[Pen-l] The Cato Institute on Obama and Military Spending

[ken hanly <northsunm@xxxxxxxxx>]

  Meanwhile Obama provides Americans with the hope that he will halve the deficit....What will Obama cut? Deficit provide a golden opportunity to cut the social safety net and social programmes and also sell off govt. assets.
  It is rather ironic that a right wing think tank such as the CATO institute is the source of a trenchant critique of Obama's military spending policy but hardly contradictory since many on the right do not share the idealistic imperialism that is part and parcel of Democratic foreign policy.
   Obama has stepped up the pace of the drone program in Pakistan and also the scope of those targetted. He also has adopted the Bush view on the status (non-status) of prisoners at Bagram.

cheers, k hanly  

 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9987

Obama's vision of American security requirements is nearly as grandiose as his predecessor's. He sees security as indivisible, defining all instability as a danger to Americans that requires our management. He wants to preserve and expand our Cold War alliances, which long ago ceased to serve our security. He embraces Washington's hubristic notion that our national security bureaucracy can "fix" failed states. Bush chose to fight "terror" by targeting "evil." Obama plans to do so by attacking "hopelessness."

Obama will hear little official dissent from these ambitions. Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tend to agree with neoconservatives on the need for a large military that intervenes in places like the Balkans, Iraq, and Sudan -- as do, in general, the chairmen of the relevant Congressional committees. Republicans, of course, will shout "surrender" at any defense spending cut.

Obama will not deliver a humble defense policy. What we can hope for is better management of our empire. But that, too, will require an enormous military. 




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