Should the Military Industrial Complex be targeted by credible Democrats?

[ProgressiveConn]

The 2004 military budget was $466 BILLION dollars. We've spent 161 BILLION dollars on Iraq. The rest of the world spent roughly $500 billion dollars. Why do we need to spend more on our military than the rest of the world combined? Is it fair that we have kids who cant afford college, and vets without adequate health coverage yet we have a military designed to take on the entire world yet to be honest we are not getting all that much in Iraq for our investment.

[punpirate]

1. To amend that vote...

... no candidate can now win on decreasing defense spending. The public, over the course of nearly six decades have been propagandized into believing that more spending is directly equatable to more security.

It's an irrational belief, and it ignores all the obvious evidence (prominent among that evidence that the most sophisticated military early warning system in the world did not respond to an imminent attack on 9/11 from terrorists wielding stone-age weapons).

In the current environment, it's political suicide to do anything but niggle about details when it comes to defense spending. That said, something will have to be done, and relatively soon, or the country will become the world's newest (and largest) banana republic--over-armed, riddled with debt and obsessed with internal security.

[DerekG]

2. *This* is the elephant in the living room

Anyone who dared pose a credible threat to this monster was either murdered (Kennedy brothers *cough*) or humiliated (McGovern). No one gets to the presidency without capitulating to the warlords in the Pentagon. If memory serves, Howard Dean chided Dennis Kucinich when the latter proposed cuts; indicative that Dean is of the "guns n' butter" sort, or, perhaps, he merely possesses survival instincts.

Frankly, I think the only thing that would stop the national security state--that dreaded creation of Harry Truman--is economic collapse.

.

[illflem]

3. Since the US's number one export

is arms nothing will change.