Cold War v. War on Terra

[reprehensor]

So what's the difference?

http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/commentary/2004/0402budget.html

The More Things Change:
Foreign Aid Budget Looks Like a Retread from the Cold War

If the "war on terror" is beginning to look increasingly like the cold war, then President George W. Bush's fiscal year (FY) 2005 foreign-aid request will not change that impression.

While Bush is proposing to increase funding for his two key anti-poverty initiatives, the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) and anti-AIDS money for African and Caribbean countries, he is also cutting funds for other key humanitarian and development accounts. At the same time, the president is asking Congress to increase by more than one billion dollars military and security assistance, particularly to key "front-line" states in the "war on terror." Those two categories, which include anti-drug aid and proliferation categories, would make up nearly one-third of all U.S. foreign aid under Bush's request, roughly the same percentage of total foreign aid when the cold war reached its height during the 1980s.

Under Bush's proposals, credits for foreign militaries to buy U.S. weapons and equipment would increase by some $700 million to nearly $five billion, the highest total in well over a decade. Even including the military credits, the total foreign aid proposal, which is included in a record federal budget request of some $2.4 trillion, amounts to a mere five percent of what Bush is requesting for the Pentagon next year.

Under his plan, military spending--which already constitutes roughly one-half of the world's total military expenditures--would rise by some seven percent, to $402 billion in FY 2005, which begins Oct. 1. That figure does not include an anticipated $50 billion more that the administration is expected to request to fund military and related operations in Iraq and Afghanistan later in the year.

The total budget request now goes to Congress, where even members of Bush's own Republican Party say he is unlikely to get everything he wants in view of the record budget deficits being forecast well into the future as a result of the president's tax cuts and military spending hikes.


More at link.

[kalian]

1. Its called "The Phantom Menace"....