Slamming the Door on Pentagon Neo-Cons

[seemslikeadream]

By MARTIN SCHRAM
Jan 12, 2005, 06:20

...

Last fall, according to knowledgeable sources, White House officials decided that the defense budget had to be cut by $10 billion to pay for the soaring cost of war and peace in Iraq. Defense budgeters got to work. Some big cuts, such as $5 billion for missile defense, were easy. But some of those irrepressible Pentagon planners could not resist taking a whack at the Defense Department's already small share of the Nunn-Lugar CTR program (which also has portions funded by Energy and State department budgets). So they slipped in a measly $46 million cut of the program their president had called his top priority, sent it upstairs to the deputy defense secretary _ and waited. Wolfowitz signed off on the cuts and the memo was sent over to the Office of Management and Budget.

Meanwhile, as always happens, the Pentagon folks who favor the Nunn-Lugar program got word of what was happening and _ you will be shocked to hear this _ they passed the word to Lugar's office in the first days of the New Year. A Lugar aide telephoned a White House National Security Council aide, who passed the word to his boss, Bush's newly named national security adviser, Steven Hadley.

Apparently, Hadley understood that it is not good to cut the program that the president told Americans was his top priority. Hadley returned the budget memo, telling the Pentagon that cuts in the Nunn-Lugar CTR program were not acceptable. "It's written all over the paper," said one source.

So here's where we are: We are in a race against terrorists who are seeking to buy or steal a nuclear weapon or nuclear material to make their own crude bomb. We are racing to secure the vulnerable WMDs before the terrorists can get to them. At the pace we are going, it will take 13 years to secure all of the sites in Russia alone. So we need to double our funding, double our pace _ and Bush needs to double his pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to do so, too. Then we need to secure the vulnerable WMDs in other countries

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