{"id":21643,"date":"2010-12-27T09:15:00","date_gmt":"2010-12-27T13:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=21643"},"modified":"2010-12-27T14:31:18","modified_gmt":"2010-12-27T18:31:18","slug":"nyt-cut-our-military-during-this-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=21643","title":{"rendered":"NYT: cut our military during this war"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the New York Times<\/a> this weekend was an opinion piece written by a journalist Nicholas Kristof who advocates cutting military spending while we’re engaged in a war beyond our borders. Now I read Mr. Kristof’s biography and I don’t see a thing that qualifies him to make such a statement…well, other than the fact that he’s a journalist, spent his whole adult life as a journalist as so he thinks he knows every thing there is to know about…well…everything. Now he wants to be heard on our global strategy;<\/p>\n

\u2022 The United States spends nearly as much on military power as every other country in the world combined, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It says that we spend more than six times as much as the country with the next highest budget, China.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And the problem is? I wonder if Mr. Kristof has noticed that the rest of the world is more than hesitant to use their military. While Serbs murdered Bosnians, the world stood around with their hands in their pockets. While hundreds of thousands of Africans died, the world stood by and watched. While terrorists attack in almost every European country, they’re resistant to send their own military to where the terrorists are being trained.<\/p>\n

\u2022 The United States maintains troops at more than 560 bases and other sites abroad, many of them a legacy of a world war that ended 65 years ago. Do we fear that if we pull our bases from Germany, Russia might invade?\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You do realize that we’ve drawn down our forces substantially in Europe right? It should also be noted that much of the underlying infrastructure in our Europe-based force supports operations in the Middle East. And, yes Russia is becoming a bigger threat to Europe every day.<\/p>\n

\n\u2022 The intelligence community is so vast that more people have \u201ctop secret\u201d clearance than live in Washington, D.C.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Having a top secret clearance doesn’t make someone a member of the intelligence community. Sometimes just being in the same grid square as mundane, routine classified information requires a clearance. You’d think someone as worldly as Mr. Kristoff would know that. But he probably does and he wants to scare the folks who don’t.<\/p>\n

\u2022 The U.S. will spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War combined. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hmmm. I wonder why a high tech war which depends on gee-whiz gadgets would cost more than every war we ever fought with cap and ball weapons while we were mounted atop horses? <\/p>\n

\u201cRepublicans think banging the war drums wins them votes, and Democrats think if they don\u2019t chime in, they\u2019ll lose votes,\u201d said Andrew Bacevich, an ex-military officer who now is a historian at Boston University.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hardly, dimbulbs two. it’s not Republicans who beating war drums. It’s people like Ahmadinejad and Il who beat war drums. Do we want to be unprepared when they finally make their move?<\/p>\n

Let me be clear: I\u2019m a believer in a robust military, which is essential for backing up diplomacy. But the implication is that we need a balanced tool chest of diplomatic and military tools alike. Instead, we have a billionaire military and a pauper diplomacy. The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service \u2014 and that\u2019s preposterous.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, because we’ve seen how well the “foreign service” has performed over the last hundred years or so. Even before we had a large standing army. Kristoff is probably home right now Windexing his Rhodes scholar scroll, so proud of how he stood up for an intellectual foreign policy in favor of a brutish military solution to all of our problems. But, he neglected to take into account that we’re not talking about existing in a civilized world like when diplomacy actually worked in the mid-19th century in Europe briefly. Diplomacy actually caused the problems with Iran and North Korea. Diplomacy caused the Iraq War.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the New York Times this weekend was an opinion piece written by a journalist Nicholas … NYT: cut our military during this war<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,6,155],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antiwar-crowd","category-media","category-shitbags"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}