The people who stop you when speaking of the need to spend a
dollar feeding a child that goes to school hungry are back again. Those who
used to say that a dollar here and a dollar there spent to feed the children
add up to something big, then say that a 50 million dollar paycheck given to an
executive is chicken feed when compared to a 17 trillion dollar economy, are at
it once more. These miserable characters are back again voicing opinions that
remain as outrageous as ever.
Here is what they say this time in black and white: “So
we're rolling in dough when it comes to entitlements … Yet we're out of cash
for defense.” They know this is outrageous so they pretend to give an
explanation. But because there is no explanation that can justify a view as
distorted as this, they do something dishonest. They give a non-explanation
that is itself in need of an explanation, and leave it up to the reader to
verify what would take the staff of a large newspaper months to complete. Here
is what they did: “This is a policy that has made much of Europe
bankrupt and defenseless at the same time.” Try verifying this claim, my
friend.
So you want to know who is saying these outrageous things.
It's easy to tell; they are the usual suspects – none other than the editors of
the Wall Street Journal who wrote an editorial under the title: “Obama's
Shrinking Army,” a piece that also came under the subtitle: “Plenty of cash for
entitlements, but not enough for defense.” It was published in the Journal on
March 1, 2014.
To make their views known, and make it look like they
appreciate some of the decisions that the President and the Secretary of
Defense have made, they used the “good news, bad news” approach. In the good
news column, they admit that the military is better off under the new budget
than under sequestration. They also like that the Marine Corps and the carrier
fleet will remain intact. They appreciate that new investment will be made in
the nuclear infrastructure. And they do not mind that the U-2 spy planes will
be replaced by unmanned vehicles, or that some combat ships will be replaced by
frigate-like alternative. Citing that there is a 20 percent excess capacity in
bases, they also welcome the closing of some bases and the pairing of personnel
costs.
Speaking of what they have in the bad news column, they make
it clear early on that the President's defense strategy stands at odds with
what they envision for the nation. And it does not take you long to find out
what the difference is between the two strategies. Whereas the President favors
a military that defends the homeland and punishes the aggressors anywhere they
try to hide in the world, the editors of the Journal envisage an invasion army
that can go into a country or two and occupy them the way that America did with
Iraq and Afghanistan – but more than that, do so simultaneously rather than
sequentially.
And this is how they explain all that: “We're all for the
SEALs and Rangers,” they write, and they follow with a “but.” Yes, they have a
but in there because to increase these special-ops forces to nearly 70,000
personnel comes at the expense of something else. It is that the Army's
helicopter fleet will be cut by 25 percent and the entire fleet of A-10 Warthog
jets will be retired. And this is where they drop something that astonishes
you; they continue the explanation with this: “presumably to be replaced by the
F-35 … but not until 2020.” And this means that they envisage invading as many
as two countries simultaneously no later than 6 years from now.
This brings to mind a similar debate that happened some
quarter of a century ago. It was a time when the American military was owned in
whole and in part by the “civilians” that had infiltrated it under the watchful
eyes of Dick Cheney. These civilians were the self-designated “children of
Holocaust survivors” who came very close to turning the America
military into a mercenary force in the service of World Jewry, dedicated
initially to fight Islam and the Arabs. To make clear that this was a war
between the religions, the Jews ordered the design and manufacture of a ground
attack, self-propelled gun they called the Crusader. To his credit, Donald
Rumsfeld put an end to this madness.
They are trying again, this time using the media they have
under their control to advance their point of view. This is why you see the
editors of the Journal object to the Army being reduced to somewhere between
440,000 and 450,000 troops from the current 520,000 level. This is how they
express that point of view: “It is hubris and bad policy to assume the U.S. will never
again fight another lengthy, manpower-intensive war that begins abruptly and
requires a swift response.”
And what they have assumed, of course, is that such scenario
will unfold within the next six years, and will happen again and again till
America is reduced to a Third World country with the difference that it will
have a primitive economy and a debt that is of a First World size. It will be a
debt that America could
never hope to pay off, which will be a development that may call on the United
Nations to assume tutelage of Washington
and perhaps some state capitals too.
To add strength to their argument, the editors of the
Journal write this: “The steep reduction in manpower and equipment is an
invitation to unexpected aggression … The purpose of fielding a large army is
to minimize the temptations for aggression.” The counterargument is that with
all its troops, helicopters and Warthogs, aggression has not been deterred, and
America
has been involved in wars non-stop since World War II. How to explain this?
Well, if we theorize that the editors of the Journal suffer
from a mental sort of dyslexia, and that they are saying the right things
except they are saying them in reverse, we would understand them to be saying
that with a large American army at its disposal, World Jewry finds it tempting
to start wars of aggression on nations it wishes to destroy, starting with the
excuse that such nations have WMD or that they are producing nuclear weapons.