Military Madness

As even Republicans this week talked about small cuts to the $720 billion military budget in the wake of President Obama's deficit commission recommending $100 million in cuts, I'm reminded that the most honest comment I ever heard about military spending in this country came from a Republican. The remark came from then-Indiana Rep. Mark Souder prior to his resigning over an affair with a staffer.

Souder was one of the most reprehensible politicians I've ever interviewed in my approximately 20 years as a reporter. A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, he had no problem supporting the Iraq War which involved others doing the fighting and dying. And making money off of his stock in the Lockheed Corp. which manufactures the F-16s Souder voted we send to Israel. But I had to give him some small credit in 2008 when I interviewed him for a story I was writing about the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War.

"Do you know how many people would be out of a job in this district if the war ended tommorrow?" he asked me when I questioned him on the cost of the war which was then approaching $700 billion. There was the ugly truth no matter how immoral it is: war or the threat of war is a jobs program in this country. Our nation is the largest arms dealer in the world and we do not build weapons to keep ourselves or others safe, we do it to make money and keep people employed

It is probably always been true, but it seemed more admirable in World War II when the nation was cranking out weapons to defeat Germany and Japan even though many of our prominent businessmen - including the raging anti-Semite Henry Ford, author of The International Jew - admired Nazi Germany and did business with it. My grandfather was part of the "military-industrial complex" during World War II before President Eisenhower coined the term in his 1960 presidential farewell speech. An engineer and 1916 Yale University graduate, my grandfather could only climb the company ladder so far at Winchester Arms because he was a Jew, but it was a good job.

After World War II, the rationalization for working in the "defense industry" was that you were helping keep America safe from communism although we now know President Truman, whose Truman Doctrine made the US the world's police officer, exaggerated the communist threat to justify the enormous spending needed for massive arms buildup. This has created a permanent state of emergency and endless war and caused our nation to support some of the most ruthless dictators in the world including Saddam Hussein until he became a threat to other dictatorships and arms customers we cared more about in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

The Department of Defense - whose original name was the more honest Department of War - spread the money around the nation in a form of economic blackmail. While our infrastructure, educational system and healthcare standards crumbled, what politician would dare call for cutting military spending when it would cost him or her jobs in their districts and re-election. This included my home state of Connecticut where Electric Boat of Groton kept building nuclear submarines even after the fall of the Soviet Union.

In 2001, I remember questioning Connecticut Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro about her support for the U.S. sending Blackhawk helicopters to the Colombian government to fight "the drug war" despite our own State Department acknowledging Colombia's atrocious human rights record. In the 1980s DeLauro had been a critic of President Ronald Reagan - now known as Saint Reagan to the right - supporting death squads in Central American countries like Colombia. But those helicopters were made by Sikorsky Aircraft in DeLauro's district and now she supported the sale and assured me the choppers would only be used for drug enforcement not butchering civilians caught in the crossfire.

The US leads the world in miltary spending, outspending Russia, it's closest competitor, by 800 percent and the 2011 budget of $720 million is 67 percent higher than the 2001 budget of $432 billion adjusted for inflation, according to a Thursday news release from the nonpartisan Center For Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. http://jnoubiyeh.com/2010/05/us-military-spending-far-outpaces-rest.html

Military madness corrupts all of us from the pols to the people who build the bombs and rationalize that what they're doing makes us safer. At best, there will be token cuts in the military in the future used to justify far deeper cuts to social services in what remains of our shredded safety net. The quagmire in Afghanistan will continue for years until a new one starts somewhere else. The only thing that will stop substantial military spending is if we run out of customers or finish shipping all the defense industry jobs overseas.

Eisenhower presided over the military buildup which makes him a hypocrite, but perhaps the 50 million dead in World War II made him aware of the immorality of it all and gave him a guilty conscience. In that article in 2008 I included a 1953 quote from Eisenhower that remains timeless: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."