Reply #5: Lehman fails to address the war in Iraq [View All]

[teryang]

<The military occupation in Iraq is consuming practically the entire defense budget and stretching the Army to its operational limits. This is understood quite clearly by both our friends and our enemies, and as a result, our ability to deter enemies around the world is disintegrating.>

This was perfectly foreseeable before our "brilliantly successful" (and illegal) invasion. What's his proposed solution? Here's a hint John: withdraw.

The international threat of "jihadists" against the US is a bunch of claptrap. Lehman favors "Army lite" but wants a six hundred ship Navy, again.

He is one of the authors of our current diaster.

Turning on Saudi Arabia at this point would be remarkably stupid. There is no "homefront" in this so-called war. Maybe the FBI out of institutional tradition is insisting on compliance with constitutional guarantees before targeting specific ethnic or religious groups by illegal means. Imagine that!

What amazes me is that these spokesman for the defense contractors never discuss the decline in American manufacturing or our untenable financial position as world's greatest debtor of all time. Perhaps if the Pentagon cut down on its spending and commitments, other more productive and competitive pursuits might be undertaken to address our declining national power.

I would like to have seen this pompous self styled iconoclast address the transformation of national defense doctrine from protecting the lines of communication from locations where strategic resources are located to simply seizing those resources by force. This degeneration of national defense policy to an outright fascist belligerence is compensation for the decline in our economic competitiveness and the doctrinaire exportation of capital overseas to exploit cheap labor. The over emphasis on defense spending in the national budget combined with ideological orthodoxy concering so called "free trade" has resulted in financial exhaustion of our national resources and the concommitant impulse to invade and seize the resources of other nations by force.