Murdering Butter with Guns
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Murdering Butter with Guns
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
Info Clearing House - Oct 5, 2007
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article18509.htm
Murdering Butter with Guns
By David Michael Green
A funny thing happened on the way to the White House in 1981.
Ronald Reagan had been talking throughout the previous years campaign
about taking a meat-axe to federal taxes (and therefore, also, revenue,
but that part somehow never got mentioned), about massively increasing
military spending, and about balancing the budget. And doing all at
once, no less.
Even a Republican could figure out - if they allowed themselves to -
that the numbers couldnt possibly add up. Indeed, no less a Goppy than
Poppy (one George Herbert Walker Bush) referred to this preposterous
suite of promises as voodoo economics. Er, he did that is, during the
primaries, when he was competing with Reagan for the nomination. Once
he had lost and was hungering for the newly nice and oh-so wise Saint
Ron to offer him the vice-presidency, he all of a sudden became
strangely silent on the topic, reminding the rest of us once again what
is mankinds second-oldest profession - a gig very much not unlike the
first.
The mystery of how Reagan could possibly do all of these things was
finally solved when the administration proposed its first budget and he
absolutely didnt. It couldnt, of course, and not only did Reagan fail
to balance the federal budget as promised, he actually went on to
quadruple the national debt, choosing instead to avidly pursue the two
more important remaining goals of his troika, tax-slashing and military
spending.
Many people wondered at the time how the Republican Party could sustain
this debt-crazed apostasy (not to mention hypocrisy), particularly
after so many years of hammering the Democrats as tax-and-spend
liberals. (Oh, and by-the-way Item Number One: The numbers involved
would pale against those of todays borrow-spend-and-giveaway
Republicans.) (Oh, and by-the-way Item Number Two: Nevertheless, in an
attempt to demonstrate that there truly is absolutely no bottom
whatsoever to the well of GOP hypocrisy, this week we have Righteous
George, Protector of the Purse, vetoing S-CHIP legislation and
replaying the partys tired old and now jaw-droppingly absurd tune as
he claims that the Democratic Congress is being profligate with the
publics tax dollars. No-bid billions for the Blackwater black-hole?
Absolutely. Money for sick kids? Irresponsible!)
When Reagan first went down this path it was so weird that a conspiracy
theory of sorts arose. The notion was that Republicans knew they could
not possibly go through the front door to successfully kill popular
programs like Social Security and Medicare, even if they were willing
to risk political suicide to do so. So Reagans agenda was a back-door
approach, instead. Driving up the debt to completely unsustainable
levels, the story went, America would be faced with a series of
uncomfortable choices as collectors came demanding their payments. The
country could either raise taxes, cut military spending, or slash
social programs. The idea was that, of the three, the last of these
would seem to the public like the least worst choice. And then
conservatives could surreptitiously achieve a long-held goal, best
expressed by Grover Norquist, right-wing tax crusader extraordinaire:
I dont want to abolish government, I simply want to reduce it to the
size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the
bathtub. By government, of course, he means the parts that help
people, not the parts that kill people. For the right, those parts are
okay. If not beloved.
Perhaps this conspiracy was real all along. Boy Bush has made Reagan
look like Leona Helmsleys accounts-payable supervisor by comparison
when it came to deficit spending, managing to borrow more than all
other American presidents (thats 42 of them, if youre keeping score
here), combined. Ouch. Thats a lot of cash, dude. Indeed, about nine
trillion bucks or so now on the national credit card, and rapidly
rising. Plus, of course, interest. Trust me, you dont want to be
handed the bill for this party of the millennium, and neither do your
children (Excuse me, you did what to us?).
But even if the alleged conspiracy was actually real, it seems likely
to have been a bad bet all along. That is, I dont think its a given
that, presented with these three options, Americans would necessarily
acquiesce to the destruction of the countrys social safety net,
especially the massive cohort of Baby Boomers who are just now
approaching the age where their hands are going to be extended outward,
palm up. I think that given such a stark choice, something miraculous
might occur. Americans might choose to finally give up their empire
instead, just as the British did when they could no longer afford to
pay for both guns and butter after the two world wars. This
conservative plan, if it was ever real, could backfire quite nicely
into forcing the country to think seriously about excessive military
spending for the first time since World War II, and then perhaps to, in
the words of Colin Powell, cut it off, and then ] kill it.
To see what I mean, lets pull Joe Six Pack - or preferably, the Baby
Boomer version of Joe Six Pack (Joe Dime Bag?) - off the street and ask
him some basic questions about his priorities for American government:
Joe, which would you prefer, to receive your Social Security payments,
or to bring democracy to the Middle East (even assuming it could be
done by American military force, which it quite clearly cannot)?
Which would you prefer, Joe, to fully fund Medicare, or to protect the
ability of American corporations to pillage third world countries
unhampered by inconveniences like, say, the governments of those
countries?
Which would you prefer, education for your children and grandchildren,
or continued tax breaks for Americans who are already fabulously
wealthy?
Which would you prefer, national infrastructure that isnt crumbling,
or corporate welfare programs for well connected defense industry firms?
These may seem like tongue in cheek pokes at Americas national
priorities, but they will actually become very real choices in the near
future, especially if there is a progressive party or other force in
America able to articulate the obvious options, and provided the the
word can get out. Given the performance of the Democratic Party and the
media of late, these are far from foregone conclusions. (Heck, Im far
from even being convinced that Bush and Cheney will actually leave
office on January 20, 2009. Watch for them to pull a Putin.) But apart
from those major caveats, these questions will rapidly become all too
real.
When the bill for the fiscal blow out comes due, hard choices are going
to have to be made. Americans are not big on taxes, but they dont
support the idea of the rich getting a free ride. That hard choice is
likely to be an easy choice.
Americans will never accept a weak defense apparatus that leaves the
country vulnerable to attack. But beyond that, they may well finally be
open to some thoughtful discussion about what is needed to achieve that
end - and where the rest of the money is going - especially if such a
dialogue is prompted by the requirements imposed by an encroaching
reality, forcing decisions like the ones posited above.
Right now, its a safe guess that the public has only the vaguest
notion of the costs and capacities of the American military, especially
in any relative sense. Most people probably understand that the United
States has the most powerful military in the world, and they support
that. On the other hand, they might well be horrified to learn just how
expensive that military is, how ridiculously disproportionate it is to
the others in the world, and how removed those costs are from any real
threat facing the country. In times of plenty - or faux plenty - when
your government is giving you tax money back even while it is fighting
two wars simultaneously, those questions dont need to be asked (or at
least one can be so deluded into thinking). But those days will soon be
gone, and - as they say - paybacks a bitch.
Its harder than might be imagined to track federal expenditures,
because there are lots of accounting choices (and nifty tricks, if you
so desire to trick people) involved. But, near as I can tell, the US is
now contemplating a budget of $672 billion this year for ~defense.
That, by the way, is up from $385 billion in 2000, measured in constant
(2007) dollars. And that, of course, is nearly a doubling, from what
was already a huge amount. These numbers dont include the costs of
past wars (principally debt from loans), estimated in 2006 to be about
$264 billion. If you add that figure to the $572 spent last year for
last years military, you get $837 billion spent on the military in
2006, or 41 percent of the federal budget.
How does that stack up comparatively? Social Security took $595 billion
in 2006. Twelve percent of the budget went to poverty initiatives, five
percent to community and economic development, and two percent to
science, energy and environmental programs.
How does that stack up internationally? In 2004, while the rest of the
worlds military expenditures equaled $500 billion, the US was spending
$534 billion. That is to say, more than all the rest of the entire
world. Combined.
Americans might even be fine with a military budget that dwarfs the sum
total for entire rest of the world - nearly 200 other countries -
assuming unlimited resources to provide butter as well as guns (though
if they knew the relative figure was quite that big, they might choke a
bit on the expenditures even with low taxes and adequate social
spending). But when you reach the point where you start having to
choose one or the other - a point we actually reached long ago, but
have hidden from ourselves by borrowing - everything is different,
hence the above alternatives for Joe Six-Pack to ponder.
What is sorely missing today, and would be even more so at the moment
when our fiscal recklessness is no longer sustainable even under
conditions of mass societal hallucination, is simply a rational
discussion of the purposes of the United States military. Once that
happens, programmatic and budgetary choices then follow in the logical
order which they should in any universe where people are even remotely
in touch with reality.
In fact, the current military budget could easily be slashed, because
the only reason for its ridiculously bloated proportions is to pursue
missions far beyond those Americans would support even during
conditions of plenty, let alone when the alternative becomes giving up
their expected benefits.
If we think about military priorities from the ground up, without any
built-in assumptions, and without the necessity of maintaining existing
programs on the basis of inertia alone, I dont think wed get very far
before the public would shout out enough, especially if they were
faced with the choice of having their Social Security checks bounce in
order to instead fund some obscure military objective on behalf of
corporate interests in Burkina Faso.
What do Americans want? They want defense, in the true meaning of the
word. To begin with, I have little doubt that Americans would be
willing to spend whatever it takes to defend American soil from foreign
attack. When it comes to state-based violence, that need could be
fairly easily addressed by a nuclear deterrent force a tenth of the
size of the current one, along with a moderate contingent of land and
naval forces. The cost of these represent a small fraction of the
current total military budget. No country is ever going to attack the
United States in either a traditional operation using conventional
forces or by means of non-conventional weapons, of course, because to
do so would mean their instant obliteration. Whatever else one can say
about nuclear weapons and all the real and potential horrors of mass
annihilation, they do give pause to those who would contemplate an
attack, in all but the most dire conflicts or screw-ups. (And this
works both ways, of course. It is no accident that the US never
attacked the Soviet Union or China, for instance, or that Bush did go
into Iraq, but not North Korea.) Perhaps some day nuclear weapons can
be eliminated from the planet. In the meantime, though, a small
quantity of them could form part of a defense structure that permitted
the US to dramatically cut military spending while allowing Americans
to feel secure from external threat.
Americans would also support, I think, the military having the
capability to respond to certain emergencies abroad - say, enough force
for the early stages of a scenario where an ally was invaded, or US
diplomats or nationals needed to be rescued from some sort of foreign
incident. This means some special forces - again, a relatively small
and inexpensive portion of the current military budget - and the same
small to moderate land and naval forces charged with defending the
national borders.
Clearly, the public would also support whatever force is necessary to
effectively attack and destroy non-state actors, such as al Qaeda, who
seek to harm the United States through non-conventional assaults. John
Kerry of course paid the price for speaking honestly about this in
2004, back when this country was still shaking off the hangover from
the Bush Binge of 9/11 and beyond, but he was right in asserting that
terrorist threats are best resisted by means of intelligence and law
enforcement (and sometimes small scale military action, when useful),
which is also a relatively low-cost affair, comparatively speaking.
(Throw in a little global justice and economic development, moreover,
and you might find youve eliminated most such threats before they ever
come to exist. What a concept, eh?)
Finally, unquestionably, there would be support in the United States
for the capacity to rapidly increase US military capability in response
to a major unexpected scenario. Americans will want a National Guard,
Reserves, and the infrastructure necessary for a Post-Pearl Harbor-like
draft and rapid militarization in the event of such an unanticipated
attack. But again, maintaining this capacity - as opposed to the actual
forces - is not a terribly expensive proposition.
And that, I suspect, is it. A moderate base force, a small nuclear
deterrent capability, the Guard and Reserves, and the capacity to
rapidly add more as needed. In sum, a vastly smaller military than
todays.
This is not World War II were in today, and its not the Cold War.
There is no need for a massive military armada to be fielded or even to
stand in readiness, as there is no massive implacable enemy to be
vigilant against, let alone a massive implacable enemy which we would
fight with conventional set-piece armies to be landed at places like
Normandy, and to fight territorial struggles like the Battle of the
Bulge.
What is the difference, then, between this American military that the
public would support and the one weve got, besides of course hundreds
of billions of dollars per year? The short answer is the capacity to
~protect American ~interests abroad. Does the American public care
whether Botswana is a democracy or not? Probably a little - not that
anyone would have the slightest clue where or what it is - but not
enough to invest their tax dollars in it, not enough to forego the
government services they want at home, and not enough to spill their
childrens blood there. Turns out their government doesnt care either,
though it may well pretend to on occasion. It doesnt even care whether
Botswana - democracy or autocracy - is particularly ~pro-American.
What the American government cares about, above all, is that Botswana
plays ball with those economic actors (who nowadays might not even
necessarily be American-based) with a pipeline to power in Washington.
Usually that means that a neat little dictatorship is in fact
preferable to a democratically elected government, particularly one
that makes the mistake of having the real interests of the local people
in mind. Folks in Iran, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua and beyond will be
happy to verify this proposition, in case you have any doubt.
Which brings us back to the absurd levels of military spending the
United States has been indulging in latter years, like an insatiable
crack addict. I hate to break up the acid test party with a mild dose
of reality, but its pure lunacy to spend considerably more than all of
nearly 200 other countries in the world on your national defense. I
mean, isnt it? Is there really no limit to the depths of Americas
national paranoia? Well, as a matter of fact, it gets far stranger yet
when you contemplate that none of those countries - not even North
Korea, Cuba or Iran - have expressed anything approaching a genuine
hostility toward your country which could plausibly lead to an attack
on their part. Then it becomes the very definition of insane when you
have a nuclear deterrent force that prevents any of those countries
from attacking you even if they wanted to. And it makes the insane look
downright wholesome when you spend these obscene sums to fight a
non-existent enemy, but cannot afford a childrens healthcare program
at home. If you needed to write a definition of a society gone mad,
surely this would be the textbook case.
Lets face it, probably three-fourths of the Pentagon budget is spent
to enrich contractors at home and bust down doors for corporate
predators abroad. China spends about $60 or $70 billion a year on
protecting the same geographical area as the US and more than four
times the number of people. Who is going to mess with that country? Not
even the United States, with tens times the military budget, would
dare. Surely America could easily procure the same degree of security
as the Chinese do for - lets be generous - say, double their
expenditure, if its true interests were purely defensive.
Nor would such a formula be a prescription for disarmament or a wimpy
defense posture. This is still double the amount of any other country
in the world. Certainly many would argue that far less than even that
much should be spent. Im one of them, but right now Id gladly settle
for a 75 percent reduction in military spending.
Of course, there are those who would claim that the United States is
the ~indispensable nation, the one that provides the glue for keeping
peace in the international system, and the only one capable of mounting
an operation like the Iraq war. Lets leave aside for the moment the
poor performance of keeping peace during the ~American century, which
often seemed rather more like the American adventure series, and lets
leave aside also the disasters of Afghanistan, Vietnam and Iraq. What a
critique such as this actually reveals is three things. First, that
other developed countries have been able to buy butter like national
healthcare and such, while we have stupidly forsaken it for guns.
Second, that the result of our spending the last decades undermining
the creation of a legitimate and functional international force to
clean up international messes is - surprise, surprise - that no such
forces now exist to carry this burden. And third, that were too
arrogant and narcissistic to pay attention to the wake-up call that
non-interest in our wars among potential allies represents.
This is where multilateralism comes into play in a crucial and
cognitive fashion. If we cant attract serious allied support for a
war, its certainly worth asking whether we should be engaged in such a
conflict at all. Neocon blowhards love to argue that Europeans have
gone soft and are all from Venus, while tough-guy Americans are from
Mars. The truth is that Europeans were fighting wars long before
America was even in diapers, and theyve learned more from the
experience than have we. Theyre not soft. Rather, its that theyre
not indiscriminate. They went to Afghanistan. They didnt go to Iraq.
Or at least a lot of them didnt. The others only went because they
wanted to keep the hyperpower happy. The next stop was regret, followed
by withdrawal of what were mostly token forces anyhow. In any case, for
a legitimate threat or a legitimate emergency (the antithesis of Iraq),
the Europeans and many others would stand shoulder to shoulder with
America, as has happened many times previously, including those wimpy
cheese-eating French who were there at Americas birth, and without
whom, indeed, the country would likely not have been born at all.
But wouldnt cutting American military spending dramatically make the
country weaker? To the contrary, our current approach makes us weaker.
We have lost the capacity to exert soft power by over-reliance on hard
power. Nobody follows us anymore unless they have to because we have
twisted their arm nearly out of its socket, or unless theyre into
committing career suicide, like Tony Blair did. And, increasingly, that
simply means that nobody follows us anymore at all. The tauntings of
Hugo Ch!vez or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would have been inconceivable not so
long ago. Now they represent leadership to a resentful world where the
arrogant and impotent superpower has hobbled itself, and can do nothing
to respond. Meanwhile, China and Russia quietly build power and
influence, wondering what they ever did to get so lucky as to have a
rival apparently quite devoted to destroying itself.
In addition to being so diplomatically, we are also weakened
economically. Dollars spent on bombs instead of education mean a dummer
~Muricah, bro. Dollars spent on napalm instead of education mean a
sicker America. And ask the Soviets what happens to a national economy
when it is dominated by military spending. If you can find the Soviets,
that is, which you cant (hint, hint). National security in the modern
era depends on economic power as well as on legions and hardware. In a
very real sense, therefore, we are diminishing our capacity to provide
sustained military security should we need it tomorrow, by bloating it
out of all recognition today.
Finally, it is pretty impossible to argue that recent choices have made
the America militarily stronger in even the most narrow sense. When all
your land forces are bogged down in a worse than useless war, youve
got a problem should a real crisis come ~round the corner. When even a
sycophant like Colin Powell can say that your Army is broken, surely
it is and worse. When your own intelligence agencies affirm that your
actions in Mesopotamia are actually creating terrorists with a
vengeance (and with a vengeance), you screwed up bad, pal. When nobody
believes you anymore including your own public, and you have to pay
exorbitant sums to get people otherwise headed to jail to join your
~volunteer military, its no longer clear which is scarier - your army
or theirs. Hey everybody, raise your hand right now if you feel safer
today than before Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld got hold of US national
security policy. Yeah, thats what I thought.
All this obscenely exorbitant military spending represents one helluva
lot of bad news, but the good news is that the entire scenario is
unsustainable. One day, not long from now, Americans will have to make
tough choices that they are avoiding (and therefore exacerbating)
today. But in all probability, such choices may not actually wind up
being so tough, after all.
We want our MTV, and we want our Social Security.
And if we have to sacrifice protecting Chiquita Brands exorbitant
profits in Guatemala or Colombia to get them, we will. David Michael
Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New
York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles
(d...@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not
always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his
website, www.regressiveantidote.net.
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