U.S. 2008’s “Rogue-est” State
Let’s talk rogue states.
Actually, let’s talk about the rogue-est of all the rogue states and their inarguably excessive, obsessive, aggressive funding of organized state-violence and, increasingly, state-terror.
Salon’s Glenn Greenwald pointed me to recent work by Global Security. Taking the FY2008 U.S. budget they prepared a revealing chart that summarizes the greatest challenge to peace and security in modern history — the continued hyper-militarization of the United States.
Greenwald summarizes:
[U.S.] military spending exceeds the rest of the world’s spending combined, and we spend almost 10 times what the second-place country, China, spends. “Only” about $150 billion of the total U.S. amount is attributable to the two active wars we’re fighting, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Thus, even if one wants to excludes those amounts, the basic picture remains the same. Nor do these amounts include the billions of dollars in military aid we give to fund the armies of other countries, such as Israel and Egypt, which alone comprise substantial portions of those countries’ defense budgets.
This disparity is collectively dangerous and suicidal for many reasons.
Prime among them, the opportunity cost of spending — on one hand — two thirds of a trillion dollars by the United States, and on the other, the US$1.1 trillion that the world combined spends on organized violence.
If the goal of “military spending” is to protect human life and security — even if only for a state’s nationals or elite segments of the state — the current arrangement is doing a tremendously poor job of it. There are innumerable other means to accomplish this goal more effectively and with tangible, more immediate results. Obviously, the goal of military spending — U.S. military spending especially — is not to protect or secure.
Certainly, Americans are less safe since the first Iraq War with their ground-in military presence in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. They are less safe since the most recent Iraq aggression and their military settlement there. They are less safe due to their insistence on a useless global proprietary U.S. missile shield. And they are less safe because of their aggressive and increasingly absurd threats to state and non-state actors everywhere — from Iran to Cuba to Valerie Plame.
In the case of the United States their goal is to extend and protect selected American business and power interests. Even a casual examination of U.S. history demonstrates this clearly. Goals of other countries — though doubtless tangled up with other interdependent power struggles — include simply protecting themselves from the aggregate tyranny of the world’s “policeman”. A “policeman” increasingly acting outside international treaties, disregarding human rights and national autonomy, abandoning and eviscerating democracy everywhere, and pushing the world ever-forward to violence and away from progress and community.
What to do though? Faced with all this?
No state can catch up nor should we encourage them to do so. The U.S. has suffered terribly for its fiscal decisions and they should not be repeated. Nor should we expect solutions to come from other states — Canadian governments, Conservative or otherwise — especially.
Me: I’ll read independent media, listen to projects like Democracy Now, and endeavour to write more and engage others. I’ll work to make my neighbourhood and my city a more prosperous and democratic place, because it is the ideal place to start and make a difference. I donated to The Real News and Wikipedia. I will continue to do this and much else. I’ll encourage others to do the same.
Above all else, I’ll keep what makes all this worthwhile a little closer — friends, family, neighbours, the kids we’re leaving this mess to, and my own sense of purpose and well-being.
Great change comes from the many — whether through acquiescence or concerted action.
(Hmm… a bit of my new years’ resolution coming out in this post.)
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