Obama’s Military Plans Conflict with Progressive Values

by Randy Shaw, 2007-04-25

In his first major foreign policy address, Barack Obama announced on April 23 that as President he would expand the overall number of US military troops by nearly 100,000. Obama’s speech came in the wake of Vice-President Dick Cheney’s recent attacks on the Democratic Party for allegedly adopting George McGovern’s 1972 anti-war platform. In 1972, even President Richard Nixon highlighted his success at shifting military spending to social programs. Today, we have a leading anti-war Democrat pledging to increase troop levels, and offering no commitment to redirect the nation’s massive military budget toward health care, education, and other human needs. Obama’s stance may have increased his stature among the foreign policy elite, but it conflicts with his image as someone who offers America a new direction.

In an April 23 speech before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama called for expanding American ground forces, adding 65,000 soldiers to the Army and 27,000 to the Marines.

The most obvious question is why Obama feels a need to increase troops when the US military budget already exceeds that of the rest of the world combined.

Another obvious question: if Obama opposes future military adventurism, then why do we need more troops?

And how about: how can Obama fulfill his campaign promise to redirect money spent in Iraq toward human needs if he is not willing to commit to cutting America’s vastly bloated and immoral military budget?

In fairness to Obama, calling for more troops does not mean that he will not also make cuts in the pork-barrel weapons systems that comprise the greatest amount of Pentagon bloat. But nowhere in his speech did Obama propose trimming the defense budget.

Perhaps Obama is just being strategic. Maybe he is afraid of being tagged “soft on terrorism,” and figures that he must balance his opposition to the Iraq war with Rumsfeld-like talk of “modernizing” the military and “building a military for the 21st century.”

But history shows that candidates worried about being labeled “soft” on defense allow this fear to govern their actions once in office.

Obama knows that reversing Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy cannot alone provide sufficient money to adequately fund our schools, house our homeless, and provide guaranteed health care for the nearly fifty million Americans without it. In fact, much of the money generated from increased taxes on the rich will first be used to eliminate the burden of the “alternative minimum tax” on the middle-class.

This means that Obama either accepts the permanent doubling of the US military budget in the wake of 9/11, or charts a new direction that puts people-serving programs first. Fudging the money issue could help elect him, but he will quickly alienate his political base if he cannot provide the money to fulfill his domestic agenda.

In Obama’s standard speech, he argues that he cannot make change alone, and that it is movements from below that alter history. It’s time for anti-war Democrats to let him know that opposing the Iraq war is not enough, and that espousing a “new direction” means ending the prioritization of defense spending over education, housing, health care, public transit, and other long unmet needs.

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