March 23, 2004
Look in the Rear-View Mirror!
Driving with one eye focused on the rear-view might be a way to avoid being run over by the Humvee behind you. Other than in times like those, the rear-view mirror should only be used when you are changing lanes in a big truck, not when you are about to change the people who run your government. Oh yes you should note how people voted during their career in the process of evaluating them for high office. In every case you will find inconsistent voting records on some issues and not on others. Except where people always voted for their personal agendas over the interests of the voting public, at least, you will find inconsistencies or apparent inconsistencies. In a twenty year or longer career in politics you should find some major inconsistencies in voting records regarding military spending. If you don’t there is something wrong with the person casting those votes. If the judgment of the politician in question is so poor that they never find a military expenditure that they don’t like they don’t belong in office in the first place.
That said; why is the loudest voice in the office of Vice President since Spiro Agnew decrying John Kerry’s voting record on military spending? This babbling baboon with Halliburton halitosis has one hell of a lot of gall talking about military spending as an issue. For all practical purposes you would think that he would keep his mouth shut about the militaristic approach to the world that he has always promoted in his long and deviant career of promoting huge military expenditures as the only way to win the cold war. We won the cold war by out producing them because we have a superior economic system based on private ownership and a strong work ethic. Our Military expenditures during the Cold War were excessive but understandable as the threat from their military forces was real if overstated by our intelligence agencies. We also created a National Debt with ill conceived military adventures like Vietnam. It is that debt which will threaten most our ability to sustain our status as the only superpower in the world.
That is the legacy of the Cold War that Cheney wants to project into the future. The War on Terror is supposed to give these guys a free ride back into the White House. Unfortunately Cheney and his pals are responding to terrorism in the same fashion as they did to the Soviet Union. The huge army of the Soviets is no longer a threat. Al Queda has no army in a conventional sense against which our standard military force can be used. Regardless of the inappropriate nature of our defense budget in fighting terrorism, that mountain of money is their greatest contribution to our fight to keep terrorists at bay. Among other prospects, the war on Terror will supposedly get Cheney and Bush back into office. It will do that no doubt courtesy of their impeccable credentials in voting for every military measure ever to come down the pike. How can you be tough on “terror” if you haven’t spent everything you have on weapons? Or for that matter on contracts for reconstruction handed to your former employer without so much as a fixed cost bid?
That whole set of issues revolving around how much “money” you have spent on military preparedness is such a crock of horse puckey. We spent around three trillion dollars during the Clinton Administration’s eight years in office. He was no doubt weak on defense too. That is in spite of the fact that the attack on the World Trade Center during his Administration resulted in the prosecution and conviction of the perpetrators. Not one of the three hundred trillion pennies in those budgets made one iota of difference on 9/11. It is not the money that we spend on conventional military forces that will offer us the greatest protection against terrorism. It is far more likely that local Police and Fire Departments will play a key role in anti terrorist activities on our own soil than military forces not near the civilian targets of terrorist attacks. Military spending will not protect us against terror! Can I repeat that again for your edification? Military spending will not protect us against terror! Terror lies not in our enemies but in ourselves, dear people. NO! I am not saying that we are the terrorists in the world! I am saying that we are too easily terrified into spending ourselves into a gigantic hole of debt that will consume our wealth. It will make us poorer without protecting us against the attacks of terrorists here where we live. Equating the expenditure of vast sums for defense with winning the “war on terror” is one of the biggest lies ever told a sovereign people in human history.
First of all if there is a real war going on out there, it is not being waged by the terrorists. They have neither the means nor the manpower to wage a real war. They are not warriors; they are criminals everywhere in the world except here. We are calling them enemy combatants. They are using criminal tactics that are only used when you are without real power. They must use stealth and destroy non-military targets to gain their political, social or religious ends. Terrorism seldom works as planned. Israel was the last entity to reach statehood through the use of terrorist tactics. While governments sometimes fall due to the actions of terrorists it is also true that they never attain their ends by terrorism alone. At some point they must gain a popular following. Terrorists seldom win the minds and hearts of the people that they terrorize. They must terrorize someone who will become the enemy of the people they need to bring them to power. In this case it is the Moslems of the world that the terrorists are hoping will support them. The war in Iraq has helped the terrorists. If you believe it has not, read the polls taken in other nations since we attacked Iraq one year ago.
Should our foreign policy be decided by polls taken in other nations? Of course not! But we ought to carefully assess what the outcome of our actions taken in other nations will be over the long run. That is the purpose of real foreign policy analysis. We should also honestly identify the true nature of any threats generated by those opposing us in the world. Otherwise our credibility will be that of the little boy who cried Wolf without the wits to look for one first. We must act preemptively only when we are virtually certain that there is a real and substantial threat, based on real intelligence estimates. We must not utilize concocted con jobs as intelligence because they will be proven false as they have with Iraq. That will make those who distrust us already, fear and hate us over time; and those who trust us begin to doubt. The lies promoted about Iraq have backfired badly against our nation. Those lies have aided the terrorists. Those false reports were used to convince a fear-filled people here, full of the justified fire of patriotic anger, that we should use our military might in Iraq. Now we are losing the respect of many decent people in the parts of the world where terrorists sleep at night. That is not a victory in the “War on Terror” or if it is, it is a victory for the terrorists.
I neither hate President Bush nor his Vice President Dick Cheney but I can clearly see the flaws in their approach to fighting terrorism around the world. Terrorism is what we are fighting! Terrorism is what we are fighting! Terrorism is what we are fighting! Repeat that mantra daily and nightly with your prayers and you will find this battle less confusing. Terror is in our minds and hearts; we can control that without war. Terrorism is in the actions of those who kill indiscriminately, those who would like to destroy our society with one, one hundredth of one percent of our annual military budget. They can only win if we overreact to the real but limited threat they can make against us. They are aided more by our inability to focus on real threats posed by unsecured facilities within our own borders than they are threatened by our huge military budgets.
First we need to secure our one thousand most dangerous locations here at home. I have watched in amazement while our President and Vice President and others in this administration have wrongly terrorized our people more than 9/11 ever did. They did so by posing one of the least likely terrorist attacks as dangerously close. They focused their attention and ours on Saddam’s ability to provide a nuclear weapon to terrorists. The idea that a nuclear weapon would be detonated on our soil in one of our cities was promoted in order to quiet opposition to the war in Iraq. The terrorists lacked the financial support and technical ability to create such weapons. So did Saddam who still had some of the oil receipts of his nation at his command. The greatest threat of nuclear attack in our nation remains within our own borders. Our nuclear plants are still unsecured at this late date. If we allow our Foreign Policy to weaken our hold on limiting the availability of nuclear weapons in the world we will have done ourselves grievous harm. Nonetheless it is the unsecured waste material and electrical plants in our own nation that pose the greatest nuclear threat to our nation’s security. We are being distracted from that real mission of securing our nation by non existent threats like the weapons of Saddam. He had no capacity to create nukes at all.
We are over a million times more ready to fight a conventional war than Al Queda, so they will never fight us in an open battle. That is where the vast majority of our military budget goes, toward tools that help us win conventional battles. When terrorists attack us with airplanes it is the airport guards and the Air Marshals who are our first line of defense. Then it is our air traffic controllers who must report the hijackings. Only then will the military scramble fighters to destroy the plane, if it becomes necessary. If it gets that far, then the people on the plane clearly offer more of a threat to the terrorists than the military. Remember, it is the people closest to the event who can most easily thwart the terrorists. Remember, that before our military could respond, the heroic people on the flight which crashed in Pennsylvania prevented those terrorists from carrying out their mission. Remember also the case of the shoe bomber and the fact that it was the people on that plane who prevented a disaster. There was nothing that the military did in either of those cases that prevented the success of the terrorists, just the actions of a few alert and brave citizens.
Funding the people in our front line of defense adequately makes the need for a military response less likely in the event of an actual attack. If they attack us at a nuclear power plant it will be the guards posted at those facilities that must fight them. We need to secure and defend those facilities better or we will possibly lose a major city and a lot of land to radiation. That nuclear plant just down the road is far easier to turn into a weapon of terror than hard to obtain nukes carried into our nation from outside. Our military does not protect those facilities today. We need to raise our level of response to that possible threat. It is not a current policy, why not? Does Mr. Cheney even know the potential threat posed by our undefended nuclear plants? It is these issues that must make it to the surface of our consciousness if we are to find the person who should be President next year. What we see in our rear view mirror related to voting for funds used by conventional military forces is meaningless and a mirror distraction. God bless and keep you all safe and aware in this first Presidential election after 9/11. ©Henri Reynard/GoldenBrush Interactive
Posted by Henri Reynard at March 23, 2004 12:20 PMThe Bush administration is doing all the things you claim it is not.
What is the department of Homeland Security? Bush is working to strengthen the intelligence community instead of defunding it. Democrats have been working and advocating to drastically and disastrously cut the pentagon and the CIA for awhile now.
It is fine to say that having the best military in the world makes us safe from attack, but to then say that since we are safe from attack we no longer need the military is, well… the left at it’s most persistant.
Posted by: Eric Simonson at March 23, 2004 02:51 PMWhat is the department of Homeland Security?
A new bureaucracy that supposedly streamlines interaction between intelligence and law enforcement agencies, but instead seems to be more fighting turf wars with them.
The largest expansion of the “big government” - and by a Republican president - in decades.
The ability to spot the nation’s weakest points was going to make Homeland Security different, recalled one person involved in the decision to set up TTIC. But now, the person said, “that whole effort has been gutted by the White House creation of TTIC, [which] has served little more than to give the appearance of progress.”Similarly, the Terrorist Screening Center, which was originally envisioned as an effort to combine terrorist watch lists across government agencies, was established within the FBI. And there, the TSC is developing not one unified watch list, but a complicated system in which agents from various parts of the government check only their own agency’s database when a query comes in about a possible terrorist.
If the search produces a “hit,” that information stays within the agency rather than producing a government-wide alert. So, for example, the FBI could be told to be on the lookout for a suspected terrorist, but Homeland Security border-control agents wouldn’t necessarily be told that person had been trying to enter the country.
“You’re still not getting all the data in one place,” complained a Homeland Security source. “It’s not happening. It’s not even slated to happen.” That is because members of the law enforcement intelligence community still don’t trust each other’s agencies, much less the new Homeland Security Department. And Ridge is in no position to force them to behave in trusting ways.
Democrats have been working and advocating to drastically and disastrously cut the pentagon and the CIA for awhile now.
We keep hearing that claim, usually as an attack on Kerry. Let’s note that Kerry’s proposed reduction failed because the Republican bill - which cut more than Kerry had proposed - passed.
It is fine to say that having the best military in the world makes us safe from attack, but to then say that since we are safe from attack we no longer need the military
When has a mainstream Democrat (c’mon, no Kucinich quotes here) ever said we don’t need a military? We’ve proposed reducing bloat in the military, making it more efficient. They’re two utterly different things, especially when you consider that the Pentagon budget - $399 billion - is almost four times the budgets of China, Russia, and the Axis of Evil combined.
Posted by: ceejayoz at March 23, 2004 07:39 PMthe Pentagon budget - $399 billion - is almost four times the budgets of China, Russia, and the Axis of Evil combined.
I’d like to keep it that way, ceejay.
By the way, you might like what Donald Rumsfeld has to say about streamlining the pentagon and our military. I’ll see what I can dig up and report back to you.
I agree, not all democrats are bent on gutting our defence in the name of social justice. There’s Zell Miller for example.
You have to admit there is a tendency and an ideological bending toward dissolving much of our military. I never hear democrats publicly talk about cutting or making entitlement programs more efficient. All you hear is how people will starve and families will be on the street if the rate of increase is reduced.
Posted by: Eric Simonson at March 23, 2004 08:39 PMBy the way, you might like what Donald Rumsfeld has to say about streamlining the pentagon and our military. I’ll see what I can dig up and report back to you.
I’ve heard it, and I like it. I’m quite pro-military, but I think we could have the same level of military strength and preparedness with less budget if we cleaned up a bit - as Rumsfeld believes.
A 15% reduction in our military budget would allow us to double or triple programs such as children’s health care, education, alternative fuels, etc., without “gutting” our military one bit - we’d still have more than 3 times the military spending than China, Russia, and the Axis of Evil.
I never hear democrats publicly talk about cutting or making entitlement programs more efficient.
As I recall, most of us Dems fully supported welfare reform under Clinton’s presidency - which was successful and fair.
Posted by: ceejayoz at March 23, 2004 09:16 PMThis may be the most important debate of our time here on earth. Do we destroy our free society to protect our free society? Do we build fortress USA?
I agree with much of what you have to say about the war on terror. I view the war on terror as a bit broader than you do. I also support the war on Iraq and believe it is going “about what I expected”. I believe this war will be like the cold war in duration. We all may not live to see the end of it.
I view Iraq like Japan after WWII. It took a decade or more to build a democracy in that portion of the world. I cannot think of a reason why it would take less time in Iraq. To my knowledge there are no democracies that are producing terrorists. It is my hope that over time (10 to 20 years), Iraq will develope into a strong regional power, with civil liberties that we can all be proud of.
Further, I hope that this new democracy “exports” freedom and civil rights to it’s neighbors. I hope that Iraq puts pressure on Syria, and Iran for example. Not militarily pressure, but economic and social pressure.
As democratic principals grow and prosper (Remember it is a hope), terrorism should be reduced. I would offer Germany Italy and Japan as examples. This cannot happen without a strong military.
I agree that this war must be fought differently than the cold war however, and you make some good points.
Craig
Henry,
In French and English literature there are many examples of truely great insults. Please plagarize a little, it will improve the quality of your insults greatly. While my ancestors were, or at least many of them were French, I am a citizen of the USA and a veteran of the US Army. As to my sexual orientation you will have to continue to guess as it is certainly not your business.
On the other hand you could try changing your y to an I and see if pretending that you have an I can make you more than simply gay. Try pretending a little even if at first it makes you feel inadequate. It may not work for you but on the other hand, while I don’t know your wife, she might see some amazing improvements.
Henri
Craig,
I think Iraq was badly done and that may yet destroy our first fumbling poorly rationalized attempt to democratize the Middle East. That democratization is now quite possibly becoming vital to our interests. On the other hand I do not believe that using force to establish Democracy usually works. Chalmers Johnson points out in “Sorrows of Empire” just how often it has failed in our last half century. We might not like what Islamic democracy looks like anyway. Not that it would change my mind about the validity of democracy there. Just that it might make the region harder to handle; which is why we have supported strong men in power for so long.
Our model is unlikely to simply transplant there successfully as has been recognized in the attempt to write a constitution.
Our failure in Iraq if we do fail will still not come close to our failure using military force in an attempt to Democratize Vietnam. We tried to repeat a model there that has turned North Korea into a very ugly place in the world over the last fifty years. Our policies are certainly not without fault in that matter. Korea might turn out to be a better example relative to Iraq than Germany which had a longer history as a nation.
Since the Sunni’s and Shiites are usually at war about the meaning of Islam a division of Iraq might become necessary eventually. Civil War is still a real prospect and the Kurds are really in a bad position in all of this. Stability in a democracy is hard to attain and easy to disrupt. Germany had a short shining moment as a democracy after WWI and then the Nazi regime took over in a time of great fear there.
As for what else is happening in that area of the world, the Palestinians are still being subjected to something very close to genocide. Sistani in Iraq is noticing our lack of committment there and it makes him understandably nervous. Israel is very split on the issue of how to resolve that problem. It is not their problem any more, it has become ours.
Sharon has outplayed Bush at every turn and has no compunction about terrorizing the occupied territories none of which belong to Israel under any construct of international law.
Our foreign policy is broken badly by the failure to build a real structure under it. In this Administration that is due to the power of the Neocons being dominant but not capable of imposing their agenda on the State Department as yet. If a second helping of Bush occurs who will hold that line intact? Should we adopt the neocon agenda?
I will never support the Neocons because I see too many historical experiences that show me we cannot go there and remain a Democracy in anything but name. It will not be Colin Powell as Secretary of State next time. He has lost a lot of his credibility trying to keep this Administration out of trouble.
Thanks for your response Craig, it keeps me thinking to have things laid out the way you did in your reply. We all need to keep one another thinking so we can unite behind a workable foreign policy built by a workable Administration.
Henri
I am a little bewildered why the news media has not picked up on some very obvious slants on recent events in reference to Clarke.
1. Most people thought it was bad campaigning for Kerry to take a
vacation at this time, but I submit to you that it was very calculated and
coordinated with Richard Clarke and his recent claims. The Kerry campaign
decided it was better to be out of the public view in order to distance
himself from the Clarke rant.
2. Clarke had his own little empire reporting to the NSC and basically being
accountable to no one until February 2003, he headed a cyber-security office at
the White House until the office was transferred to the newly created
Homeland Security Department in February 2003. He announce his retirement
January 31 2003, before he would have been required to report to the Office
of Homeland Security, a department he thinks he should have been running or at least the number 2 man. It seems very obvious to me that Richard Clarke has an agenda, and selective
memory of past events, that stem primarily from his being ignored as a
possible candidate for Secretary of Homeland Security or the number 2 job.
Henri:
I only wish our national debate were being held in such a thoughtful way. The issues we are debating are critical to the very survival of freedom, and our very way of life. The over politicalization of foreign policy in this time of great need should be like serving ham at a bar mitzvah. (I think I slaughtered the spelling here).
Even after 50 years, I am not sure North Korea is lost. It is my hope that eventually something like what happened with East Germany and the res of Eastern Europe will take place in North Korea.
I am also not disappointed yet with the progress in Iraq. What is happening meets what I expected going in. Basically, over optimism is normal for early in a war. Cost estimates are initially way low. Intelligence is usually flawed.
Democracy is such a messy business. I don’t turn from any of the negative news or hang my head in denial to the murders, corruption etc. My basic point is that democracy in Iraq is in our national interest, and should be viewed as a very long and difficult journey.
As a Republican I also have no problem with holding President Bush accountable for what was said before the war. Obviously as a country we were not correctly prepared.
I clear truth (admitidly from my perspective), could be clearly accepted and the President could be given a mandate. This clear truth is that it is in our national interest to have democracy in the middle east. That there is an unwelcome possibility that people like Saddam can link with people like OBL, and that result could be a disaster. That even though there is no current evidence that there is link, there is clear proof that Iraq is in violation of many many United Nations resolutions. In the post 9/11 world we cannot tolerate uninforced UN resolutions. If the UN will not enforce it’s own resolutions then we must, since we are the biggest target and have the most to loose as evidenced by 9/11.
Also, in a desperate time like these, the public needs to be leveled with, with the truth, and not fabrication. Fabrication leads to distrust which could cost lives in the long term.
I think all of these points are quality points worthy of national debate, and focus. You make some excellent points as well.
If the debate can be real on the national level, and past partison cheapshoting, (Bush is a liar and Kerry is soft on terror), who ever wins in November just might have the American people behind them. And the chance of actually winning this war will be greatly enhanced.
I agree some what on the palistinian issue. What ever we are fighting and dying for in Iraq needs to be for the palistinians as well. They deserve fundamental human rights. In fact we cannot win the war on terrorism without solving the palistinian issue.
Craig
Posted by: Craig Holmes at March 24, 2004 12:36 PMI have heard Chalmers Johnson talk about his book on KPFA pacifica radio, and what I heard was extremely one sided and fit in well with most of the other programming at KPFA. (That is to say, politically left of Marx.)
Chalmers Johnson starts with the presumption that the United States is an oppressive capitalist empire. I don’t know that I can agree with any of the conclusions which flow from that.
The democratization of Iraq will be messy. We cannot expect, one year from the US military invading that country, to have a full fledged western style democracy in place and a golden age of peace and prosperity commencing.
It is unreasonable to continually proclaim the US occupation in Iraq a failure after only one year. It reminds me of the invasion itself, when every day the news media proclaimed the troops ‘bogged down’ in fighting what might become another Vietnam. We have made tremendous progress in Iraq. The future is not predetermined for failure despite what you believe are mistakes of the Bush Administration.
A point I’d like to make is that the Iraqi’s will have to be allowed to argue, to fight, to cajole, and work out their own democracy or it will not work. That process will be messy. Some of it will look like chaos. If we try to plan out their democracy point by point it will be doomed to failure. Self-government is the goal. After 30+ years of dictatorship getting to self-sufficiency should not be expected in one year.
Posted by: Eric Simonson at March 24, 2004 03:49 PM
