On Tuesday night, US Undersecretary of Defense Shay Assad, the
Pentagon's top contracting official, sent a memo to the commanders and
directors of all branches of the military instructing them to cease all
business with the embattled community organization ACORN and to take
"all necessary and appropriate" steps to prevent future contracts with
the organization.
In the coming year's military spending bill, members of a House panel
continue to steer lucrative defense contracts to companies represented
by their former staffers, who in turn steer generous campaign donations
to those lawmakers, a new analysis has found.
And then along
comes one of those stories that makes you cringe down to your very
core, that makes you see our semi-fine nation and the world around it
through a bleak and unforgiving lens indeed. No matter how hard you try
and how you spin the story and flip it around and try to forcibly shape
it into something less slightly nauseating, all you can do is realize
that sometimes ugliness and violence win the day, the year, the planet.
I’ll believe it when it finally happens.
But the news that Congress might actually stop production of a
high-tech, job-generating and, most of all, high-profit weapons system
because it fills no legitimate national security function is a
considerable victory for President Barack Obama and Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates, as well as for logic.
A major landmark in the in the United States's military presence in
Iraq arrives on 30 June 2009, when the army is scheduled to withdraw
its combat-troops from the country's cities. The terms of the
"status-of-forces agreement" with the Iraqi government will see most of
these (currently 133,000) soldiers relocated
to a number of major bases in rural areas, though some will join the
30,000 troops that have left Iraq since the peak of the "surge" in
mid-2008.
The arrows or the olive branch? Offense or
defense?
The eagle on the Great Seal of the United States faces an olive
branch held in its talon-- symbolic of our desire for peace. But
the eagle on the seal of the president has, for most of our
history, faced the 13 arrows held in the other talon -- showing
that we are always ready for war. And we have had more than our
share: two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the
Cold War.
In the comic books, bad guys often team up to fight the forces of good.
The Masters of Evil battle the Avengers superhero team. The Joker and
Scarecrow ally against Batman. Lex Luthor and Brainiac take on
Superman.
And the Somali pirates, who have dominated recent headlines with
their hijacking and hostage-taking, join hands with al-Qaeda to form a
dynamic evil duo against the United States and our allies. We're the
friendly monsters -- a big, hulking superpower with a heart of gold --
and they're the aliens from Planet Amok.
There are few statistics as stunning
as the following simple, single number: The United States spends
two times more on its military than all the other countries of the world,
combined.
Yes, that's right. All 200 or
so of them. Combined.
Much of the media attention this week on President Obama's new
military budget has put forward a false narrative wherein Obama is
somehow taking his socialist/pacifist sledgehammer to the Pentagon's
war machine and blasting it to smithereens. Republicans have charged
that Obama is endangering the country's security, while the Democratic
leadership has hailed it as the dawn of a new era in responsible
spending priorities. Part of this narrative portrays Defense Secretary
Robert Gates as standing up to the war industry, particularly military
contractors.
The war
that ended 20 years ago has lived on in a menu of weapons systems we
have continued to develop, modify, and build at ever increasing cost,
if not utility, since then. Defense Secretary Robert Gates'
announcement of significant cuts in several of those systems signals
that in a new administration and a severe fiscal crisis, this Cold War
legacy may finally be winding down.
