Sherry Chandler

Well, as Attaturk says at Firedoglake, Bush’s line of credit on the Iraq war has just gone up again

War funding, which averaged about $93 billion a year from 2003 through 2005, rose to $120 billion in 2006 and $171 billion in 2007 and President George W. Bush has asked for $193 billion in 2008…

Meanwhile, Bush is trying to use his executive hyper-power to commit us to a long-term stay in Iraq (also here), something that he doesn’t have to ask Congress to approve but that will tie the hands of the next administration. We will prop up Maliki in return, I’m sure, for maintaining the huge base we continue to build.

And over at Tom Dispatch, Chalmers Johnson has a long article explaining how this war and our huge military build-up in general are contributing to our current financial woes. The section that struck me is this (emphasis mine):

It is virtually impossible to overstate the profligacy of what our government spends on the military. The Department of Defense’s planned expenditures for fiscal year 2008 are larger than all other nations’ military budgets combined. The supplementary budget to pay for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not part of the official defense budget, is itself larger than the combined military budgets of Russia and China. Defense-related spending for fiscal 2008 will exceed $1 trillion for the first time in history. The United States has become the largest single salesman of arms and munitions to other nations on Earth. Leaving out of account President Bush’s two on-going wars, defense spending has doubled since the mid-1990s. The defense budget for fiscal 2008 is the largest since World War II.

We are the nation that spreads war throughout the world, though we claim to be reluctant warriors.

Here, once more, is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from his Christmas sermon of 1967:

And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means. All of this is saying that, in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.

They had started speaking of “women and children”—that phrase that exempts the male from sanity when it has been repeated a few times. Each felt that all he loved best in the world was at stake, demanded revenge, and was filled with a not unpleasing glow, in which the chilly and half-known features of Miss Quested vanished, and were replaced by all that is sweetest and warmest in private life. “But it’s the women and children,” they repeated, and the Collector knew he ought to stop them intoxicating themselves, but he hadn’t the heart.

—E. M. Forster, A Passage to India (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1952)