The Long Road to Change: War Funding
Published by marco on
In recent years, supplemental spending bills for war funding have been passed with depressing regularity since the launching of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Over those years, the U.S. military apparatus has commanded declared budgets of well over $500 billion. That number is only a baseline which does not include other massive costs like those for maintaining over a dozen secret service agencies or the interest paid on debt incurred by spending so much money on the military over the last half-century or more. Back-of-the-envelope calculations by seasoned industry observers (Chalmers Johnson, among others) put the real, final figure at over $1 trillion per year.
One of the main reasons that the baseline budget figure differs so much from the actual figure is supplemental spending. Where budgets in the real world are required to address and account for foreseeable costs—that is, after all, what “budgeting” means—the military is free to create a budget that does not include the costs of running ongoing wars. The entire establishment accepts such budgets as valid and cheerily passes “supplemental” spending bills—usually, more than once per year—to cover the astronomical (and, apparently, unforeseeable) costs of making war all over the planet. This counts, more or less, as purely a marketing advantage, as the national budget is discussed vociferously and nationally whereas supplemental spending bills are generally ignored. Therefore, the Congress and the administration appear to be tightening the purse-strings in the official budget while still allocating even more obscene amounts of cash[1] to the military later and under cover of boring procedure.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars started during the Bush administration have always been funded in this way. Whereas the most recent budget put forth by the Obama administration also included an astronomical military budget—at $693 billion, higher than any other, ever[2]—as an arbiter of change, Obama claimed to have included the costs of ongoing wars in the official budget in what, at the time, appeared to be an act of forthrightness that we’d so long craved in a leader. However, as detailed in the articles, These Are Obama’s Wars Now by Joshua Frank (Antiwar.com) and Shame: The ‘Antiwar’ Democrats Who Sold Out by Jeremy Scahill (Antiwar.com), the Congress just passed a $106 billion supplemental spending bill for war spending. In a rush and with overwhelming Democratic support (the tepid Republican support resulted from inclusion of a rider that would open up new lines of credit to the IMF[3]), this supplemental bill was passed even though we’d ostensibly already budgeted for the wars in the original budget.
Nice one, Obama. You’ve improved on your predecessor by getting us to pay twice as much for our ever-expanding wars—now even bigger! Expanded in Afghanistan and moving into Pakistan!—while praising you for your honesty.
Though the current administration is quite correct in stating that they inherited a very damaged situation, they have made these wars their very own now by expanding them both on the ground and monetarily. Bush still owns the bad economy (for now), but with this grotesque betrayal of his anti-war campaign rhetoric—and betrayal of all the people who voted for him because he was the only viable anti-war candidate[4]—Obama has well and truly inherited the wars Bush started.
[1] If you’re a sane human being, spending $500 billion or more on the military in a country that’s ostensibly peace- and freedom-loving should strike you as obscene. The entire rest of world combined has been making do with less than the U.S. spends for years now. We spend more than half of global yearly outlays on the military and are also the #1 provider of military hardware to the rest of the world. We are a moral, peace-loving and just country and don’t you forget it.↩
[2] The military budget is always more every year. This year, we were told that it was trimmed; it was not. It increased by 4% over Bush’s last budget. The utterly useless F22 was finally struck from the bill, but the equally useless F35 enjoyed extra funding. The missile defense shield is safe and sound. And so it goes.↩
[3] Don’t assume they did this on the principle that the IMF has essentially only destroyed or suborned third-world economies during its entire existence. The wing-nuts opposed it because they oppose “global socialism” of which they accused the IMF, despite all evidence to the contrary. They’re like children who don’t even understand the powerful tools that their forebears have created for them. The IMF is a global, legalized, money-laundering operation that funnels cash from the third-world to first-world corporations and governments. If these legislators understood how it worked, they would likely not be opposed. It’s the same with the near-constant cries to leave the UN: the UN is completely under U.S. control and always has been. Nothing happens without the U.S. vote—that’s why the UN is essentially powerless. Legislators calling for the U.S. to leave the UN are mostly not aware how much the U.S. uses the UN to promulgate its empire.↩
[4] The word “viable” when applied to a candidate is standard fare in the States to describe a candidate who has even an outside chance of winning. Much more palatable—and credible—anti-war candidates like Dennis Kucinich and Ralph Nader were, unfortunately, never considered as such. Both of those gentlemen are still adamantly anti-war, with Kucinich having voted against the latest supplemental spending bill.↩