Wars Sending US into Ruin

Wars Sending US into Ruin

 

Obama the peace president is fighting battles his country cannot afford

 

By Eric Margolis

 

February 7, 2010, Toronto Sun/Canada

 

http://www.torontosun.com/comment/columnists/eric_margolis/2010/02/05/12758511-qmi.html

 

U.S. President Barack Obama calls the $3.8-trillion US budget

he just sent to Congress a major step in restoring America's

economic health.

 

In fact, it's another potent fix given to a sick patient

deeply addicted to the dangerous drug - debt.

 

More empires have fallen because of reckless finances than

invasion. The latest example was the Soviet Union, which

spent itself into ruin by buying tanks.

 

Washington's deficit (the difference between spending and

income from taxes) will reach a vertiginous $1.6 trillion US

this year. The huge sum will be borrowed, mostly from China

and Japan, to which the U.S. already owes $1.5 trillion. Debt

service will cost $250 billion.

 

To spend $1 trillion, one would have had to start spending $1

million daily soon after Rome was founded and continue for

2,738 years until today.

 

Obama's total military budget is nearly $1 trillion. This

includes Pentagon spending of $880 billion. Add secret black

programs (about $70 billion); military aid to foreign nations

like Egypt, Israel and Pakistan; 225,000 military

"contractors" (mercenaries and workers); and veterans' costs.

Add $75 billion (nearly four times Canada's total defence

budget) for 16 intelligence agencies with 200,000 employees.

 

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars ($1 trillion so far), will cost

$200-250 billion more this year, including hidden and

indirect expenses. Obama's Afghan "surge" of 30,000 new

troops will cost an additional $33 billion - more than

Germany's total defence budget.

 

No wonder U.S. defence stocks rose after Peace Laureate

Obama's "austerity" budget.

 

Military and intelligence spending relentlessly increase as

unemployment heads over 10% and the economy bleeds red ink.

America has become the Sick Man of the Western Hemisphere, an

economic cripple like the defunct Ottoman Empire.

 

The Pentagon now accounts for half of total world military

spending. Add America's rich NATO allies and Japan, and the

figure reaches 75%.

 

China and Russia combined spend only a paltry 10% of what the

U.S. spends on defence.

 

There are 750 U.S. military bases in 50 nations and 255,000

service members stationed abroad, 116,000 in Europe, nearly

100,000 in Japan and South Korea.

 

Military spending gobbles up 19% of federal spending and at

least 44% of tax revenues. During the Bush administration,

the Iraq and Afghanistan wars - funded by borrowing - cost

each American family more than $25,000.

 

Like Bush, Obama is paying for America's wars through

supplemental authorizations ­- putting them on the nation's

already maxed-out credit card. Future generations will be

stuck with the bill.

 

This presidential and congressional jiggery-pokery is the

height of public dishonesty.

 

America's wars ought to be paid for through taxes, not

bookkeeping fraud.

 

If U.S. taxpayers actually had to pay for the Afghan and Iraq

wars, these conflicts would end in short order.

 

America needs a fair, honest war tax.

 

The U.S. clearly has reached the point of imperial overreach.

Military spending and debt-servicing are cannibalizing the

U.S. economy, the real basis of its world power. Besides the

late U.S.S.R., the U.S. also increasingly resembles the dying

British Empire in 1945, crushed by immense debts incurred to

wage the Second World War, unable to continue financing or

defending the imperium, yet still imbued with imperial pretensions.

 

It is increasingly clear the president is not in control of

America's runaway military juggernaut. Sixty years ago, the

great President Dwight Eisenhower, whose portrait I keep by

my desk, warned Americans to beware of the military-

industrial complex. Six decades later, partisans of permanent

war and world domination have joined Wall Street's money

lenders to put America into thrall.

 

Increasing numbers of Americans are rightly outraged and

fearful of runaway deficits. Most do not understand their

political leaders are also spending their nation into ruin

through unnecessary foreign wars and a vainglorious attempt

to control much of the globe - what neocons call "full

spectrum dominance."

 

If Obama really were serious about restoring America's

economic health, he would demand military spending be

slashed, quickly end the Iraq and Afghan wars and break up

the nation's giant Frankenbanks.

 

Copyright © 2010 Toronto Sun

 

Eric Margolis is a columnist for The Toronto Sun. A veteran

of many conflicts in the Middle East, Margolis recently was

featured in a special appearance on Britain's Sky News TV as

"the man who got it right" in his predictions about the

dangerous risks and entanglements the US would face in Iraq.

His latest book is American Raj: Liberation or Domination?:

Resolving the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World