Tomgram: David Swanson, All War All the Time
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TomDispatch
David Swanson
11/21/2010
These last years of blissful peace have left Republican Congressman Howard P. "Buck" McKeon, soon to be the new chair of the House Armed Services Committee, in a true panic. How, he wonders, will a starved military ever get the necessary money for the weapons it needs to keep us safe, and where exactly is that military heading, anyway? "My concern is we end up back with a 'bow and arrow' -- I'm hoping not," McKeon said about Obama-era austerity measures at the Pentagon. Get ready America: the dovish days of the Obama presidency are over. With the midterm elections successfully behind them, the hawks are taking flight and they're bound for Washington. Don't you remember those halcyon days under Obama when we traded guns for butter, the military shrank, and peace was at hand? Me neither. These last years, of course, have seen the largest military budget in history, the repeated doubling down on one war, a pretend conclusion to another, the building up of the structure of U.S. military bases across the Greater Middle East and a massive build-up of such bases in Afghanistan, as well as the violent escalation of conflicts in nations not at war with the U.S., and record numbers of Special Forces troops -- the military's expanding secret military -- sent into 75 countries (15 more than at the end of the Bush era). With doves like these, who needs hawks? And yet, you're going to see a new batch of Republican hawks landing anyway. There may be so many competitors, when it comes to war funding, that -- as David Swanson makes clear -- you won't know whether our conflicts are Obama's wars, McKeon's wars, or... well, you'll have plenty of choices when it comes to continuing to boost military budgets well beyond Bush-era levels. TomDispatch regular Swanson, an antiwar organizer and all-around dynamo, who now runs the website War Is a Crime, among other things, is just publishing his latest book, War Is A Lie, as this post appears. In his usual vigorous fashion, he takes on every argument used to justify war and all the lies we've unfortunately grown so painfully familiar with these last years. Tom
