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.
The
phrase "Obama has a lot on his plate" is the understatement of the
year. The president has a to-do list a mile long, and every day a new
crisis (like the coup in Honduras) gets added to the list. Can we really fault him if he sneaks the occasional smoke?
The more things change at the polls, the more they apparently stay
the same in Congress. The Defense bill that the House Armed Services
Committee is presenting today on the House floor is the first
opportunity for this Democratic Congress to turn the page on the Bush
administration's disastrous approach to national defense. Instead, it
is poised to authorize more of the same, or worse.
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 global arms madness continues.
A new report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
(one of my favorite think tanks) confirms that worldwide military
expenditure is again on the up and up, with spending having increased
by 4 percent in 2008.
“All regions and subregions have seen significant increases since
1999, except for Western and Central Europe,” says the report (available at www.sipri.org).
One of the most pernicious effects of the U.S. government’s
commitment to militarism is a toxic landscape. Current legislation
pending in the House, H.R. 672, the Military Environmental Responsibility Act, would force the military to comply with environmental and public safety laws.
In a highly unusual reversal, the Defense Department's inspector general's office has withdrawn a report it issued in January exonerating a Pentagon public relations program that made extensive use of retired officers who worked as military analysts for television and radio networks.
The Pentagon has done little to collect at least $100 million in overcharges paid in deals arranged by corrupt former officials of Kellogg Brown & Root, the defense contractor, even though the officials admitted much of the wrongdoing years ago, two senators have complained in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.
The letter also said that the Army had almost completely failed to move away from the monopolistic nature of the logistics contract that has paid the contractor, now called KBR, $31.3 billion for logistics operations in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan.
Some of the nation's largest defense contractors, labor unions and trade groups are banding together to argue that the Obama administration is putting 100,000 or more jobs at risk by proposing deep cuts in weapons programs.
The defense industry and its supporters argue that the proposals by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates will increase unemployment during a historic economic crisis. Why, they ask, would President Obama push hundreds of billions in stimulus spending to create jobs only to propose weapons cuts that would eliminate tens of thousands of them?
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.
