Pro vs Con

"With an effective date of August 1st, this means that not one troop will benefit from this deployment reduction until August 2009--seven months into the next Presidential administration." -- VetVoice's Brandon Friedman, 4/10/08

Actually, the president’s 2009 budget is way out of balance, throwing money at the military and on feared future terrorist threats while shortchanging the everyday security needs of the American people. The budget cuts homeland security grants to state and local governments by 48 percent — a whopping $2 billion. That includes a 79 percent cut in the largest state homeland security grant program, a 60 percent cut to firefighters, a 56 percent cut to transit security grants, and a 48 percent reduction to port security grants. Plus, the office that investigates waste, fraud and abuse in the Department of Homeland Security is being cut $7 million.

If the administration was really focused on homeland security, the Department of Homeland Security, with a proposed 6.8 percent budget increase, to more than $50 billion — would be able to adequately fund programs for first responders who are not only at the front lines of reacting to a disaster, but are at the first lines of prevention as well. The administration would also fund the dozens of other initiatives — from crime-prevention programs at the Department of Justice to youth programs at the Department of Education — that contribute to making our nation safer but whioh have been given the cold shoulder by conservative government.

The current strategy is failing. The sooner we recognize that and make changes, the more chance we have of success.

Nobody is planning an immediate headlong flight. What’s needed is a deliberate, orderly transition. Iraqis need to manage their own affairs. We can’t referee their civil war.

The war in Iraq has made us less safe. The U.S. official National Intelligence Estimate concludes that the war in Iraq has increased Islamic radicalism, and has made the terror threat around the world worse. The number of significant terrorist incidents worldwide tripled in the year following the beginning of the war, and a bipartisan survey of national security experts says the war in Iraq is making the world more dangerous for Americans.

The Bush administration has demonstrated clearly how to tear down the nation’s morale. Use September 11 and the war in Iraq as partisan clubs. Ignore your generals and rush into a war with the deluded belief that we would be greeted as liberators, and that Iraq oil revenues would pay for the costs of our involvement there. Shred the president’s credibility by fixing the intelligence to fit the policy. Then mire our forces in an extended and bloody occupation with no plan to get out.

For the United States, military force should always be a last resort, not a first response.

We face a range of threats to our national security, but we cannot ask our military to face them alone. Smart bombs won’t stop global warming or the spread of pandemic diseases. Our reliance on foreign oil makes us vulnerable to turmoil within oil-producing nations, but we cannot seize and hold every oilfield. Diplomacy, alliances, international cooperation, intelligence sharing and police work are the essential tools for heading off the emergence of real threats to our national security. They are the real means of preemption.

The facts are clear: Bush’s team was bent on going to war and distorted the intelligence to mislead the American people into supporting an ill-conceived invasion. The question now is how to deal with this terrible mess. There aren’t any easy answers, but our troops cannot be left as targets in the midst of a growing Iraqi civil war. We need to redeploy our troops over the next year, support the Iraqis in their effort to govern themselves and encourage our allies in the region to provide assistance.

International terrorist attacks are up across the world. Iraq is sinking into a civil war, after we’ve suffered more than 28,000 casualties and spent more than $465 billion. The administration has alienated Muslim opinion across the world. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission gives the administration failing grades on homeland security. This country is less secure not more. It is hard to imagine a more complete failure of leadership.