That’s the highest level requested since World War II, except for the peak moment of the Afghan and Iraq wars, when the United States had nearly 200,000 troops deployed in those two countries. The new Pentagon budget would come in at $842 billion. The results were - or at least should have been - stunning, even by the standards of a department that’s used to getting what it wants when it wants it. On March 13th, the Pentagon rolled out its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2024. And with that in mind, let Pentagon expert Hartung introduce you to that imposing trillionaire-in-the-making that has had just one great success in the twenty-first century: taking Congress captive. Imagine that! Something that might once have seemed inconceivable is now almost unstoppable, a future trillion-dollar military budget. Think of it this way: in a world where billionaires are running rampant and grabbing ever more wealth, the Pentagon is going to outdo them all and, if nothing changes in the coming years, as TomDispatch regular William Hartung notes today, become the world’s first trillionaire.
The response of Congress to such disasters in this century: rewarding the Pentagon with yet more barrels of money. Despite all but obliterating North Korea from the air, it couldn’t beat that country’s military (aided by China’s) in the early 1950s it lost disastrously to distinctly under-armed rebels in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s and did so again more recently to the half-baked forces of the Taliban in Afghanistan. The lesson is all too clear: the more that’s spent on our military and the more potentially destructive it gets, the less it’s actually able to accomplish. Bush, who launched that invasion, gets it, however subliminally.) Somehow, the fact that the Pentagon has been utterly incapable of winning - yes, actually winning! - a war that matters (or even half matters) since World War II never fully seems to penetrate, not even on the 20th anniversary of the disastrous invasion of Iraq, America’s own Ukraine. And nothing seems to truly dent that sensibility. Despite arguments about the small things, just about everyone accepts that the United States must have a monstrous, all-powerful military and a military budget beyond compare (beyond, in fact, all comprehension). Somehow, when it comes to Congress and the mainstream media, the true strangeness of the Pentagon budget always is missing in action.
0 kommentar(er)
