[Peace-discuss] Antiwar tendency in Tea-party

[C. G. Estabrook]

      Neocons Panic Over 'Tea Party'
      How sweet it is!
      by Justin Raimondo <http://original.antiwar.com/author/justin/>, October 
06, 2010

The tiny but well-placed -- and very well-financed -- political sect known as 
the neoconservatives 
<http://www.google.com/search?q=site:antiwar.com+neocons&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGLL_enUS400US400&ie=UTF-8&hl=#sclient=psy&hl=en&rlz=1B3GGLL_enUS400US400&q=neocons+site:antiwar.com&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=c6affe93747c32d0> 
is in panic mode. Discredited 
<http://www.amazon.com/They-Knew-Were-Right-Neocons/dp/0385511817/antiwarradio> 
by the disastrous war 
<http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2010/0816/US-in-Iraq-What-s-been-left-behind> 
in Iraq, and implicated <http://www.thenation.com/article/agents-influence> in 
the trail <http://stage.tp.techprogress.org/2005/11/02/hadley-non-denial/> of 
lies <http://motherjones.com/politics/2004/01/lie-factory> that led us into that 
quagmire, the neocons are deathly afraid that the jig is up: that their agenda 
of perpetual war and extravagant "defense" spending is coming up against the 
limits <http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/10/03/the-new-antiwar-populism/> 
both of the US Treasury, and the willingness of the American people to finance it.

They're living in fear of the so-called tea party, the spontaneous grassroots 
rebellion against runaway federal spending 
<http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=11878> that has successfully 
challenged the GOP establishment and wants to cut big government down to size -- 
with a meat axe. Not that the tea partiers have even brought up the idea that 
military spending ought to be treated like all government spending and summarily 
subjected to the chopping block, but, hey, the whole idea of preemption as a 
strategic principle originated 
<http://work.colum.edu/%7Eamiller/wolfowitz1992.htm> in the neocon brain 
<http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/01/14/richard-perle-still-crazy-after-all-these-years/>. 
We've had a veritable fusillade of op eds, first 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/23/AR2010092305493_pf.html> 
from Danielle Pletka and Thomas Donnelly in the / Washington Post/ the other 
day, and today 
<http://www.heritage.org/Research/Commentary/2010/10/Peace-Doesnt-Keep-Itself> 
it's the /War Street Journal/'s turn to go to the barricades for the Old Cause 
<http://www.amazon.com/Perpetual-Peace-Harry-Elmer-Barnes/dp/0939484013/antiwarbookstore>. 


/Weekly Standard/ editor Bill Kristol 
<http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=8591>, Ed Feulner 
<http://www.heritage.org/about/staff/f/edwin-feulner>, longtime chief honcho at 
the Heritage Foundation, and Heritage policy wonk Arthur Brooks 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Brooks>, onetime "compassionate 
conservative," make the case for cutting little old ladies off of social 
security while letting the big defense contractors off the hook. The party line 
is trotted out in partisan terms: citing President Obama's Aug. 31 speech 
<http://projects.washingtonpost.com/obama-speeches/speech/380/> announcing the 
supposed "end" of "combat operations" in Iraq, in which he pointed to the costs 
of the Iraq occupation as one reason to draw our mission to a close, they snicker:

/"It is encouraging to see Mr. Obama concerned about deficits and debt. But his 
concern with the military is largely misplaced. It is neither the true source of 
our fiscal woes, nor an appropriate target for indiscriminate budget-slashing in 
a still-dangerous world."/

Well, then, why argue about the "true source" of our looming bankruptcy if 
cutting the military is off the table from the start? I guess they want to cover 
all their bases, which shows how nervous they must be -- as they ought to be. 
Because while neither Obama <http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/02/01-9> 
nor the tea party 
<http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/07/08/military-expert-sarah-palin-fights-to-ensure-tea-parties-support-insane-bloated-war-budget/> 
is making any overt moves in the direction of the War Party's toy chest, the 
neocons are truly worried about the latter: the fact that Ron Paul 
<http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/10/05/neocons-panic-over-tea-party/original.antiwar.com/paul> 
is one of the Tea Party's heroes is enough to cause them acute discomfort. Nor 
is Paul the only one in those circles calling for a reevaluation of our foreign 
policy and gargantuan <http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1941> 
"defense" expenditures.

So the neocons have to clothe their argument for more spending in "fiscal 
conservative" drag. Thus they are mad as hell about "the president's proposed 
budget for 2011" which "will add $10 trillion in debt over the next decade." No 
mention is made, however, of the trillions in debt 
<http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-500803_162-4486228-500803.html> accrued by the Bush 
administration, where their comrades-in-arms held sway for eight years. "By 
2020," they wail, "the federal government will owe $20 trillion, or $170,000 per 
American household. That's a beast that must be stopped": but the tea partiers 
know it's a beast with two heads -- and they're one of them.

Oh, but this is "a beast that has not principally been fattened on a diet of 
Pentagon spending," they aver. "Even with the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan, 
this year the Department of Defense will spend some $720 billion---about 4.9% of 
our gross domestic product, significantly below the average of 6.5% since World 
War II."

The old GDP trick is tired, and unlikely to work on readers of the /Wall Street 
Journal/, many of whom may be more aware than the Average Joe that GDP, or gross 
domestic product, includes all domestic spending and acquisitions, /including 
government spending 
<http://www.amazon.com/Depression-War-Cold-Studies-Political/dp/0195182928/antiwarbookstore>/: 
every time Ben Bernanke and his friends speed up the printing presses, it's all 
counted as part of "GDP." That's why this metric generates complete baloney: a 
more useful one would measure the /private sector/ GDP 
<http://www.philkerpen.com/?q=node/17>, i.e. the real source of actual wealth 
and productivity in the US economy. In real terms, the percentage of national 
wealth consumed by military spending is much higher.

Go here <http://blog.mises.org/14134/tax-receipt-fascinating/> and look at the 
"receipt" you would get if the feds thought enough of you to give you one, in 
return for your taxes. The military is divided up into several different items, 
but add them all together and it looks like the Warfare State rivals the Welfare 
State in terms of sheer extravagance. It's worth noting that the military 
operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are right up there all by themselves at 
number five, just below the big entitlement programs and the interest on the 
national debt. And those are just the military expenditures they tell us about: 
if we add the "classified" "off-budget" items handed out to the CIA and other 
clandestine agencies and "special projects," plus the opportunity costs of 
allocating this huge sum to the military sector, the real price tag is much higher.

In the face of the overwhelming reality of skyrocketing military costs, the 
neocon triumvirate simply makes up their own numbers:

/"Defense spending has increased at a much lower rate than domestic spending in 
recent years and is not the cause of soaring deficits. Even as the United States 
has fought two wars, the core defense budget has increased by approximately $220 
billion since 2001."/

Perhaps they simply define the "core defense budget" as DoD expenditures alone 
-- or else the neocons have invented their own branch of mathematics -- but the 
fiscal reality is this: since 2001, money for the military has nearly doubled 
<http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending>. According to 
Laicie Olson of the Center for Arms Control, military spending totaled $437 
billion in 2001, and by 2011 had climbed to $720 billion.

"We should be vigilant against waste in every corner of the budget," the 
triumvirs aver, "but anyone seeking to restore our fiscal health should look at 
entitlements first, not across-the-board cuts aimed at our men and women in 
uniform."

They always hide behind this trope: it's for the troops in the field. Except it 
isn't. Those soldiers who have been severely wounded 
<http://www.homefrontthemovie.com/abouthomefront.php> or otherwise traumatized 
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31596375/> in the neocons' wars come home to an 
economy that has no jobs 
<http://www.marketwatch.com/story/high-unemployment-could-last-a-long-time-2010-10-05?dist=countdown> 
for them, and a healthcare system that treats them like sh*t 
<http://www.truth-out.org/060509A>. Remember how soldiers' families had to send 
them body armor <http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,101061,00.html>, fer 
chrissake, because the military wasn't providing it? It isn't about "our men and 
women in uniform," it's about the hugely expensive weapons systems that were 
designed to face off against the Soviet Union 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/subjects/m/military_aircraft/f22_airplane/index.html> 
-- an enemy that no longer exists. And speaking of enemies that no longer exist: 
how much money are we spending maintaining a string of military bases all across 
Europe <http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/eucom.htm>? They've been 
there since the end of World War II 
<http://www.antiwar.com/stromberg/?articleid=656>! While the neocons are always 
screeching about how this or that tinpot dictator is the equivalent of Hitler, 
there seems little likelihood the real thing is making a comeback in Germany. 
Ditto Korea, which has tens of thousands 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Forces_Korea> of US troops stationed 
in harm's way 
<http://original.antiwar.com/prather/2009/03/27/how-bush-pushed-north-korea-to-nukes/>, 
just waiting for the nutty North Koreans to blast them with a couple of nukes.

Why are they there -- and at what cost?

After this fusillade of phony numbers, the triumvirs wheel out the big guns:

/"Furthermore, military spending is not a net drain on our economy. It is 
unrealistic to imagine a return to long-term prosperity if we face instability 
around the globe because of a hollowed-out U.S. military lacking the size and 
strength to defend American interests around the world. /

/"Global prosperity requires commerce and trade, and this requires peace. But 
the peace does not keep itself. The Global Trends 2025 report, which reflects 
the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community, anticipates the rise of new 
powers---some hostile---and projects a demand for continued American military 
power. Meanwhile we face many nonstate threats such as terrorism, and piracy in 
sea lanes around the world. Strength, not weakness, brings the true peace 
dividend in a global economy."/

If commerce and trade are dependent on the US military policing the world, then 
it's a zero sum game, because there is no bigger drain on our economy than our 
grossly extravagant military budget. It is a fiscal cancer eating away at our 
vitals, as any honest set of budget numbers will show. And why can't our trading 
partners take up some of the responsibilities of policing the sea lanes and 
other trade routes: isn't trade a two-way street?

Yes, no doubt the "intelligence community" wants more money, as does the 
military establishment and every other self-interested bureaucracy operating out 
of Washington: it's the natural inclination 
<http://mises.org/etexts/mises/bureaucracy.asp> of every government agency and 
program to expand, and to justify its own existence 
<http://www.amazon.com/Crisis-Leviathan-Critical-Government-Institute/dp/019505900X/antiwarbookstore> 
in terms of a looming "crisis." Yet the US doesn't face a major adversary, or, 
at least, an adversary of a conventional type: can we really compare the threat 
of /pirates /to that posed by Soviet nukes aimed at our cities during the cold 
war era? Let's get real.

Our extravagance is itself the biggest threat to our national security -- not 
China, but our debt to China. Kristol & Co. are worried about the Chinese 
People's Liberation Army denying us access to the Asian-Pacific region, but the 
real danger 
<http://washingtonindependent.com/76320/china-threatens-to-dump-u-s-treasury-bonds-over-taiwan-arms-sales> 
is their denying us access to their capital, which buys up US debt and keeps the 
US government afloat. They own us. Isn't that the real threat to our national 
security, and not some imagined military assault? There's no reason to attack us 
militarily if they can accomplish the same goal without firing a shot.

As was widely reported, the former director of national intelligence, Dennis 
Blair, testified 
<http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/13/nation/na-security-threat13> before 
Congress that our looming economic crisis is the number one threat facing us at 
the moment:

/"The nation's new intelligence chief warned Thursday that the global economic 
crisis is the most serious security peril facing the United States, threatening 
to topple governments, trigger waves of refugees and undermine the ability of 
America's allies to help in Afghanistan and elsewhere./

/"The economic collapse 'already looms as the most serious one in decades, if 
not in centuries,' said Dennis C. Blair, director of national intelligence, in 
his first appearance before Congress as the top intelligence official in the 
Obama administration."/

In his testimony, Blair made a quite plausible case that economic instability 
across the globe will lead inevitably to political turmoil, which will in turn 
adversely impact American interests in a major way. The nature of the crisis is 
multiplied many times by the global character of the economic implosion: in the 
past, regions experiencing economic woes were able to export their way out of 
it. These days, however, there is no one to export to: /everyone/ is going broke.

Oh, but surely the armchair generals over at Heritage and the /Weekly Standard/ 
know more about it than the Director of National Intelligence -- right?

The neocons' trump card, aside from pure partisanship, is their own 
self-portrayal as Reaganite "optimists," a meme that seems oddly inappropriate 
at a time when millions of Americans are facing foreclosure, bankruptcy, and a 
diet of cat food in their old age:

/"There are some who think the era of U.S. global leadership is over, and that 
decline is what the future inevitably holds for us. Some even believe that 
decline offers us a better future, in the model of our relatively pacifist 
social-democratic allies. But this is an error. A weaker, cheaper military will 
not solve our financial woes. It will, however, make the world a more dangerous 
place, and it will impoverish our future."/

If we don't take radical steps to reduce government spending -- including 
military spending, arguably the biggest single item in the budget 
<http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm> -- our pretensions to "global 
leadership" will surely evaporate as quickly as did those trillions of dollars 
during the crash of '08. What is this "global leadership," anyway? It has always 
been our position of economic preeminence, the foundations of our military 
strength, that has ensured our leadership. Yet that preeminence is being 
hollowed out by the spendthrift addictions of both the right and the left, who 
exempt their own favorite government programs from honest scrutiny.

A cheaper military is not necessarily a weaker military: indeed, a leaner 
fighting force, one geared to the realistic objectives of the post-cold war era, 
is in all ways a stronger, more capable, more useful military configuration. 
This is what a real "defense" budget would entail: but the neocons aren't 
interested in defense: they want to play offense. It was, after all, Kristol's 
little subsidized magazine that plumbed for war with Iraq 
<http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001/550afrhr.asp>, and 
is now agitating tirelessly <http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/kristol-iran> 
for war with Iran. Beyond that, it was the /Standard/ that published Max Boot's 
infamous article, "The Case for American Empire 
<http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/318qpvmc.asp>," 
which called for establishing US colonies around the world.

What we have is a /bankrupt / empire -- and that's the sort of empire that 
inevitably goes into decline. If we follow the advice of Kristol and his 
buddies, we'll be in receivership in no time.

It's great to see the neocons so worried: anything that makes them nervous is a 
good thing. Now, come on, you tea partiers, let's give them something to worry 
about!

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2010/10/05/neocons-panic-over-tea-party/

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