All Posts Tagged With: "Military Keynesianism"
The Three Trillion Dollar War
Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and Linda J Bilmes have done an exhaustive study on the real cost of the Iraq war. The book goes into great detail the costs to other nations and the impact on the global economy as well.
More importantly, it assesses the human cost in more detail than anything else I have read. Most certainly this book should be required reading for all returning veterans and their families.
Iraq war costing US $12B per month
Studies vary on the price tag depending on time frame and assumptions but these figures do not include the cost to other countries, iraq and have already exceeded the price tag for Vietnam. Read about it here
These numbers don’t include the war’s cost to the rest of the world. In Iraq itself, the 2003 U.S.-led invasion — with its devastating air bombardments — and the looting and arson that followed, severely damaged electricity and other utilities, the oil industry, countless factories, hospitals, schools and other underpinnings of an economy.
No one has tried to calculate the economic damage done to Iraq, said spokesman Niels Buenemann of the International Monetary Fund, which closely tracks national economies. But millions of Iraqis have been left without jobs, and hundreds of thousands of professionals, managers and other middle-class citizens have fled the country.
In their book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” Stiglitz, of Columbia University, and Bilmes, of Harvard, report the two wars will have cost the U.S. budget $845 billion in 2007 dollars by next Sept. 30, end of fiscal year 2008, assuming Congress fully funds Bush administration requests. That counts not just military operations, but embassy costs, reconstruction and other war-related expenses.
That total far surpasses the $670 billion in 2007 dollars the Congressional Research Service said was the U.S. price tag for the 12-year Vietnam War.
Nevertheless, we are spending an awful lot of money to have our gas prices and food prices go up and up.
Most likely threat down the road, China
Bush requested the largest one year Pentagon budget exclusive of Iraq and Afghanistan ever, $515.4B. On the ‘buy’ list are F-22 Raptors, a CVN-78 aircraft carrier and a Virginia class nuclear submarine. In order to pitch this to Congress and the American people guess who the ‘threat’ target is? As detailed by Michael Klare…
Against whom are these super-sophisticated ships and planes intended to be deployed? Not Iran, which is still largely equipped with aging US arms acquired in the 1970s during the reign of the Shah. Not Syria or North Korea, both still equipped with Korean- and Vietnam War-era Soviet castoffs. Not any of the other so-called rogue states against which Bush has railed so often. In fact, it is impossible to conceive of any adversary with the capacity to engage the United States on anything approaching major-power status except China.
The China threat
In their efforts to secure funding for all these costly new weapons, US military officials – and their allies in Congress and the corporate world – have begun highlighting the China threat.
The American people have been sold before and time will tell if they will be sold again.
Just as the Department of Defense and its corporate allies often touted the “Soviet threat” during the Cold War period to stampede Congress and the American public into supporting ever-increasing spending on advanced weapons, so a hypothetical “China threat” will now be conjured up to achieve the same purpose in the post-Cold War era.
With the US public concerned over the rising costs of the Iraq war and other national priorities – health care, education, alternative energy development, the mortgage crisis, and so on – such threat amplification will become indispensable to ensure adequate funding for the Pentagon’s favored weapons programs.
This level of defense spending is not sustainable and history is replete with fallen empires that can attribute their demise to an imbalance between military actions and providing for their people.
Global military complex
The fight for energy, the need to provide for and control the increasing population and the lust for power are driving the planet toward a massive military showdown.
Since the dawn of the 21st century, five of the six countries involved in the six-party talks have increased their military spending by 50% or more. The sixth, Japan, has maintained a steady, if sizeable military budget while nonetheless aspiring to keep pace. Every country in the region is now eagerly investing staggering amounts of money in new weapons systems and new offensive capabilities.
The arms race in Northeast Asia undercuts all talk of peace in the region. It also sustains a growing global military-industrial complex. Northeast Asia is where four of the world’s largest militaries – those of the United States, China, Russia, and Japan – confront each other. Together, the countries participating in the six-party talks account for approximately 65% of world military expenditures, with the US responsible for roughly half the global total.
Here is the real news that should hit the front pages of papers today: wars grip Iraq, Afghanistan and large swathes of Africa, but the heart of the global military-industrial complex lies in Northeast Asia. Any attempt to drive a stake through this potentially destabilizing monster must start with the militaries that face one another there.
Of course, sustaining military budgets of such grand proportions is not possible. Read The Rise and Fall of the Great Empires by Paul Kennedy to learn what history teaches us. Downfall, catastrophic downfall is inevitable.
Critics of the North Korean regime often point out that its military spending is ultimately a human-rights violation, because the government essentially takes food out of the mouths of its people to spend on armaments. North Korea is, however, just a particularly gross example of an expanding global problem. Each of the six countries in the new Pacific arms race has devised a wealth of rationales for its military spending – and each has ignored significant domestic needs in the process.
Given the sums that would be necessary to address the decommissioning of nuclear weapons, the looming crisis of climate change, and the destabilizing gap between rich and poor, such spending priorities are in themselves a threat to humanity.
The world put 37% more into military spending in 2006 than in 1997. If the “peace dividend” that was to follow the end of the Cold War never quite appeared, a decade later the world finds itself burdened with quite the opposite: a genuine peace deficit.
The same is true in the US
Chalmers Johnson on Keynesian military spending
National bankruptcy has always led to a revolution and new government.
Thank you for this M. I've been asking on The World and The Forum for the Editorial Board at The ...
http://www.larryvanelsberg2010.com/index.html 
Thanks, Den, this is very useful 