BY MAURICE WILLIAMS
In his weekly radio address January 2, U.S. president
William Clinton proposed the largest increase in military
spending in 15 years. In the budget he plans to submit to
Congress in February, Clinton will propose to hike the Defense
Department's $258 billion budget to almost $269 billion for
1999, with a $110 billion increase over the next six years. The
additional funds will pay for new weaponry, including F-22
warplanes, new warships, and Comanche attack helicopters.
On December 7 Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Gen. Henry Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps met with Clinton to discuss a $148 billion increase over next six years. Two weeks later Cohen announced a planned 4.4 percent pay hike across the board for the 1.4 million U.S. military personnel.
Coming close to the sum Pentagon tops had requested only brought Clinton more denunciations from the right wing, however. The Democratic president is "personally responsible for the defamation of our defense system," exclaimed Republican Sen. James Inhofe, a member of the committee on combat readiness. "The president's going to try to make it look like he's a pro-defense president. It's an outrage."
James Webb, who was secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, called Clinton's spending hike "a small Band- Aid on a military system that has been hemorrhaging for years," in a column published in the Wall Street Journal January 5.
White House officials retorted by pointing to the Clinton administration's record of using U.S. military force around the world, including operations in Yugoslavia and the recent "Operation Desert Fox" that rained hundreds of missiles and bombs on the Iraqi people.
That onslaught in the Arab-Persian Gulf cost more than $400 million in cruise missiles. Clinton and his top officials have made a habit of referring to the United States as "the world's indispensable nation."
The Clinton administration's war budget proposal is a continuation of the third militarization drive launched by Democrats in the White House since the late 1930s.
The first began with President Franklin Roosevelt's "quarantine the aggressor" speech in 1937 as the U.S. rulers prepared for entry into World War II. The bourgeois class used their war preparations for this slaughter to contain and push back working-class radicalization that flowed from the gigantic labor battles that built the CIO. It ended with the demobilization of millions of U.S. troops following Washington's defeat of Japan in 1945.
Washington's second militarization drive began in 1947 with President Harry Truman's executive order initiating the anticommunist loyalty-oath program and the witch-hunt. That campaign lasted through the Korean War and ended with Washington's defeat in Vietnam.
The third militarization drive was launched in the January 1980 State of the Union address of President James Carter, who announced the decision to reinstate draft registration. Carter's speech triggered immediate and large-scale protest through the United States. The U.S. government's massive increase in military spending began late in the Carter administration and has continued since then.
U.S. military expands across Europe
Washington's expansion of the NATO military alliance into
Eastern Europe, its military operations in the Caspian Sea
region, and elsewhere around the planet highlights the Clinton
administration's deepening militarization drive. According to
the December 14 Washington Post, U.S. special operations forces
have conducted military maneuvers and training exercises in at
least 110 countries, including every country in Latin America.
In a move to tighten its military noose around the Russian workers state, Washington has launched a Joint Contact Team Program run by the U.S. European Command based in Stuttgart, Germany. Under this arrangement 1,400 U.S. military personnel have been brought into the region to train 100,000 soldiers. Another 1,400 military officers from countries in Eastern Europe have traveled to the United States or to U.S. bases in Europe.
The U.S. military has set up operations in 13 countries across Central and Eastern Europe, with plans to expand into the Caucasus region and the southern flank of Russia. Bulgarian soldiers have participated in more than 15 joint exercises with U.S. GIs. And in Lithuania, a team of U.S. military officials went to inspect every active air base and naval facility, companies, and platoons, to assess that country's military capabilities. Last July, Washington organized a joint military exercise involving U.S., Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian troops.
Washington's military moves have gone hand-in-hand with attacks on working people in the United states, including the deportation of almost 300,000 undocumented immigrants in the two years since Clinton signed into law the Illegal Immigration and Reform Responsibility Act.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service is now the largest federal law enforcement agency with a budget of nearly $1 billion and 15,000 armed cops.