Richard's Blog

The article below was written by Tom Blackburn and was posted in today’s (3/16/10) edition of The Daily News (a newspaper serving the San Francisco Peninsula communities.)  For those who can fast forward five years or so, the demise of the U.S. planting its flag on foreign soil is approaching.  Very soon.  This is the very point that I made in “None Dare Call It Reason.”  As Blackburn points out below, we’ll only have 50,000 troops in Iraq by next year.  That goes with the 50,000 in Korea and the 40,000 on Okinawa.  Where will we get the money to pay for that?

 

Richard

 

Inevitably, President Obama’s foreign policy will crash into his domestic policy. The surprise is that it hasn’t happened already.

Mr. Obama is getting us out of Iraq and marching us deeper into Afghanistan. Defense, including those two adventures, is costing $660 billion a year. The two wars are nearing the cumulative $1 trillion mark in costs.

The good news from Iraq is that we may have “only” 50,000 troops there by next year. The good news from Afghanistan is in an article in the current Foreign Affairs by political scientist Sheri Berman of Barnard College. History, she says, shows that it is possible to build a state, which is a precursor to building a nation, which is a precursor to democracy, which is Mr. Obama’s goal. There are precedents. The best model of state-building is France. There, it took 105 years. Transition to democracy took longer.

Did we mention that it is also the bad news from Afghanistan?

It has belatedly come to the attention of the public and the Republican Party that we have doozy deficits. We don’t really have $660 billion. We know where to borrow it. For a feel of how much it is, it’s a little more than we spend on Medicare and Medicaid together.

The figure includes the first installment on the $40 billion-plus contract for 179 tanker-refueling aircraft that Boeing will get by default. The new planes will service Stealth bombers when we launch them against terrorist tanks swarming through the Fulda Gap on the German plains.

While we prepare for World War III and rebuild what was built poorly by no-bid contractors who had the first crack at Iraq and replicate the policies of France’s Louis XIV in Afghanistan, states shut down services, close parks, give employees unpaid time off, pay vendors in scrip and expect a worse year this year without that dreaded, socialistic stimulus money they couldn’t get through last year without. The latest thing in education — besides laying off teachers and cutting their pay — is four-day school weeks in some districts.

What’s annoying is that hard times spawn wider social problems like spouse abuse and child abandonment. So just when the proper folks whose taxes paid for services for others need family services themselves, the states lay off social workers.

Since the start of the recession of 2007 we have lost 8.4 million jobs. In addition, we have failed to create the 2.7 million new jobs needed to keep up with new entrants to the workforce. That leaves us 11.1 million jobs in the hole. There were more than five job seekers for every open job last month, as the Economic Policy Institute counts them.

No industry in this country plans on massive hiring. The big companies boast of doing more with fewer workers. That may explain why the stock market went up while the jobs market stays down. Even the president’s economists don’t see the unemployment rate returning to 5.7 percent before 2015.

That is where the rate was after the previous recession ended in 2002. But half of the working people never got their pay back to its pre-recession level after 2002. Those are the good old days to the people who would replace Mr. Obama’s team.

People grow surly when there is too little work for the willing. Some surliness began to show up last summer in unfocused tea parties. Afghanistan, though, seldom comes up over tea. The idea that we can still plant the flag abroad, even if we can’t afford toilet paper for our courthouse rest rooms, seems to soothe the American soul. The House of Representatives had an uncharacteristically polite “debate” on Afghanistan last week and kept the flag flying. Of course, the members still have jobs.

A day will dawn when people notice that they are losing Saturday mail delivery while paving roads for Afghan poppy growers. When things fall apart, people lose their enthusiasm for dreams of empire.

Tom Blackburn is a former member of The Post Editorial Board. His e-mail address is tom_blackburn@juno.com