Foreign Policy Isn't Free

I originally published this piece at RevoluTimes on November 22, 2011

War is a racket… easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious… It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives…. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes….I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.” -two time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Major General Smedley Butler

When debating what should be cut from the federal budget, Washington promises that “everything’s on the table”. But is it? From entitlements to earmarks, congressional leaders and the president have spent the last several months pledging to address wasteful spending and restore fiscal sanity. Even if these sentiments were true, (which they’re not) it wouldn’t make any difference. No amount of tinkering around the edges or “reforms” of domestic spending is going to change the fact that our foreign entanglements around the world are not only destroying our liberties but crippling our economy. This cannot however be put completely at the feet of politicians as many Americans have yet to understand that there are limits to what the country can sustain.

The gut reaction to defend all military spending is understandable. If there is any legitimate role of government, it’s national defense. But in a post-9/11 world, the potential threat of terrorism has caused much of America to not question the reckless spending of the Pentagon. In our desperate attempt to feel secure, we’ve neglected our reason and placed faith in politicians. The same politicians and bureaucrats, who’ve proven to be unreliable and irresponsible with your tax dollars at home, haven’t suddenly become accountable and trustworthy when it comes to foreign policy.

Indeed few Americans are aware the Department of Defense is the only federal department expressly exempt from being audited. This alone should be startling to Americans, especially those concerned with an out-of-control government; but even more stunning is the fact that the US spends more on defense than all other nations combined. This is what economist and historian, Tom Woods has called, “The greatest fleecing of the American public in history.”

According to a recent study by the Eisenhower Research Project at Brown University, the U.S. has spent over $3.2-4 trillion on the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The study noted these numbers do not include: “Medicare costs for injured veterans after age 65; Expenses for veterans paid for by state and local government budgets; Promised $5.3 billion reconstruction aid for Afghanistan; Additional macroeconomic consequences of war spending including infrastructure and jobs.”

David Callahan writing at The Policy Shop summarized the report saying,

“… the total direct and indirect costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may exceed $6 trillion…. That figure comes from combining congressional appropriations for the wars over the past decade ($1.3 trillion), additional spending by the Pentagon related to the wars ($326 – $652 billion), interest so far on Pentagon war appropriations, all of which was borrowed ($185 billion), immediate medical costs for veterans ($32 billion), war related foreign aid ($74 billion), homeland security spending ($401 billion), projected medical costs for veterans through 2051 ($589 – $934 billion), social costs to military families ($295 – $400 billion), projected Pentagon war spending and foreign aid as troops wind down in the two war zones ($453 billion); and interest payments on all this spending through 2020 ($1 trillion).”

These estimates are also excluding military operations such as Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia andUganda.

While these numbers are unconscionable, a fact even more astounding is the number of U.S. military bases around the world. The problem is, there are so many, no one knows the exact number. Writes Antiwar.com’s Nick Turse:

“…there’s one number no American knows. Not the president. Not the Pentagon. Not the experts. No one… There are more than 1,000 U.S. military bases dotting the globe. To be specific, the most accurate count is 1,077. Unless it’s 1,088. Or, if you count differently, 1,169. Or even 1,180. Actually, the number might even be higher. Nobody knows for sure.”

Having over a thousand bases worldwide not only dwarfs any other nation’s foreign bases, but the magnitude of the bases themselves is overwhelming. As author Tom Engelhardt explains,

“India, a rising power, almost had one (but the Tajiks said no). China, which last year became the world’s second largest economy as well as the planet’s leading energy consumer, and is expanding abroad like mad (largely via trade and the power of the purse), still has none. The Russians have a few (in Central Asia where “the great game” is ongoing), as do those former colonial powers Great Britain and France, as do certain NATO countries in Afghanistan. Sooner or later, Japan may even have one… All of them together… add up to a relatively modest (if unknown) total. The U.S., on the other hand, has enough bases abroad to sink the world. You almost have the feeling that a single American mega-base like Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan could swallow them all up. It’s so large that a special Air Force “team” has to be assigned to it just to deal with the mail arriving every day, 360,000 pounds of it in November 2010 alone. At the same base, the U.S. has just spent $130 million building “a better gas station for aircraft … [a] new refueling system, which features a pair of 1.1-million gallon tanks and two miles of pipes.” Imagine that: two miles of pipes, thousands of miles from home – and that’s just to scratch the surface of Bagram’s enormity.”

It’s safe to say most Americans would be surprised, even shocked by these staggering numbers, but it is unfortunately also likely that many U.S. citizens would find such exorbitant costs necessary. We have been conditioned to trust government with such decisions and forgotten Randolph Bourne’s timeless warning, “War is the health of the State.”

There’s no denying domestic spending must be drastically cut as well, but while lawmakers in Washington have been playing political theatre, the U.S. has had its credit rating downgraded for the first time in history, we just recently reached a debt of $15 trillion and we’ve lost over 6,000 U.S. soldiers; at what point do we admit these are debts that cannot be paid?