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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Hurst who wrote (244101)	10/5/2007 2:20:21 PM
From: one_less	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

"...what do you think about us taxpayers funding a large, $Bn, private, far right wing army headquartered in North Carolina?" Your army would get it's butt kicked by the real US Military. Extracting current budget figures over one hundred years of operation at today's values, the feds will spend 53.29 trillion dollars of tax payers money to directly fund the real US Military. This does not currently include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget, such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance and production (which is in the Department of Energy budget), Veterans Affairs or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which are largely funded through extra-budgetary supplements, e.g. $120 Billion in 2007). Conversely, the military budget does include a certain amount of spending that is of dual-use nature; for instance, infrastructure development for areas around US military bases within the United States often fall under the military budget en.wikipedia.org

To: Don Hurst who wrote (244101)	10/5/2007 2:43:17 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

So Ed, what do you think about us taxpayers funding a large, $Bn, private, far right wing army headquartered in North Carolina? We created a far richer and wider market for those kinds of armed services and then we failed to meet that demand in-house. I suppose it's because we wanted maximum control over the events in Iraq and that meant to the extent possible it had to be "our people" who were filling the demand for mercenary soldiers. We had to keep it reasonable in terms of cost and availability of recruits and we wanted to keep it quiet at home so we gave them immunity from Iraqi legal controls over their exercise of violence and we didn't provide for any US controls. It worked out pretty well if you wanted the job done, dirty or not, no questions asked. Of course the unintended short term consequences are that their level of "reaction" created "terrorists" in Iraq who were, for some reason, somehow upset at the random, indiscriminate level of violence exercised by swaggering tough guy mercenaries subject to no laws who sometimes shot first and never bothered to ask questions later. And if you ignored the fact that they successfully recruited away from our own special forces and career military men who learned there was a much more lucrative market for their skills and one where they could act in whatever manner their own code of conduct, or lack of a code, required. And, of course, those unrestrained, shoot first if you want, human life is cheap, forces will and have come home. If the demand for their services wanes they'll have to take low excitement, low paying jobs and they'll ....? The thing about cowboying is that when the fences come up they want to tear them down. In the end it's an expensive side show in a carnival of an unnecessary war. But it is one that catches the imagination and we'll hear about an occasional mercenary doing violence for years to come. Ed PS, on a side note, I went to a reunion of the men of my battalion in Vietnam and there were 11 of us that I knew and had served with in the jungle. We were from Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, California, Oregon, New Jersey, New Mexico and all around. Most of us hadn't talked in almost 4 decades. Do you know how many of us had supported the war in Iraq? Not ONE of us. Nobody. Who are these "vet's who support George Bush?" I don't think they're combat veterans.