The Deafening Silence About the War in the Deficit Debate

By Dan Kovalik, The Huffington Post

There is a lot of talk right now on Capitol Hill about the need to balance the federal budget. Sadly, both Democrats and Republicans alike are largely debating about how best to balance the budget upon the backs of the poor and working people (who are many times the very same people) and the elderly. First and foremost on the chopping block appears to be Social Security and Medicare -- the lifeline for millions of seniors in this country and the only hope for any sort of retirement for the vast majority of people in this country.

Meanwhile, belying any real interest in balancing the budget, the extension of unemployment benefits for millions of people out of work through no fault of their own is being made contingent upon tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.

At the same time, what is largely absent from this debate is discussion of the war, which includes military actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, allied Pakistan, military exercises in the Yellow Sea and elsewhere, and the maintenance of over 800 U.S. military bases throughout the world. To put the latter into perspective, Great Britain and Ancient Rome, at the very height of their Empires, never had more than 40 military bases internationally.

The U.S. is always at war, whether the pretext is fighting Communism or terrorism, or, as is usually the actual case, fighting against national liberation efforts and for the ability of U.S. corporations to expand their domain and control.

While President Obama had promised during his campaign to "change the mindset that leads us to war," and while many of us, myself included, believed him, Obama could not even wait until his first weekend in office before launching one of his many (many more than Bush) drone attacks into Pakistan, predictably killing mostly civilians. In addition, just after it was announced that he won the Nobel Prize for Peace, Obama, almost to spite the Nobel committee, announced the "surge" in Afghanistan which is putting 30,000 more American lives in jeopardy, leading to a massive increase of civilian deaths in Afghanistan over those killed during Bush's tenure, and further inflaming tensions in the Middle East.

Indeed, Obama has been more hawkish than Bush in a number of ways as seen, for example, in his re-commencing funding for the brutal "red berets" of Indonesia -- which even Bush refused to do on human rights grounds -- and in his re-commissioning the 4th Fleet in the Caribbean which Eisenhower had de-commissioned in the 1950's.

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