Re: Clinton downsized & gutted the military to such a dangerous level that it was necessary after 9/11 to restore it in order to wage the War on Terror.
You are skating dangerously close to lunacy with that comment.
Perhaps you are unaware of what happened at the end of the 1980s. The Soviet Union disappeared as a credible threat to the U.S. Did you miss the news?
If so, that may explain why you seem so out of touch with reality regarding the excessive cost to the U.S. of maintain a wasteful, bloated and useless military in the state of readiness achieved by the Reagan excesses.
Perhaps you are even more ill-informed of the choice made in the early 1980s by the Secretary of the Navy to commission 600 new vessels, in spite of every analyst in the Department of Defense arguing against this madness. The explosion of ship building has meant an explosion later of ship staffing and maintenance that is a national embarrassment. We now have 12 major task forces, each centered on a behemoth aircraft carrier. France has one. Britain has two. Russia has two in working order, though they are predominantly just for coastal defense. Why we need 12 is never rationally explained. But it is wasting a fortune.
Keep in mind that the way an out-of-control military works is that the general staff is full of high testosterone individuals who are all seeking career advancement. To them, peace is the enemy, because it stalls out careers. Thus, maintaining too large a military, as we do, creates inevitable pressures leading to war. Because war is what advances careers. So a perverse incentive is built into our system so that what once was meant as a defensive system actually become a self-licking ice cream cone that demands more and more struggle and conflict in order to justify its very existence and its call upon the treasury of the nation.
Dwight Eisenhower understood this crazy pathology very well:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." --President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Speech in 1953
Source: eisenhower.utexas.edu
Today, it is undeniable, the U.S. is deeply in debt. We are now $7 Trillion in debt, with probably another $700 Billion to be added this year. That's insane. And almost all of this crazy destruction of the fiscal integrity can be ascribed to insane weapons proliferation since Reagan came into power in 1980. When he took office, the U.S. debt stood at less than $1 Trillion. Look what we've bought with $6 Trillion in debts: A huge war machine with an ever increasing appetite for conquest. While the social and physical infrastructure is allowed to rot away. This is insane.
No wonder the rest of the world fears the U.S. government. There has never been a more out-of-control monster in the history of the planet.
The military might of the U.S. government does not make the U.S. citizen safer. It makes the citizen poorer. It make the country more resented across the entire planet. And justifiably so.
We need to re-order our priorities in this nation.
First and foremost by resisting the temptation that Bush fell for to be the mercenary chump fulfilling Ariel Sharon's foreign policy. America needs to come to its senses.
We spend half of the world's budget for military matters. Yet no one thinks this is actually making us safe and secure.
Isn't it time we wake up and realize that we are creating our own enemies by projecting such bristling hostility across the planet? Isn't it time for America to lead toward peace and not toward war? Only when the rest of the world doesn't see the U.S. as a rapacious bully will we have real peace.
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Re: Those people who like to blow up Americans & their architecture are not imaginary figures you know.
Explain this to me. How is it that you don't seem at all inquisitive about the fact that NORAD stood down on 9/11/01 and has been trying to cover its tracks ever since. Why aren't you in the least bit inquisitive about why Bush and Cheney have been fighting any and all investigations into 9/11 since that date? Doesn't your mind at least tug at you a little bit that there is something drastically wrong with this picture?
Who are the real enemies of the American public? I can guarantee that they are not who you think they are. They are not a tiny band of insurrectionists existing without modern communications in frozen caves in outer Baluchistan. They are closer than you think.
An impeachment of George Bush would certainly help to start to bring out the truth about who America's real enemies are. |
