre as that sounds, it may be the real framework for Bush's proposed
spending orgy. In any case, almost every non-American speaker at the World
Economic Forum in New York expressed fear at this specter.
Even our own Bill Gates was alarmed at the United States' apparent hubris:
"People who feel the world is tilted against them will spawn the kind of hatred
that is very dangerous for all of us."
Is it too much to ask that these billions, our billions, be spent to enhance our
security rather than further erode it?
latimes.com *
Robert Scheer writes a syndicated column. |
