Hanging From a Cross of Iron: The Economics and Politics of War-Making

Today I read a Congressional Quarterly article on the Bush administration's budget plans for the upcoming fiscal year of 2008. The proposed budget is about $2.9 trillion. Where does the money go? Well, lets see.

$245 billion are alloted to war-making in Afghanistan and Iraq.

$700 billion total for security related spending, which comes to about $2,300 per US resident and has basically doubled since Bush came to office.

Balancing the budget was also an important theme. How was this done? Primarily, this was accomplished by cutting Medicade and Medicare spending, which would save an estimated $252 billion over the next decade. In other words, the burden is placed on the poor and the elderly.

This whole budget reminds me of a comment President Eisenhower made many years ago:

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 are 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. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. 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. [...] Is there no other way the world may live?

President George W. Bush apparently has no problem hanging American children, the elderly and the poor from a cross of iron and steel.

But war-making gives us meaning. War helps us clearly define whom we are by differentiating whom we are not. In some ways, two wars are being waged. One war is external, the "war on terrorism." This external war helps define the Nation. The second war is being waged internally against far less threatening Others. This internal war helps differentiate hierarchically those elite at the top from those at the bottom.