Ayoon Wa Azan (Their Wars Have Moved Past Us)

As I was following the battle for raising the ceiling on U.S. borrowing, -and how to reduce some of the debt immediately, and the rest over the coming ten years-, I was often reading one thing and then its opposite, be it from official sources, think-tanks, or the media. The simple truth, however, can be understood by all people, and is clear to anyone who has two eyes and indeed wants to see: President Barack Obama wanted to reduce the U.S. debt by cutting the defense budget, and abolish tax cuts for the rich, while the war cabal, as represented by the Republicans in Congress, wanted to cut or abolish social welfare and healthcare benefits for the poor, while keeping the Bush administration’s tax cuts for the rich in place. Below are some pertinent figures: The defense budget (or more accurately, the offense budget) amounted to 650 billion dollars this year, in addition to the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which amounted to 154 billion dollars, and many other billions in military spending listed under other items in order to hide the size of this spending. It suffices here to remind the reader that Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel Prize laureate, had estimated the long-term spending on the Iraq war to be around four trillion dollars, or 13 thousand dollars per American household. Every figure is well documented in fact (I keep all references by the way). The proposed cuts in the defense spending range between 2.4 and 4 trillion dollars, over a period of ten years. As for the budget of the Department of Defense itself, the former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had proposed to cut it by 78 billion dollars. However, President Obama proposed instead to cut the budget by 400 billion dollars last April, and recently increased this figure to 886 billion. What has the United States achieved through its military spending, which exceeds that of the rest of the world combined? The U.S. lost all its wars, the war in Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror (which it started and spawned more terrorists). The result was that America ended up with a deficit that is bigger than the budgets of three quarters of all states around the world. This is not to mention the killing of more than one million Arabs and Muslims, or former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s assertion, regarding the death of half a million Iraqi children during the criminal embargo after the liberation of Kuwait, that their death ‘was worth it’ – in the sense that the causes and consequences of the embargo justify the death of half a million Iraqi children. In truth, the reader may examine the views of the war cabal on this in a report published by the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Foreign Policy Initiative (directed by Bill Kristol), all mouthpieces of the neocons and the Likudnik advocates of Israel. The report objects to President Obama’s proposals to slash the defense budget, and warns that the future of American national security is being mortgaged to reduce the deficit by an ‘insignificant’ amount. Thus, while those opposed to wars and to the American empire, such as Jacob G. Hornberger, call out “End America’s Role as a Military Empire”, Robert Kagan, a key figure of the war cabal, calls out, “America, Don’t Come Home”- in the sense that America’s youths should continue to fight in distant lands and be killed in the service of oil and Israeli interests. I even read an article entitled “Don’t Slash Defense Spending”, written by Alvin Felzenberg and Alexander Gray, which listed a few dozen figures that did not include the size of the defense budget. But I have never seen anything more insolent than the comparison the article gives next, as it said that the size of defense spending at present is 4 percent to the GDP, compared to 7 percent in 1945. The article failed to mention that back then, America had just finished fighting a world war, while all its current wars have originated with the fight against al-Qaeda, and its 50 members who live in Afghanistan. Of course, the article cites ‘Islamic terrorism’. But I insist that it was the sway of the Israel lobby over U.S. foreign policy that has unleashed this terrorism, and that it is Israel and its advocates in the United States who are fully responsible for it. Their wars have now moved past us, to also target the middle class and America’s poor. Nonetheless, I do not think that they will be able to fool all the people all the time.