Predictable Preemption
This excerpt from Going Nuclear: The Coming Wars with Iran and North Korea
"Other possible scripts could be triggered by preemptive strikes, the preeminent tool of the Neocons, on either Iranian or North Korean nuclear facilities. The consequences of these strikes would likely lead to the use of battlefield nuclear weapons as well.
In any of the scenarios it is simply assumed that violence is the solution to any difficult problems the US encounters, yet there are simply not enough conventional forces or weapons to adequately wage war, if winning at all costs is the objective. This is despite the fact that Americans are spending $350-400 billion a year on the greatest array of military power the world has ever seen. These resources are being spread around the globe to more than 700 bases being maintained by the American military.
The figure for American defense spending is seven or eight times that of the next highest spenders, Russia and China, at $60 and $50 billion, respectively. The Axis of Evil comes in at less than a billion dollars total, but Americans are still scared. Perhaps what they should really be more scared of is the financial consequences.
The US debt will climb to $7 trillion a year in 2004, five times the entire debt of the third world. Other countries, notably Japan and China, hold one-third of that debt. This is at a time, we might note, that the Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs has proposed that the world's poverty could be eliminated with an investment of $150 billion."
Comments
Oy. Maybe we shouldn't take our "four more years" for granted...? What price, whooping ass?
Posted by: nate | November 23, 2004 10:09 PM
Yes, aside from all arguments ethical, I fear that the terrorists will "win the war" by bankrupting us. Not only are we inefficiently spending vast sums of money to "free" Iraq (and I still fail to understand how this responds to 9/11), we are inefficiently spending money to "prevent" further terrorist attacks. By their very nature, terrorist attacks cannot be prevented, but terror planners of import well understand the knee-jerk reaction prompted by a terror attack. And they are sly enough to let us spend ourselves into ruin. Pogo was right.
Posted by: Cop Car | November 29, 2004 3:04 PM