[Peace-discuss] George Will slams GOP candidates for pushing wars & military spending Americans don't want

[E. Wayne Johnson]

Great piece.
"Neoconservative bent", indeed.  lol.

A pedal worked on their organ sounds like a good idea to me.

"We're bringing the war back home,
where it ought to have been before..."

On 2/10/2012 7:43 AM, Robert Naiman wrote:
> Look at that Urbana boy go.
>
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/republicans-need-more-than-rhetoric-on-defense/2012/02/07/gIQA5SF1zQ_story.html
>
> Republicans need more than rhetoric on defense
>
> By George F. Will, Published: February 8
>
> Through 11 presidential elections, beginning with the Democrats’
> nomination of George McGovern in 1972, Republicans have enjoyed a
> presumption of superiority regarding national security. This year,
> however, events and their rhetoric are dissipating their advantage.
>
> Hours — not months, not weeks, hours — after the last U.S. troops left
> Iraq, vicious political factionalism and sectarian violence
> intensified. Many Republicans say Barack Obama’s withdrawal —
> accompanied by his administration’s foolish praise of Iraq’s
> “stability” — has jeopardized what has been achieved there. But if it
> cannot survive a sunrise without fraying, how much of an achievement
> was it?
>
> Few things so embitter a nation as squandered valor; hence Americans,
> with much valor spent there, want Iraq to master its fissures. But
> with America in the second decade of its longest war, the probable
> Republican nominee is promising to extend it indefinitely.
>
> Mitt Romney opposes negotiations with the Taliban while they “are
> killing our soldiers.” Which means: No negotiations until the war
> ends, when there will be nothing about which to negotiate. “We don’t,”
> he says, “negotiate from a position of weakness as we are pulling our
> troops out.” That would mean stopping the drawdown of U.S. forces —
> except Romney would not negotiate even from a position of strength:
> “We should not negotiate with the Taliban. We should defeat the
> Taliban.” How could that be achieved in a second decade of war? What
> metrics would establish “defeat”? Details to come, perhaps.
>
> The U.S. defense budget is about 43 percent of the world’s total
> military spending — more than the combined defense spending of the
> next 17 nations, many of which are U.S. allies. Are Republicans really
> going to warn voters that America will be imperiled if the defense
> budget is cut 8 percent from projections over the next decade? In
> 2017, defense spending would still be more than that of the next 10
> countries combined.
>
> Do Republicans think it is premature to withdraw as many as 7,000
> troops from Europe two decades after the Soviet Union’s death? About
> 73,000 will remain, most of them in prosperous, pacific, largely
> unarmed and utterly unthreatened Germany. Why do so many remain?
>
> Since 2001, the United States has waged war in three nations, and some
> Republicans appear ready to bring the total to five, adding Iran and
> Syria. (The Weekly Standard, of neoconservative bent, regrets that
> Obama “is reluctant to intervene to oust Iran’s closest ally, Syrian
> President Bashar al-Assad.”) GOP critics say that Obama’s proposed
> defense cuts will limit America’s ability to engage in troop-intensive
> nation-building. Most Americans probably say: Good.
>
> Critics say that defense cuts will limit America’s ability to
> intervene abroad as it has recently done. Well. Even leaving aside
> Iraq and Afghanistan, do Americans want defense spending to enable a
> rump of NATO — principally, Britain and France — to indulge moral
> ambitions and imperial nostalgia in Libya, and perhaps elsewhere,
> using U.S. materiel and competence?
>
> Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says that the Army should contract from
> 570,000 soldiers to 490,000 in a decade. Romney says that the military
> should have 100,000 more troops than it does. (The Army is 88,000
> larger than it was before Afghanistan and Iraq.) Romney may be right,
> but he should connect that judgment to specific assessments of threats
> and ambitions.
>
> Romney says: “It is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon,”
> that if he is elected, Iran will not get such a weapon, and if Obama
> is reelected, it will. He also says that Obama “has made it very clear
> that he’s not willing to do those things necessary to get Iran to be
> dissuaded from” its nuclear ambitions.” Romney may, however, be
> premature in assuming the futility of new sanctions the Obama
> administration is orchestrating, and Panetta says Iran acquiring
> nuclear weapons is “unacceptable” and “a red line for us” and if “we
> get intelligence that they are proceeding with developing a nuclear
> weapon, then we will take whatever steps necessary to stop it.” What,
> then, is the difference between Romney and Obama regarding Iran?
>
> Osama bin Laden and many other “high-value targets” are dead, the
> drone war is being waged more vigorously than ever, and Guantanamo is
> still open, so Republicans can hardly say that Obama has implemented
> dramatic and dangerous discontinuities regarding counterterrorism.
> Obama says that, even with his proposed cuts, the defense budget would
> increase at about the rate of inflation through the next decade.
> Republicans who think America is being endangered by “appeasement” and
> military parsimony have worked that pedal on their organ quite enough.
>
>