Katrina Vanden Heuvel: Occupying Melting Glaciers (The Nation)

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BLOG | Posted 01/31/2007 @ 9:00pm
Occupying Melting Glaciers


Amid his plan to escalate the war in Iraq, and his dead-on-arrival health care proposal, barely noticed in President Bush's State of the Union address was the call to permanently expand the US military by 92,000 soldiers over five years. Many Democrats and much of the mainstream media have signed onto this plan without so much as raising an eyebrow.

"I am glad he has realized the need for increasing the size of the armed forces… but this is where the Democrats have been for two years," said Representative Rahm Emanuel ☼.

"In the post-Sept. 11 world," argued a Washington Post editorial, "the Army must be prepared to deploy to multiple theaters, while still guarding against the rise of a strategic threat such as China."

This decision has serious ramifications for the future direction of our country. We already have a hyper-militarized approach to security. This is a critical moment when the new Democratic Congress could lead a vigorous debate over how to best serve the national interest in an era of climate chaos, resource scarcity and geopolitical energy struggles rather than acquiesce to a size and spending increase in order to look "strong on defense."

Despite what some supporters of an expanded military say, this policy would do absolutely nothing to help the current situation of an army stretched thin ("the active Army is about broken," said former Secretary of State Colin Powell) due to this administration's recklessness. Gordon Adams and John Diamond of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars wrote in a recent op-ed, "Even on a fast track, it might be as long as five years before an additional combat-ready brigade would be ready to deploy ." Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates said, "An increase in the size of the Army today really won't show up for some period of time."

So what are the expand-the-military cheerleaders gunning for exactly? A continued course of invasions followed by occupation and nation-building? Spreading the folly of Iraq into Iran or Syria? The Bush administration has already demonstrated that such missions are as achievable as occupying the glaciers it is melting, and the American people have made clear that they have no desire to repeat the human catastrophe of Iraq. .....(more)

The rest of the piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?bid=7&pid=162148