The below comes in response to Sarah Palin's "foreign policy manifesto" she posted on her Facebook profile on July 4th. There may be a series of posts here in the near future in response to much of what she said, but I wanted to start with this one since a couple members of the House, as well as Keith Olbermann have brought up responses to her proposed policies. Much of what I discuss below can be seen on "Countdown" for July 6th, #3, for further elaboration of the Paul/Frank proposal and Secretary Gates defense cuts. But I take the argument farther into the history of foreign policy and the philosophy of maintaining our presence around the world.
With Congress currently mired in a political firestorm over the growing national deficit and unable to significantly enact any real legislation to curb the nation's costs, Reps. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Ron Paul (R-TX) have begun a push for cutting the deficit by a "novel" idea: reducing military spending. I put novel in quotations because the defense budget has been, for the past five decades or so, untouchable, a perceived notion that any cuts to defense are an automatic sign of being weak in the world's eyes, or un-American. The calls for defense cuts come after Defense Secretary Robert Gates has made repeated calls for paring down the military budget, sighting an unnecessary abundance of nuclear carriers, submarines, and other malapropos weapons in our fight against terrorism. Of course, Sarah Palin decided to offer her 1/2 a cent thoughts, as her remarks on the subject are vague at best, and idiotic at worst.
Ron Paul, a libertarian Congressman, has repeatedly spoken out for the government's need to cut spending, in all aspects of discretionary spending, and to lower taxes. Paul is a bit extreme in his view of taxes though, as he would like to abolish the income tax, which would ostensibly abolish millions of policemen, firemen, and teachers from their jobs. A total halt of federal taxes would drastically increase local and state taxes, as someone would need to pay the police, the construction workers to keep up the roads, and the sanitation depts. to recycle waste and provide clean drinking water. Luckily, since Paul has gained abundant national attention, it seems he has lessened his calls for total abolition of all federal taxes, but he still petitions for large cuts to federal taxes.
Representative Frank is a liberal Congressman from Massachusetts, highly in favor of federal income taxes to provide proper education, federal programs such as Medicare, and police and security for his district and the entire state, for example. Liberals, generally perceived as the spending party, have needed to show strong focus on the national debt; one, because of the public's sudden interest in the matter; and two, it really is a problem brought on by the last administration's deep tax cuts and false war with Iraq. President Clinton had balanced the budget; Dubyah and a Republican Congress sent us into unparalleled debt.
Defense Secretary Gates has called into question the overall abundance of military weaponry this country manufactures every year unuseful to modern warfare. He sighted numerous programs to be halted, and increased spending in areas that are more appropriate for the sporadic battles we fight against terrorists. His questioning of having battle-ready 11 nuclear aircraft carriers, while no other country has even one, seems not only cognoscente, but years too late. To paraphrase him: Do we really need this stuff? Most would answer no, especially in light of the current state of our country's finances. Sarah Palin admonished Gates' critique of military spending, but failed to offer anything remotely salient. "Well, my answer is pretty simple... yes, we do, because we must." Indeed, Ms. Palin, your answer is simple.
She then tried offering broader elaboration of why military spending is so important with the dribble reported here. "If we lose wars... we risk losing all that makes America great." The problem with Ms. Palin's suggestion that losing wars would diminish the grandeur of America is it holds no logical bearing on history, especially in the context of the birth of this nation. George Washington in his farewell address warned of foreign influence of American affairs, and "permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world." In fact, a large portion of his farewell address warns against foreign relations of any kind, and that the government should be interested in helping its own people. Of course, times have changed and America is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. It is a just cause in this growing global economy to extend aid to struggling nations, to spread our military wealth around the world, but it should not come at the expense of our own nation and people. We have fallen behind in engineering, education, health care, and numerous other facets of modernity, pushing jobs overseas, widening the gap between upper class and the middle and lower classes (as I've written before). The appropriate thing to do when Americans begin to suffer is to pull back the olive branch from the world and extend it to our own citizens. Furthermore, Palin must hold a fairly favorable outcome, albeit against all standard viewpoints and general knowledge of the war, that we won in Vietnam. History shows that we by no means were outright victorious (but didn't necessarily lose either; a tie! everybody wins!) and that certainly did not "diminish" the country to any great extent.
While I applaud Secretary Gates for his reverent cuts to defense spending, I would like to see some of that money come back into rebuilding the American infrastructure. Sure, the money is being apportioned to other military endeavors, such as predator drones, which will help create some jobs in the States, but millions of Americans are out of work who do not have the special skills to build such aircraft, but are construction workers, teachers, policemen, social workers; all of which are needed to educate, to protect, to build right here at home, instead of fanning the flames of hatred in this "second Vietnam" we're hunkered-down in Afghanistan. We need to reinvest in education, to train the next generation of engineers to build smarter, more efficient weapons, not simply more of the outdated ones.
The longer we continue to increase the defense budget, to spread the military wealth around the world so other countries don't have to spend as much on their own defense, the longer we'll continue to short-change the American people. President Washington warned against mingling in the affairs of neighboring countries, especially at the expense of our own citizens. For Conservatives, for Sarah Palin (whatever she is), those who tout such a strong idolization of the Founding Fathers, have betrayed the very interests their champion politician preached. We have stretched our wealth and resources to "defend" other countries while our own is under attack, and rotting away from the inside, out. We are military socialists spreading the wealth and abundance of our military around the world to areas that do not need it to maintain an "empire" that might collapse momentarily.
