budget Archives - Page 2 of 5 - Foreign Policy In Focus

Dems: What about the Military Budget?

by William D. Hartung, Miriam Pemberton | Feb 21, 2008

One issue that will not be discussed in tonight’s presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is our nation’s burgeoning military budget. Earlier this month, the Bush administration announced a proposed military budget of $614 billion, not counting the full cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This represents the highest level of spending since World War II, even though our most dangerous adversary is a dispersed terrorist network measured in the tens of thousands, not a nuclear-armed Soviet Union whose armed forces were measured in the millions.

Hardliners Target Detente with North Korea

by John Feffer, Suzy Kim | Feb 21, 2008

The Bush administration’s approach to North Korea was once quite consistent with its overall foreign policy. There was name-calling, a preference for regime change, and an emphasis on military solutions. Not surprisingly, then, the relationship between the United States and North Korea, like so many other tense stand-offs, deteriorated over the last seven years. The United States accused the third member of the “axis of evil” of money-laundering, missile sales, and a secret program for the production of nuclear material. For its part, North Korea responded tit for tat at the rhetorical level. And, in October 2006, it upped the ante by exploding a nuclear device. If the United States were not tied up in other military conflicts, and eyeing Iran to boot, a war in Northeast Asia might have been higher on the administration’s to-do list.

Asia’s Hidden Arms Race

by John Feffer | Feb 12, 2008

Often what is hidden in our world is so simply because no cares or thinks to look. Yes, a fair amount of attention has recently been given to the staggering new Pentagon budget request, the largest since World War II, that the Bush administration has just submitted to Congress for fiscal year 2009. It comes in at $515.4 billion – a 7.5% hike for an already bloated Pentagon — and that doesn’t include all sorts of Defense Department funds that will be stowed away elsewhere (even if in plain sight), nor does it include the couple of hundred billion dollars or more in funds to be appropriated largely via “supplemental” requests for the ongoing military disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even the official budget, however, includes staggering sums for procuring major new weapons systems and for R&D leading to ever more such big-ticket items in the future. According to Steve Kosiak, vice president of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, “The fiscal year 2009 budget may be about as good as it gets for defense contractors.” When all is said and done, this will probably be a trillion dollar “defense” budget. As it happens, military budgets like this have a multiplier effect globally. After all, there’s no such thing as a one-nation arms race. It’s just that no one here thinking about what we’re about to feed the Pentagon pays much attention to such things. Fortunately, John Feffer, an expert on military policy and Asia, has been doing just that. He is the co-director of a particularly interesting website, Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington — with which Tomdispatch hopes to collaborate on projects in the future. (To subscribe to FPIF’s e-news service, click here.) In the following piece, he brings genuine arms-race news to all of us. Yes, Virginia, there is indeed an arms race underway; it’s taking off in Northeast Asia; and it’s dangerous. (Introduction by TomDispatch’s editor Tom Engelhardt.)

Bush Budget Adds to Military, Cuts Prevention

by Anita Dancs, Miriam Pemberton | Feb 6, 2008

Voters — Republicans and Democrats alike — are telling pollsters they want, not a modest course correction, not a turned page, but a whole new book. The security budget President Bush proposed today is anything but.

Modern-Day Slavery and the Big Game

by Emira Woods | Feb 3, 2008

After 26 years of chaos and war, Liberia, on the shores of West Africa, is reemerging as a beacon of hope in a difficult region. A peaceful democratic transition ushered in Africa’s first woman president, a successful UN peacekeeping effort, and a wave of repatriates eager to build for the future. One glaring blemish on this positive picture is the condition of workers engaged with Liberia’s largest employer, Bridgestone Firestone. The American icon, now a division of a Japanese corporation, is the sponsor of the 2008 and 2009 Super Bowl half-time shows. It also runs the world’s largest rubber operations in Liberia. The country’s fertile soil and stable workforce brought Firestone to Liberia back in 1926. For 82 years, the company has secured a steady flow of rubber from Liberia to the United States through a system based on modern-day slavery.

Defense Dollars

by Miriam Pemberton | Jan 1, 2008

Richard Betts (“A Disciplined Defense,” November/December 2007) laments that most “organizations associated with mainstream policy thinking,” instead of arguing for military budget rationality, have been cowed into silence. He refers to recent proposals by my own organization — the Institute for Policy Studies, which has been known over the years for its far-reaching proposals to scale back the military budget — that focus on a set of cuts amounting to only about $56 billion, or 11 percent of the total. Betts is right that this $56 billion is only the low-hanging fruit.

Paying for the Wars’ Wounded

by Emily Schwartz Greco, Col. Daniel Smith (Ret.) | Nov 9, 2007

The Bureau of the Census has issued a lengthy summary of “facts” about the nation’s 23.7 million veterans in time for Veteran’s Day. Considering that there are two significant ongoing armed conflicts involving U.S. forces, I expected that there would be some “facts” dealing with Iraq and Afghanistan.

To improve security, follow the money

by Lawrence Korb, Miriam Pemberton | Jul 5, 2007

IN THE midst of an enviably quick transition of leadership from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown, the British people saw their country’s terrorist threat level raised to critical, after back-to-back attempts to inflict massive destruction with car bombs. As a result they, and we, were handed a fresh reminder of how little counterterrorism has to do with conventional war-fighting.

A Unified Security Budget for the United States, FY 2008

by Lawrence Korb, Miriam Pemberton | Apr 26, 2007

As Congress works to balance the budget and find a solution to the Iraq crisis it must also focus on a different kind of budget balancing. Our country needs a rebalanced its security budget, one that strengthens a different kind of overall U.S. presence in the world. This budget would emphasize working with international partners to resolve conflicts and tackle looming human security problems like climate change; preventing the spread of nuclear materials by means other than regime change; and addressing the root causes of terrorism, while protecting the homeland against it. The rhetoric of these intentions must be underwritten by the resources to make them real. The overall priorities set by a Unified Security Budget must both symbolically and substantially guide the United States toward a new, more balanced foreign policy.

The Plane That Won’t Die…Or Fly

by Miriam Pemberton | Apr 26, 2007

Calling the V-22 Osprey a Rube Goldberg contraption does some disservice to the late cartoonist who died in 1970. Vice President Dick Cheney tried to kill the V-22 in the early 1990s, when he was defense secretary. But it lives on today, and the Marine Corps announced on April 13 that in September it will begin flying its first combat missions in Iraq. A combination helicopter-plane with bells and whistles galore might have appealed to Rube, but he wouldn’t have unveiled it in public until he’d made it work.