March 18, 2007
"War is much too serious a matter to be entrusted to the military."Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the senior Republican on the House Budget Committee, at a hearing on the Pentagon's proposed $623.1 billion budget for fiscal 2008, asked Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England and Adm. Edmund Giambastiani, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, why the emergency spending bill for Iraq included money for new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets and C-130 cargo planes.
The answer from England was that the Iraq conflict was lasting longer than expected and the weapons and equipment were wearing out at a faster rate than they had planned for. England, who first served in the Bush administration as Secretary of the Navy, was a General Dynamics contractor and a former president of Lockheed.
England knew well that his former employer, Air Force Secretary and former Northrup president James G. Roche, had awarded the JSF contract to Lockheed-Martin and Northrop-Grumman. The only other competitor was Boeing. The order which stretches over 40 years, called for the development and manufacturing of 3000 fighters to be used by the Air Force, Navy and Marines.
Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England just happened to have served as president of Lockheed's Fort Worth division, which will build the fighter jets. The defense contract was the largest in U.S. military history; a potential $250 billion deal. Business is booming for defense contractors like Lockheed. This week, it was reported that the aerospace corporation's current president took home a $24 billion bonus.
What England did not explain to the budget committee - behind all of the president's insistence that Congress immediately fund his escalation of his occupation - was why these weapon systems needed to be included at all in the emergency request since most of them, like the F-35 fighter jets, wouldn't be operational until at least 2010. Certainly, the Pentagon should know enough after four years in Iraq to plan for these appropriations in the regular budget, but have insisted on including these items in the 'emergency' budget request which Bush has described as "funding our war fighters."
The two future weapons systems weren't the only expenditures in Bush's budget which had nothing to do with any 'emergency' in Iraq. It was revealed last month that Bush's proposed war budget includes many other high-cost weapons that won't reach any battlefield for years. There's a request for a dozen F/A-18 fighter jets; seven new V-22 Osprey transport aircraft; six copies of a new plane called the Growler; and $74 million for "design, development, integration, and testing" of an unmanned spy plane.
All of these extraneous expenditures included in the Iraq 'emergency' supplemental by Bush's Pentagon make a lie out of the scolding Bush gave Congress this weekend in his
radio address:
"The purpose of this legislation should be to give our troops on the front lines the resources, funds, and equipment they need to fight our enemies," Bush told Americans listening. "Unfortunately, some in Congress are using this bill as an opportunity to micromanage our military commanders, force a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, and spend billions on domestic projects that have nothing to do with the war on terror," he said.
The first line is made false by his own inflated budget request, and by his continued insistence that his 'war on terror' is being fought against "enemies" in Iraq. As his National Intelligence Estimate concluded last year, Bush's occupation is actually fueling the violent resistance to the Iraq government he installed with our military, and, in fact, is creating even more individuals who are wiling to attack the U.S., our interests, and allies in the region.
Even if we accepted that Bush had once cared at all about "funding our war fighters," that vow was laid bare this month when the shortcomings and neglect of the medical care for the soldiers and veterans who served as the point of Bush's ideological invasion and occupation of Iraq, and whatever other militarism he's committed them to, was revealed in reports from the largest, most prominent military health care facility at Walter Reed. Indeed, the Pentagon, themselves, released a report which claimed that rising health care costs were threatening their 'readiness' for combat operations and their ability to wage war.
The Boston Globe reported earlier this month that, the Navy and Air Force plan to cut 15,000 jobs to try and save their health care system $138 million per year. "Without relief, spending for healthcare will . . . divert critical funds needed for war fighters, their readiness, and for critical equipment," Dr. William Winkenwerder , assistant defense secretary for health affairs, reportedly told Congress.
Despite the fact that Bush's 'emergency' request was $93.4 billion, Democrats are insisting on adding an additional $2.5 billion for training and readiness for forces deployed outside of the war zones and another $1.4 billion to cover housing allowance shortfalls. Also included in the Democrat's funding plan - which calls for troops to leave Iraq by the fall of 2008, or earlier - is $900 million for soldiers with brain injuries and post-traumatic stress.
In response to Rep. John Murtha, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and the Subcommittee on Defense, Gen. Peter Pace made the amazing argument that, if the military was forced by Democrats in Congress to live up to their own established standards for readiness it would actually 'erode' their fighting ability.
Yet, in a report by Pace in February, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded that the dual occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq were, themselves, straining military readiness to the point where, it "may take several years to reduce risk to acceptable levels." That assessment has done little, if anything, to deter the Pentagon and Bush from proceeding with their escalation of the occupation, and the increased deployment of combat troops to Iraq without any change in the meager preparation time provided for the soldiers so far, or an addition of resources to cover the equipment shortages which already plague the existing forces.
With little regard - if any - for the over 3200 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq at the rate of 1-3 dead every day, Bush and the Pentagon are wedging them in-between the warring factions; ordering them into cramped, vulnerable, sandbagged huts as quickly as they can ship more troops over. All of the talk of "success" in suppressing the Sunnis and others who are engaged in armed resistance against the Shiite-dominated regime masks the reality of our nation's defenders hunkered-down doing the policing that Iraqis should rightly be doing for themselves.
All of Bush's talk of the consequences of bringing our soldiers home before "Iraq is more secure" is a curious and revealing caution which he ignores in his zeal to press forward. It's apparent to everyone, except to Bush and his generals, that guaranteeing the security of Iraq's new regime is an open-ended, dubious commitment which relies on continuing the occupation indefinitely to maintain the current buffer against insurgent violence. Everywhere else in Iraq that our forces have not massed and embedded has become host to whatever mischief, unrest, and violence the Baghdad gauntlet cannot contain.
Under Bush's prescription, we would be in Iraq for as long as any insurgency was successful in continuing the present state of violence in Iraq; the state of violence that the commanding general in Iraq says he can't contain without the sacrifices of even more American soldiers deployed there. Many of those deployed would have already endured historic, repeated tours into Iraq's battle zone; others would arrive as dangerously unprepared as Bush and the Pentagon have, admittedly, rendered the majority of our forces.
It's apparent to everyone, except Bush and his generals, that our nation's defenders are being sacrificed in Iraq without regard to their safety, security, or well-being. Even more damning, Bush has balanced our soldiers' sacrifices against the importance of his 'mission' in Iraq and decided that, the comfort and embrace of the increasingly indifferent regime he helped install is more important than preserving our nation's defenders' lives and livelihoods. As long as our soldiers are in place - doing the work of the Iraqi military and police - there will be little incentive for the Iraqis to reach as far as they should to settle their differences with those resisting their puppet rule, and the pretext for using their military to repress and intimidate the opposition into obedience remains in place.
It's a betrayal of our democracy that Bush has ceded our foreign policy to the "generals on the ground." They will always recommend adding more troops to bolster the continuing mission; even more so, to protect our hunkering forces, as their presence and increased occupation sparks even more threatening resistance. Bush has confused their ability to fight and prevail for progress; satisfied with the 1-3 soldiers a day who are losing their lives defending against an enemy they cannot recognize. He's reduced the question of whether our soldiers should remain in Iraq to whether they can circle the wagons around Baghdad, the center of his manufactured regime. But, the Constitution says that the president is to command the generals, not the other way around.
More importantly, no matter who prevails in the struggle for authority to commit and direct forces between the White House and Congress, there is no dispute at all over where the authority lies between our Legislature and the Military. Congress has the constitutional and traditional authority to cap troop levels, restrict the escalation of troops, and set a date certain for troop deployment or withdrawal. All of that authority lies in their appropriation of money which would enable the scope, size, or duration of an engagement or conflict. Bush, however, thinks the exercise of our nation's military is a matter best left to the Executive and the Pentagon brass.
In his radio address this weekend, Bush complains about Congress' intention to reign in the commander-in-chief and his generals from their unadvised militarism:
"The bill Congress is considering," Bush complained, "would undermine General Petraeus and the troops under his command just as these critical security operations are getting under way."
"First, the bill would impose arbitrary and restrictive conditions on the use of war funds and require the withdrawal of forces by the end of this year if these conditions are not met.," he said. "These restrictions would handcuff our generals in the field by denying them the flexibility they need to adjust their operations to the changing situation on the ground. And these restrictions would substitute the mandates of Congress for the considered judgment of our military commanders."
It is exactly those "mandates of Congress" which our constitution intends for our legislators to use to trump the "judgment of our military commanders." The generals don't need 'flexibility' unless they intend to aid Bush in defying Congress' will. It's more than a mockery of our tradition of civilian control over our nation's military to suggest that Congress should defer their own intent to the whim of the entity they oversee.
The Supreme Court during WW2
ruled that Congress' shared authority over the military "is not restricted to the winning of victories in the field and the repulse of enemy forces. It embraces every phase of the national defense, including the protection of war materials and the members of the armed forces from injury and from the dangers which attend the rise, prosecution and progress of war.”
"Congress needs to approve emergency funding for our troops, without strings," Bush said. But, his request won't be rubber-stamped by the new Democratic majority. If Bush wants money to further his militarism in Iraq or elsewhere, he'll either accept Congress' "strings" or find himself some other country to fund his occupation whose legislators don't mind if he rapes their treasury and tramples over their laws and traditions like he and his republican enablers have grown accustomed to here at home.
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/bigtree
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
