WikiLeaks and national priorities
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
The massive leak of U.S. diplomatic cables by the web site WikiLeaks is likely to embarrass not only the United States but many American allies, especially Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, that have publicly refrained from criticizing Iran publicly while secretly wishing for an American attack to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear bomb.
Yet, beyond the red-faced diplomats and the exposed hypocrisies, the real embarrassment should be the fact that, despite the huge and vastly expensive intelligence apparatus maintained by the United States (as detailed in the recent Washington Post series “Top Secret America”), a lowly Army Private First Class (PFC) and an obscure web site could access and make public tens of thousands of official documents, including some of the best-guarded secrets of the most powerful nation in the world. What good are the 16 intelligence agencies upon which the government of the United States last year lavished $80.1 billion dollars?
The question is especially relevant at a time when reducing the deficit has become a virtually pervasive — although wrong-headed — obsession in Washington. The conventional wisdom, as expressed by establishment pundits and reinforced by the reports of several official and unofficial commissions, is that the United States needs to “make tough choices” and engage in “painful shared sacrifice” to avert a looming fiscal catastrophe.
The reality behind these sensible sounding words and weighty commission reports is that the pain and sacrifice they contemplate will be shared mainly by the shrinking middle class, the growing millions of unemployed, the poor, the aged and the infirm. If they come to fruition, the policies championed by deficit hawks in both political parties — not to mention the bizarre “Tea Party” — will come at the expense of further disintegration of the country’s already crumbling physical infrastructure (roads, bridges, government buildings, levees, dams), a continuing decrease in the quality of public education and a growing economic inaccessibility of higher education, and the collapse of what little is left of the nation’s social safety net.
Yet what is never entertained by the conventional wisdom and by “serious” commentators, analysts, and policymakers, is the massive misallocation of resources implied not only by stratospheric intelligence outlays (especially judging by the results on such key issues as 9/11, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and now WikiLeaks) but also on the even more outsized military budget.
As the scholar Chalmers Johnson, who passed away last week, pointed out, the United States has some 700 military bases around the world. This vast expanse of U.S. military power comes at an astronomical cost. The United States spends as much on its military as all other countries combined. Yet, what does this expensive and far-flung military buy the United States as a nation and the average American as a person? As is the case with intelligence — and American medicine for that matter — the results don’t match the expenditures.
Consider the two seemingly endless, ruinous wars — Afghanistan and Iraq — the United States has been engaged in for nearly a decade. Despite at least tens of thousands of Afghan and Iraqi lives lost, more than 5,000 American and NATO troops killed, and no less than $1 trillion spent, Iraq is still enmeshed in violence and lacks a functioning government while in Afghanistan the Taliban has proved as resilient as the U.S.-backed government of Hamid Karzai has shown itself troublesome and corrupt.
Meanwhile the United States, the nation that can afford extravagant military and intelligence expenditures, cannot come up with the money to stimulate the economy in order to reduce the current 17 percent rate of unemployment/underemployment or to pay all of its firefighters, police, and teachers. Those who have not (yet) lost their jobs live in constant fear of doing so and thereby also losing their (increasingly rare and costly) employer-provided health insurance.
Thus the gravest deficit faced by the United States today is not a monetary one but rather a deficit of leadership and imagination, the imagination to conceive of different priorities and real changes in the values that determine how we allocate the astonishing wealth of this bountiful nation.
