Guns or Butter

Stolen from: The Daily Brew

The ongoing death and destruction in Afghanistan guarantee that Bush's war on terrorism continues to be big news overseas, but many Americans have stopped paying much attention. They should know that our armed forces are still engaged in combat.

Mop up operations continue in Afghanistan (where we occasionally kill a bunch of the wrong people) and any day now it seems like Bush might invade Iraq. Still, the war effort no longer seems to capture the interest of many of the U.S. citizens in whose name it is being fought. Americans seem to have moved on from the spectacle. Perhaps it is simply too painful a reminder of the attacks in New York and Washington.

More cynically, perhaps the war coverage is too uninspiring to still garner our interest. That would be one predictable consequence of the U.S. media meekly accepting military control over their movements in and around U.S. combat forces. It would also explain why the Bushies are going to begin an official policy of planting lies in the foreign press, the only reporters they do not control.

Maybe Americans have tuned out the war simply because they are distracted by the Olympics. Salt Lake City got the games because community leaders in Utah handed out massive bribes to third world IOC members. About every 4 events seems to produce a sandal that blows up to an international incident, and in the middle of all of this, the U.S. is taking home a record number of medals. Is it any surprise that the Olympics are getting huge numbers? What could be more attractive to a culture that has merged the concepts of competition and corruption, scandal and entertainment?

Still, it would be better if people were paying attention, because continuing the current game plan in Bush's war on terrorism is a big mistake, and one that is almost certain to bite us on the ass.

The war was never really about fighting evil. We can no more eliminate evil than we can eliminate lust. It certainly isn't being fought to counter any credible military threat to America. While twenty guys with box cutters managed to get some very lethal results, they were still only twenty guys with box cutters. The United States isn't making some high minded declaration that killing innocent civilians is unacceptable, because far more innocents have been killed in Afghanistan than in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania combined. The war also isn't about "liberating" Afghanistan, unless it was to "liberate" what little infrastructure was left in their country after twenty years of wars we armed them to fight.

The war is about revenge, and oil. They hit us, and we wanted to hit them back ten times as hard. And we did.

Osama bin Laden and the Taliban are on the run, and no longer control a government that provides them with a base of operations. The oil pipeline the Bush administration sought from the Caspian across Afghanistan is back on track. We have achieved our objectives. While the U.S. should certainly continue to find, and perhaps eliminate, terrorists, we should do so covertly. Continuing to pummel Afghanistan with the blunt instruments of strike fighters simply creates more enemies than it eliminates. Reporters inside of Afghanistan describe "miles of housing, schools and government buildings reduced to rubble" and "tens of thousands of desperate people... packed into rooms without ceilings, without walls, without water or electricity or heat". We should declare victory, and leave. Or even better, we should declare victory and stay, not to provide security for Bush's oil pipeline to the Caspian, but to rebuild Afghanistan.

Bush has proposed a $120 billion increase in the military budget, $48 billion in the coming year alone. The plans call for spending $475 million for mobile howitzers, $910 million for reconnaissance helicopters, $1.3 billion for 23 stealth fighter jets, and $5 billion for new navy destroyers and submarines. Notably, none of these weapons would have been of any use in preventing the September 11 attacks, so perhaps our national security would be better served if we spent that money in Afghanistan, rebuilding homes, hospitals, schools and farms, rather than with the defense contractors who are business partners with Bush's father in the Carlyle Group.

Were Bush's $120 billion increase directed to the impoverished people of Afghanistan, we could improve living conditions in the country to a level they have never seen. Housing could be provided for literally millions of displaced Afghan refugees. Health care services could be provided for millions more. Agricultural production could be increased to a level to make Afghanistan self-sufficient. We could use Bush's proposed increase in the military budget to single-handedly lift the country out of its misery, while keeping our defense spending constant.

What message would such massive humanitarian aid send to potential recruits of radical Islamic fundamentalists? How could anyone in the Arab world continue to credibly argue that the United States was at war with Muslims? More importantly, which course of action would actually make us safer from further terrorist attacks; showing the world that the war really wasn't against Islam, or further enriching the Bush family by building countless weapons, all of which are useless against terrorists who are supposedly already living amongst us?