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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ish who wrote (159033)	7/8/2001 6:41:38 PM
From: CYBERKEN	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769670

Actually, the Bush administration is not committed to large defense expenditures. They have not, however, made their vision on defense clear, for many reasons, most of which would hamper a Democrat president also: 1) The defense bureaucracy is like any other bureaucracy. It will create national security crises scenarios of the depth an quality to justify and preserve their bureaucratic empires. The conservative objection to big government is that, even if a reason once happened to exist for expenditures, those expenditures and their concomitant power shifts to the public sector are fought for by wild-eyed factions decades after any possible justifications may have existed. What a % of conservatives forget is that this art form was perfected in defense before its post war expansion into welfare, entitlements, and regulations of all kinds. 2) Even when the country was in danger from large, hostile foreign powers throughout the 20th century, the only politically practical way to build defense structure was to pork barrel it as far and wide as possible, making key legislators into defenders of their state's and district's facilities without regard for their continued need. Base closings are nearly impossible, and major weapons systems like the B-1 bomber (based on 1960's technologies) have their parts produced in a majority of the 50 states. A perfect example was seen in the early 90's when even an appeaser/traitor like Diane Feinstein was having conniptions about the proposed base closings in California. 3) Even though the American general staff is the most modern in the world, there is still a strong intrinsic tendency to fight the last war rather than the next one. The replacement of divisions of soldiers and fleets of ships with smaller high-tech forces designed for the probabilities of the future will be bitterly resisted, and only a promise of preserve the old will lead to a willingness to build the new. 4) The Second World War and the Cold war presented a simplified set of defense options that the nation could be organized around: defeat Germany and Japan, then keep the communist nations from consuming the Third World until they collapsed under the weight of their own corruption. Today there are defense theorists on both the liberal and conservative sides who create threats and "security" goals because its-purely and simply-their job to do so. This results in phony missions like Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, and the Horn of Africa, that waste assets and destroy readiness. A reasonable assessment of why NATO still exists a decade after its purpose disappeared cannot be conducted in Washington because NOBODY wants to take the side that would get them labelled "isolationist". The first purpose of any government is national defense. The justification for all of the unnecessary and criminal government activity, such as Social Security, Medicare, environmental regulation, welfare, and many more too numerous to mention here, use the backbone of defense spending for their own philosophical justification ("If we could devote all those resources to defeating Germany and Japan, why can't we win a "War on Poverty", a "War on Drugs", defeat "pollution", go to the moon, etc." The Founder's warning that it is dangerous to liberty to rely on government for these purposes-not to mention that it is grossly inefficient-were simply ignored). Reduce the role defense in federal spending so that it's virtually a non-issue, and all other programs, which are basically a usurpation of private sector functions, come under greater scrutiny. Social Security is defended by nothing but greed on the part of voters who consider it their key concern, and by the politicians who whore for them. Bush will succeed in moving the defense elephant slightly into the next century, and maybe slightly changing our thinking about it. But true reform is a decades-long process, and fraught with peril from legislators whose interests are not even closely related to national defense...