We have no exit plan because we don’t plan to exit June 23, 2007
Posted by reformedville in : Government, Media , trackbackA cure based on a false diagnosis is almost always worthless, often worsening the condition that is supposed to be healed. If perception is power, and he that controls the perception has the power…then: Who’s the Daddy? The Big Boys and girls have been engaging us in a game of Perceptual “Peek-A-Boo!”
There is to be no withdrawal from Iraq, just as there has been no withdrawal from hundreds of places around the world that are outposts of the American empire. As UC San Diego professor emeritus Chalmers Johnson put it, “One of the reasons we had no exit plan from Iraq is that we didn’t intend to leave.”
The United States maintains 737 military bases in 130 countries across the globe. They exist for the purpose of defending the economic interests of the United States, what is euphemistically called “national security.” In order to secure favorable access to Iraq’s vast reserves of light crude, the United States is spending billions on the construction of at least five large permanent military bases throughout that country.
The DoD always tries to minimize the size of its budget by representing it as a declining percentage of the gross national product. What it never reveals is that total military spending is actually many times larger than the official appropriation for the Defense Department. For fiscal year 2006, Robert Higgs of the Independent Institute calculated national security outlays at almost a trillion dollars— $934.9 billion to be exact— broken down as follows (in billions of dollars):
• Department of Defense: $499.4
• Department of Energy (atomic weapons): $16.6
• Department of State (foreign military aid): $25.3
• Department of Veterans Affairs (treatment of wounded soldiers): $69.8
• Department of Homeland Security (actual defense): $69.1
• Department of Justice (1/3rd for the FBI): $1.9
• Department of the Treasury (military retirements): $38.5
• NASA (satellite launches): $7.6
• Interest on war debts, 1916-present: $206.7
Totaled, the sum is larger than the combined sum spent by all other nations on military security.When Ronald Reagan coined the phrase “evil empire,” he was referring to the Soviet Union, and I basically agreed with him that the USSR needed to be contained and checkmated. But today it is the U.S. that is widely perceived as an evil empire by others and world forces are gathering to stop us. The Bush administration insists that if we leave Iraq our enemies will “win” or— even more improbably— “follow us home.” I believe that, if we leave Iraq and our other imperial enclaves, we can regain the moral high ground and disavow the need for a foreign policy based on premptive war.
Agree or disagree?
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