As a follow up to my post about a JFK quote, here’s one from President Eisenhower: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
I had a hard time imagining anyone saying Kennedy’s quote in the present. This is even harder to conceive of.
In the first place, I don’t hear that many politicians even talk about the poor these days, let alone imply that the government or society has any obligation toward them. If poverty comes up lately, it seems to be a discussion of how the unemployed are just coasting along and refusing to look for work so we’d better cut their benefits.
Even rarer is it to suggest that cutting military spending to provide social services might be a good thing. Or to suggest that any cut in military spending is ever, under any circumstances a good thing. The same pundits and politicians who insist that government must live within its means and cut Social Security (for example) don’t bat an eye at spending billions on our current wars or doing it with an off-the-budget account so that the war costs don’t actually show up as red ink.
We currently spend as much as the entire rest of the world on our military, but I’ve known people to assert that cutting any of that when we’re at war is treason! As if every last penny were devoted to fighting in the Middle East. As if government—which conservatives usually damn as inefficient and incompetent—somehow became a tower of lean, mean efficiency when it runs the military.
It doesn’t. The BBC has reported that $8.7 out of $9 billion can’t be fully accounted for (this is apparently separate from the millions that have vanished in Iraq reconstruction).
Yet our leaders recoil from any suggestion that there’s waste or fat in the military budget that could be cut. Or even suggesting the Pentagon actually hire some frakking accountants to show where the money’s going.
It’s the military-industrial complex Ike used to talk about, I think: The defense industry pours millions into political donations and lobbying and it pays off. And I’ve read that military contracting is spread out over as much of the country as possible, to ensure that there’s a big consistency for every project: Any cut to any military base or contract will trigger protests that it’s taking away jobs (and yet if our government put the unemployed to work building roads or repairing bridges, we’d hear screams of outrage about “welfare programs.”).
Another factor is that any vote against military spending can be turned by the political opposition or the media into “soft on defense” or “anti military.” And that still has an effect with voters.
Not that we don’t need military spending, but do we really need all of it? At some point a sane policy would make choices—cut one weapons system to fund another, invest more money in counter-insurgency and less in conventional warfare—but our government’s automatic response is to avoid the choice and pay for both. Regardless of how much it costs. As if we can somehow spend enough to fight off every possible threat that will ever exist. That might conceivably exist.
We can’t. In the words of Eisenhower, again: ““There is no way in which a country can satisfy the craving for absolute security, but it can bankrupt itself morally and economically in attempting to reach that illusory goal through arms alone.”
