Home News Tribune Online, March 7, 2006

 

By HASSAN MAHMOUD

The president's proposed budget of $2.77 trillion for the 2007 fiscal year shows that the administration can't get its priorities straight. The spending plan would create a staggering deficit of $423 billion and emphasize military spending over domestic or growth-enhancing programs. Military spending is to be increased by 6.9 percent, to $440 billion, making it larger than the next 18 defense budgets in the world, without even counting an additional request for another $120 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The Pentagon is pouring additional funds into military systems that were built to fight the former Soviet Union instead of concentrating on less-expensive agile force that can effectively fight terrorists, who only use their bodies as weapons. It is said that President Eisenhower justified capping defense spending by saying that our real strengths of ideology and economy would win the Cold War.

Meanwhile, the president is preferring guns over butter by proposing to slow the growth in programs for the old and the poor in Medicare, cutting back food stamps, reducing programs for vocational education, student loans, housing assistance, environmental protection, and scientific research, while shifting some of the Medicaid burden to the states, which could result in increased state or real estate taxes.

The baby boomers are starting to retire; slowing the growth of the Medicare would increase their financial burden. The reduction of student loans would prevent many students from pursuing college education, which could erode our edge in a competitive world economy.

In order to finance the deficit, we have to borrow from foreign nations, some of whom could become adversaries in the future. Those nations such as China, Japan, South Korea and the rich oil-exporting countries are holding the biggest chunk of our treasury bonds. If they decide to withdraw their money it could have devastating economic consequences and destabilize the dollar.

A major factor in creating this financial mess is the ill-conceived invasion of secular Iraq, which was instigated by the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, who had their evil design on the Middle East to grab the oil and to keep the balance of power in favor of Israel. So far, besides destroying Iraq, we've spent $400 billion on that war and lost 2,300 of our soldiers. 17,000 young soldiers were seriously injured or maimed. The invasion also helped create a safe haven in Iraq for fundamentalist terrorism, which never existed under the secular albeit tyrant regime of Saddam Hussein.

In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Laureate in economics and a professor at Columbia University, and Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary of commerce and a public finance professor at Harvard University, estimated that the final bill for the cost of the Iraqi war would be between $1 trillion and $2 trillion, depending on how much longer our troops stay.

We apparently have not learned anything from the Iraq debacle. The administration has embarked on a new, frenzied campaign to pave the road to a possible military action against Iran; a country three times as large as Iraq in area, population and wealth, which has a hold on Persian Gulf passages through which 30 percent of world oil passes. The situation is reminiscent to the one before the Iraqi invasion, when the administration whipped up people's emotions by falsely claiming that weapon of mass destruction or ties to 9/11 existed. Iran is working on projects to develop nuclear energy as permitted under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which it signed, while Israel, India and Pakistan never signed and possess nuclear bombs. Our intelligence believes that Iran cannot produce nuclear weapons before 10 to 12 years from now. Regardless of how abhorrent the Iranian regime is, it never attacked any of its neighbors or threatened to attack us. Ironically, during the Reagan administration, we supplied the same regime in Iran, through Israel, with weapons for its war against Iraq, and the nuclear project started during the Shah's regime with our blessings. The outcry of the Bush administration is that if Iran produces the nuclear bomb it will threaten the security of Israel, even though Israel possesses more than 200 nuclear bombs and has the capability to deliver them by missiles or by submarines.

Our government should concentrate on our nation's security and economic development in order to preserve our leadership and our edge in the world economic competition.

Columnist Hassan Mahmoud is a resident of Westfield.