Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared on Capitol Hill Thursday, March 25, to launch the Obama administration’s drive to secure nearly $40 billion in supplemental appropriations, the bulk of it to fund the escalation of the Afghanistan war.
The push for additional off-the-books funding for the current fiscal year comes as Congress is also debating the administration’s proposed $159 billion to pay for the wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan in fiscal year 2011. The request for the Pentagon’s so-called base budget, which covers military spending outside of the war costs, amounts to $548.9 billion
In her opening remarks, Clinton was compelled to acknowledge the implications of the massive war spending—a total of $322 billion for the current and next fiscal years—under conditions in which funding is being cut for vital social programs, deficits are soaring and next to nothing has been done to create jobs for the country’s 15 million unemployed.
“I am well aware of the economic strain we all face here at home,” declared Clinton. Referring to Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as “front-line states,” she justified the spending, insisting that “the challenges we face demand that we draw on all of the tools of American leadership and American power.”
Defense Secretary Gates sounded a similar note. “These times of economic and fiscal stress place enormous pressure on all of us to be good stewards of taxpayers’ dollars,” he said in his opening remarks. “However,” he continued, “even at a time of budget pressures, I believe it is critical to sustain an adequate, sustainable level of investment in the instruments of national security—be it defense, diplomacy, or development—that are so essential to America’s security and position in the world.”
The appearance of Gates and Clinton together was aimed at promoting the conception that the wars being waged by Washington are, in the secretary of state’s words, “a fully integrated civilian and military effort, one in which security gains are followed immediately by economic and political gain.”
Yet the funding request is overwhelmingly geared to paying for stepped-up military operations. The Pentagon would receive $33 billion of the supplemental funding, the bulk of it going for the war in Afghanistan. Only $4.5 billion would be allocated for civilian operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. The remainder would go to pay for US operations in Haiti.
When the administration requested an $80 billion supplemental funding bill to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in April of last year, President Obama vowed that this would be the last such request.
He criticized the Bush administration for having submitted 17 separate emergency supplemental funding bills totaling $822 billion—all passed by Congress with Democratic support.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/warf-m27.shtml
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