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Bush's War On The Poor
By Robert Scheer.
02/10/06 "The
Nation" -- -- Where would the Bush Administration
be without terrorism? Like the Cold War before it, the "war on
terror" is a conveniently sweeping rationale for all manner of
irrational governance, such as the outrageous $2.77 trillion
budget the President proposed to Congress on Monday.
Without terrorism, how could Bush justify to fiscal
conservatives the whopping budget deficits that he has ballooned
via his tax cuts for the wealthy that he now seeks to make
permanent? Without terrorism, how could he convince government
corruption watchdogs that the huge increases in military and
homeland security – seven percent and eight percent,
respectively – aren't simply payback to the defense contractors
who so heavily support the Republicans every election cycle?
Without terrorism, how could the President get away with blindly
dumping another $120 billion into the war in Afghanistan and the
bungled occupation of Iraq that the Bush Administration had once
promised would be financed by Iraqi oil sales?
In order to pay for the money pit that is Iraq, the Bush budget
demands draconian cuts in 141 domestic programs, led by a $36
billion cut in Medicare spending for the elderly over the next
five years. This from a president re-elected after promising to
expand rather than curtail health-care services to seniors.
Many of the other proposed cuts are equally obscene, such as the
termination of $1 billion in child-care funds over five years,
and the complete elimination of the Commodity Supplemental Food
Program that provides food assistance to low-income seniors,
needy pregnant women and children.
These attacks on the social safety net for the most vulnerable
members of our society are not only patently unfair, in light of
Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, but the simultaneous blank
check for the Pentagon cannot be honestly justified by the fight
against terrorism. And although the President insists that it is
unpatriotic to question his strategies in fighting terrorism,
let me risk his opprobrium, and that of the pseudo-conservative
bully boys that shill for him in the media, by doing just that.
To begin with, we must remember that this "war" was launched
against an enemy, still mostly at large, who on September 11
accomplished phenomenal destruction and suffering with armaments
no fiercer or costly than some box-cutters. Their key weapon, in
fact, was suicidal fanaticism.
Yet, rather than sensibly investing in aggressive global
detective work, collaborating with our European allies, engaging
meaningfully with an independent and skeptical Arab world, and
working to protect vulnerable US sites such as nuclear power
plants, our leaders decided to turn logic on its head and make
ignorance about the enemy into a virtue, slash civil liberties
and recklessly invade a major Muslim country that had no
connection to the attacks.
In other words, our response to September 11 has been almost
completely military in nature, granting the Defense Department
an excuse to increase spending by 48 percent in just four years.
Yet, despite all this spending, and the loss of life that has
accompanied it, our standing in the Muslim world has been in
freefall since we invaded Iraq, we have never captured or killed
Osama bin Laden or his top strongman, we don't know how to "fix"
Iraq or Afghanistan, and we have greatly strengthened the hand
of our rivals in Iran.
We don't even know, as the September 11 Commission report
revealed, much of anything about the fifteen Saudi hijackers and
their four leaders from other parts of the Arab world who
committed the September 11 attacks. We do know, however, that
they weren't from Iraq, weren't funded by Iraq and weren't
trained by or in Iraq; nevertheless, the huge elephant in the
Bush budget is the war and occupation of Iraq, now approaching
its third anniversary, not the effort to dismantle al Qaeda.
"Since 2001, the Administration...liberated nearly 50 million
people in Iraq and Afghanistan," boasts the Bush budget
document. Ah, but if they have been liberated, then why the need
for an additional $50 billion emergency "bridge funding" in
2007, itself coming on the heels of a supplementary $70 billion
budget request last week? The answer provided by the report is
that Iraq is far from being stabilized and that in Afghanistan
"enemy activity has increased over the past year."
Unfortunately, the Democratic leadership in Congress is still
unwilling to challenge the necessity of "winning" the war in
Iraq and, as a result, its complaints about cutting needed
domestic programs are framed exclusively as an argument against
making Bush's tax cuts permanent. It is a losing argument,
because it leaves Bush as both the big spender and the big
tax-cutter once again, posturing as the savior of the taxpayer
when he is in fact quite the opposite for all but the wealthiest
Americans.
Reprinted with permission from The Nation.
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