Commentary from the liberterrain…
In a Washington Post article, "Obama’s damaging blow to our military," a writer plays out a familiar scaremongering game.
Phrases like "defense spending" and "national interests" and "threat" are thrown about without any admission that there's a huge difference between defense spending, military spending, spending on empire creation, spending on nation building, spending to police the world, and just plain old wasteful spending. We're supposed to accept that all such spending is "defense spending."
We're told that the smaller military force resulting from Obama's recently announced Pentagon budget cuts will harm our ability to respond to unforeseen crises. But we're not told which "unforeseen crises" we should respond to or what constitutes a legitimate "threat" or a legitimate "national interest."
How will our smaller forces operate in "multiple theatres," fighting simultaneous wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, western Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, and Iran next? But these countries were bullied by the CIA for decades, creating a backlash that forced these aggressive pick-up wars on us. This isn't national defense, it's hubris, and it's bankrupting us.
"Going to war with a smaller, 'smarter' military," the writer argues, "lead to devastating consequences at the beginning of World War II, Korea and in Vietnam."
But Americans, following the destructive and pointless Great War, were understandably antiwar, which is why FDR promised to keep America out of what became World War II during his 1940 election campaign while secretly manipulating us into it based on his own personal, not "national," interests.
And, again, neither North Korea nor Vietnam ever contemplated attacking us.
But with a Big Military, the writer says, the US was able to deploy a half million troops for the Persian Gulf War while still having plenty of firepower left over to "maintain our guard against a dying but potent Soviet Union."
And yet again, no Persian Gulf state ever threatened to invade America.
The article's author is Republican Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
To people like McKeon, The World belongs to America, everything in it is a "national interest" and every bug that crawls in the general direction of America is a threat that must be stomped on, no matter how many young American lives are slaughtered or taxpayer dollars are squandered.
Libertarians ought to agree that the "Bucks" of the world, whether they're paranoid or just cynically opportunistic, need to be stopped.
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