The bizarre reasoning behind vast and wasteful military spending - the F-35 program (which keeps getting cut back, and might finally be eliminated), and NPR's report last week on the politics of Egyptian military "aid."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2013/08/08/209878158/egypt-may-not-need-fighter-jets-but-u-s-keeps-sending-them-anyway
Egypt has been supplied with about 1000 front-line Abrams tanks, and more are being shipped every year, kept crated in warehouses, because there is no use for them. F-16's, no longer considered "modern" enough for the US Air Force, are still being manufactured for the "foreign aid market", as well as those countries paying for them with oil or other resources, and Egypt gets a lot of them, giving them one of the largest Air Forces in the Middle East.
"The U.S. started sending M1A1 Abrams tanks to Egypt in the late '80s. In all, the U.S. sent more than 1,000 tanks to Egypt since then — valued at some $3.9 billion — which Egypt maintains along with several thousand Soviet-era tanks.
"There's no conceivable scenario in which they'd need all those tanks short of an alien invasion," Shana Marshall of the Institute of Middle East Studies at George Washington University, told me.
A thousand tanks would be helpful for large land battles, but not for the threats facing Egypt today, such as terrorism and border security in the Sinai Peninsula, according to Robert Springborg, an expert on the Egyptian military at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. In fact, he said, at least 200 of the tanks the U.S. has sent to Egypt have never been used.
"They are crated up and then they sit in deep storage, and that's where they remain," he told me."
"The story with F-16 fighter jets is similar. Since 1980, we've sent Egypt 221 fighter jets, valued at $8 billion. "Our American military advisers in Cairo have for many years been advising against further acquisitions of F-16s," Springborg said. Egypt already has more F-16s than it needs, he said.
I asked the State Department why the U.S. is giving Egypt weapons against the advice of its own military personnel. (The State Department, along with Congress, gives final approval on the weapons we send to Egypt.) Regarding those unused tanks, an official told me via email, it's not usual for a country to "maintain a portion of its equipment in reserve in the event of security contingencies." The U.S. decides which weapons to send to countries like Egypt "in consultation with our partners' own determination of their strategic and force structure requirements," the email added."
This is the legacy of Carter's Camp David, which increased military aid to both Israel and Egypt, hoping they would henceforth peaceably co-exist and oppose the Muslim fundamentalists who wanted to removed "the Zionist Entity" from Palestine. Several billion dollars a year is spent on weapons for these two largest recipients of American "aid" - all American weapons, of course, and these programs have political constituencies in every state and Congressional District so that the money keeps being spent, regardless of the actions or intentions of the regimes receiving them.
The victory of the Islamic Brotherhood in Egypt overthrowing the Mubarek dictatorship more or less marked the end of this program, except that the weapons are still going to the two countries, requiring a counter-coup by a military government which will continue to "play ball" with the Americans and Zionists. So, not only are these weapons unnecessary, unwanted, and dangerous to America's goals of peace in the Middle East. They are immune from any budget cuts which support them - for exactly the same reasons that Malmstrom's 50-year-old Minuteman strategic nuclear missile "deterrent" is "safe" from budget cuts. Because each District, Senator, and Representative is abolutely held at gunpoint by local business interests like our "military affairs committee" to keep wasting money on war and destruction, or the "deterrence" thereto - a deterrence, incidentally, which no one believes in or can explain and justify under any sort of cross-examination.
Such are the "long-term objectives" of the war mongers and profiteers. Naomi Klein had it right. Disaster Capitalism - destroy and build again, making profits every step of the way..
And it's like that "by proxy" syndrome among doctors - they cause illnesses so they can feel good about curing them (and demand more outrageous payments from "insurance" or whatever).
Then there's simple bellicosity - these guys like to fight and destroy. Sort of like the caricatures of the Vikings, but most cultures had them. We'd now call them "sociopaths", although some would never hurt a fly outside of the battlefield. Yet, even the worst wars a century ago were wholesome in comparison to the wholesale mindless slaughter of civilians with carpet-bombing, white phosphorus, Hellfire drones, DU shells, and countless other weapons regularly deployed by we "leaders of the civilized world," all the while threatening a nuclear holocaust if anyone objects or wishes to deny our hegemony over their lives and resources.
Pretty good racket. One thing I learned of great importance from Shirer's work on the Third Reich was that the Nazis modeled their organization on the Prohibition Era American gangsters - especially Chicago, with a large German population. Since Shirer was himself part of that, he understood the Nazis and the logic of their actions probably better than anyone else, German or American.
Now, NATO has taken up where the Nazis left off. Instead of being a defensive alliance against the supposed threats from "the Evil Empire" Soviet Union (which no longer exists), they have decided to adopt the Ostpolitik of Hitler, not Willie Brandt. Its goal is to once again establish Full Spectrum Dominance over everything, and what will be the outcome? Why, World War III, of course, but it's their own fault if they don't surrender first, right?
Whatever happened to the Fulbright's, the Dulles's, the Kissinger's, and others who got away with all this stuff? Well, they didn't flaunt it. They didn't keep outraging world opinion by wantonly slaughtering innocent people. That only works with the most brutalized and irrational people - like the American voters, maybe.
We need to reset. Start over. Dissolve the Federal Government and whatever states are dependent on it. If we want a new federation of sane, peaceful, civilized countries, we can "unite" whatever states want to join whatever federations. But we've got to "de-Nazify" our government and leaders, first. And remove the sociopaths from power - those who think nothing of killing thousands or millions of people for money, or simply because they are "different", branded as "militants" or "Jihadists."
Some of our leaders are merely political cowards, and claim that "they (lobbyists, AIPAC, etc.) made me do it." Obama may be in that category. But God doesn't take excuses. If what you are doing fundamentally violates the most sacred laws of God and Man, you will be punished, along with your family and country. Please don't condemn us to any more Hells on Earth, Mr. President...
