Category Archives: Military

Reality Check For America’s Armchair Warriors

China, Fascism, Foreign Policy, Liberty, Military, Republicans, Russia

Said Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell address to the nation: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. … we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.”

And that was then.

Nevertheless, Mitt Romney (“I will insist on a military so powerful no one would ever think of challenging it”), and Rick Santorum (“I will not cut one penny out of military spending”) both decry the “gutting” of the military by Obama. They are following a not-so proud tradition. A “former president George W. Bush told his Argentine counterpart Nestor Kirchner, ‘The best way to revitalize the economy is war, and the US has grown stronger with war.'”

“In 2009 alone,” reports RT, “the United States was responsible for almost half of the world’s total military spending – 46 per cent, or 712 billion US dollars. Since then, the figures have only grown, to the point that American military spending now exceeds that of China, Russia, Japan, India, and the rest of NATO combined. The US has more than 700 military bases in 130 countries around the world.”

Wikipedia confirms that assessment.

UPDATED: The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn’t Care If You Read

Foreign Policy, Media, Military, War

“The war has been a disaster and the military’s top brass” is lying to the American public to keep the adventure going, never mind the grunts that give up the ghost for the brass’s career designs. Wow. That can’t be, can it?

Sure it can. It’s probably quite unremarkable.

Anyone who has been reading this space and articles with any regularity will yawn, and then, disinterestedly, peruse the report written by active-duty officer Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis, who is “a 17-year Army veteran recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan.”

The title of the article in Rolling Stone is “The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn’t Want You to Read.” Don’t you think that’s over-dramatic? Is deception to keep the killing fields open for the business of the military-industrial-complex that unusual? Hardly.

“If the public had access to these classified reports they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes,” Davis writes. I don’t think so. The American public is a zombie.

Davis last month submitted the unclassified report –titled “Dereliction of Duty II: Senior Military Leader’s Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort” – for an internal Army review. Such a report could then be released to the public. However, according to U.S. military officials familiar with the situation, the Pentagon is refusing to do so. Rolling Stone has now obtained a full copy of the 84-page unclassified version, which has been making the rounds within the U.S. government, including the White House. We’ve decided to publish it in full; it’s well worth reading for yourself. It is, in my estimation, one of the most significant documents published by an active-duty officer in the past ten years.

READ MORE.

UPDATE (Feb. 15):

Refreshers for the record from “‘JUST WAR’ FOR DUMMIES” March 12, 2003: “I’m no pacifist. While I don’t condone the lingering American presence in Afghanistan, and while I doubt the abilities of the U.S. military to contain al-Qaida there, I supported going after bin Laden’s group in that country. That was a legitimate act of retaliation and defense, accommodated within St. Augustine’s teachings, whereby a just war is one ‘that avenges wrongs, when a nation or state has to be punished, for refusing to make amends for the wrongs inflicted by its subjects.'”

And from “A War He Can Call His Own” July 18, 2008: “The initial mission in Afghanistan was, after all, a just one. Going after al-Qaida in Afghanistan at the time was the right thing to do and was a legitimate act of retaliation and defense accommodated within Just War teachings. Al-Qaida was responsible for the murder of 3,000 Americans. The Taliban succored al-Qaida and its leader bin Laden. The President had told the hosting Taliban to surrender bin Laden and his gang. The Taliban refused. America invaded. So far so good. But that initial mission mutated miraculously, and now we are doing in Afghanistan what we’re doing in Iraq: nation building. Nations building is Democrat for spreading democracy. Spreading democracy is Republican for nation building. These interchangeable concepts stand for an open-ended military presence with all the pitfalls that attach to Iraq. …”

The Adventures Of America’s Alinskyites in Egypt

Barack Obama, Bush, Democracy, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Media, Middle East, Military, Neoconservatism

The following is excerpted from my latest column, “The Adventures Of America’s Alinskyites in Egypt.”:

“The Egyptian Justice Ministry, under the authority of the military council, has detained and indicted 19 American democracy activists. To listen to the malfunctioning media stateside, however, the Egyptians are being petty, picking a fight with their American benefactors for “operating in Egypt without a license.”

Or, if you want ‘expert’ opinion, courtesy of Politico.com, the Egyptian plan to prosecute these ‘Americans and two dozen others’ ‘is more over the future of U.S. aid to Egypt and who controls it.’

Among the Americans detained in Egypt is Sam LaHood—son of Ray LaHood, the Obama administration’s secretary of transportation and a former Republican congressman from Illinois.

Try as it did to obfuscate Egypt’s allegations against LaHood, the New York Times was forced to mention the military-led government’s suspicion that LaHood’s organization had been funneling funds through Washington ‘to stir unrest in the streets’ of Cairo. The Gray Lady nevertheless attributed this preposterous figment of the Arab imagination to an ‘escalating drumbeat of anti-American statements’ in Egypt.

LaHood fell under suspicion in his capacity as head of the International Republican Institute (IRI). And, wouldn’t you know it, he was working alongside the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and Freedom House—described by the Times as ‘a Washington-based group that promotes democracy and open elections.’ Also arraigned were the director of the NDI and one ‘Patrick Butler, vice president of programs at the DC-based International Center for Journalists.’

The IRI and the NDI are excrescences of the Republican and Democratic parties respectively.

Yes, on the foreign-policy front, not much distinguishes America’s duopoly. Republicans and Democrats work in tandem, Saul-Alinsky style, to bring about volcanic transformation in societies that desperately need stability. …

Dr. Ron Paul excepted, conjuring up new missions abroad is a project shared by the incumbent president and his Republican rivals.

To cap it all, the troublesome meddling is paid for by the unsuspecting, overburdened American taxpayer. …

The hypocrisy in all this is that we Americans do not live under the Athenian democracy seemingly promoted abroad. On the contrary, we the people labor under a highly evolved technocratic, militarized Managerial State, which is far more efficient in encroaching on its citizens than are the tin-pot dictators, who’ve been built-up into mega-monsters in infantile, Disneyfied minds.

… Were Americans to run riot, as the spirited Egyptians have done pursuant to the Port Said stampede, they’d probably come face-to-face with the Military. In contravention of The Posse Comitatus Act—and in furtherance of freedom, of course—the 2006 version of The National Defense Authorization Act allowed the Armed Forces to ‘restore public order’ during “major public emergencies.”

Read the complete column, “The Adventures Of America’s Alinskyites in Egypt.”

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UPDATED: Mitt Romney’s Foreign Policy Bellicosity (Sununu Stumping for Romney)

Debt, Elections, Foreign Policy, Military, Republicans

In his Florida victory speech, Mitt Romney promised: “I will insist on a military so powerful no one would ever think of challenging it. President Obama has adopted a policy of appeasement and apology. I will speak out for those seeking freedom and I will stand shoulder to shoulder with our friends around the world.”

Romney offered a permutation of the promise in the Nevada victory speech, Saturday, February 4, where he took 49.4% of the vote (14,535 votes).

President Obama is shrinking our military and hollowing out our national defense. I will insist on a military so powerful that no one would ever think of challenging it. President Obama believes America’s role as leader in the world is a thing of the past. I believe the 21st century will be and must be an American century.

Romney understands business, not economics. One needs an understanding of the natural laws of economics to comprehend the extent of the economic malaise that afflicts the US. “The defining characteristic of the Unites States is debt—public and private. America is a debtor nation,” I wrote in “Republicans, Repent!” Course correction is unlikely for a country, America, that is now the biggest debtor nation in the world.

His foreign policy bellicosity aside, Romney is sincere when he says that “the disappointments of the last few years are a detour, not our destiny.” Sincere, pleasant, presidential, but hopelessly delusional about the feasibility of course-correction. (Consider: The Tea Party Congress has done precious little to correct course, except to get comfortable on the Hill.)

UPDATE: John Sununu was on FoxBussiess today promising that Mitt Romney would add 100,000 men and women to the Navy to beef it up. That is the definition of insanity. To accuse OBama of gutting the American military qualifies too.

Sununu, who is stumping for Romney, does have a good idea, though, of who New Gingrich is:

“When Newt Gingrich talks about big ideas, I take ‘big’ as being a synonym for cockamamie because half the stuff he comes up with is unrealistic and undoable at a time when we’re dealing with huge budget deficits, when we are expressing concerns about $15 trillion, $16 trillion debt. He is talking about a trillion dollar program to go to the moon. There are appropriate times to have ideas that are new and different. This is not a time to spend a billion dollars going to the moon. Most of the ideas he has are designed to be self-aggrandizing.”