First, President Obama moves to gut our Federal defense establishment, including among other moves reducing the size of our Army to 1940 levels.
Now he wants to gut our state militias, in particular the States’ Army National Guards, also—and reduce thereby their ability to deal with internal matters ranging from disorder to disaster recovery. And, oh by the way, severely restrict the States’ ability to reinforce that drastically curtailed Federal defense capacity.
Hmm….
Or, more to the point, what’s the value of Russia’s good opinion of us? After all, it’s this perceived need that’s among the barriers to providing meaningful aid to Ukraine in the face of the present Russian invasion of that country.
Max Boot, at Commentary, suggests that one aspect of the pseudo-thinking going on inside President Barack Obama’s head and that of his State Department Secretary is this:
Russia…remains an important power that Washington hesitates to antagonize because of a general feeling that we need Russian help to deal with Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, and other important issues….
What help? How has Russia “helped” us in any way there, or anywhere else? In Iran, the Russians are actively helping build nuclear reactors and actively blocking attempts to slow, much less stop, the Iranian drive to acquire nuclear weapons. In Syria, the Russians are actively propping up Bashar al-Assad and sending him both arms to replace combat losses and SAMs with which to oppose the Israeli air force. In Afghanistan, the Russians routinely interfere with (though they’ve not actually blocked, yet) our access to Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, from which a major portion of our Afghan-based troop resupply flows.
Those “other important issues?” Russia has replaced us in Egypt. Russian is propping up a failed Venezuelan government that is antagonistic to us. Russian is back to sending naval units, including electronic surveillance assets, to Cuba. And now they’ve invaded Ukraine, with a view of anschluss and partition. And so on.
Since Russia isn’t helping us anyway, what “help” will we lose if we support, materially, the nascent Ukrainian government?
Aside from the morality of the situation (the strong should protect the weak), and the improvement to our credibility, it’s in our national interest to actively support the new Ukrainian government, to facilitate their—and the bulk of their people’s—move to closer ties with Western Europe and the West generally.
It’s in our interest to do this regardless of what the Russians might think of us as a result. Or even because of that.
Here are a couple of types of spending increases that will appear in upcoming Federal budgets:
[A] CBO report finds that mandatory spending, which includes Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, is projected to rise $85 billion, or 4%….
And
Interest on the debt is worse. It is projected to increase 14% per year, almost quadrupling in dollar terms between 2014 and 2024.
DoD Secretary Chuck Hagel’s proposed budget cuts Defense spending by $75 billion over the next two years.
The “mandatory” spending problem could be cured over those same two years, with a proper reform package.
From $416 billion in interest payments in 2013, that 14% increase for 2014 comes to $58 billion; for 2015, the first year of President Barack Obama’s budget proposal (which includes that “mandatory” spending and Hagel’s cuts in the Defense budget), that interest payment increase comes to $65 billion.
Our debt debacle, with its required interest payments, will take considerably longer than two years to redress, and that puts a premium on getting started now on the necessary spending cuts. This is made even more difficult, though, by the enormous size of our debt coupled with the national survival need to preserve our military capacity.
But the Democrats won’t allow entitlement reform in any direction except expansion—and more spending. And they refuse to take our debt seriously, demanding ever more (non-defense) spending, and not just for the “mandatory” stuff. Go figure.
President Barack Obama decries keeping the pressure on Iran during “negotiations” over their nuclear weapons program while bragging that pressure is what got them to talk (more).
Now he’s accommodating the Taliban by cutting back on pressure on them during Pakistani “negotiations” over their future in Pakistan.
The Obama administration has sharply curtailed drone strikes in Pakistan after a request from the government there for restraint as it pursues peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban, according to US officials.
“That’s what they asked for, and we didn’t tell them no,” one US official said.
YGTBSM.
This is national security, community organizer style.
The Department of Veterans Affairs has linked the recent deaths of at least 19 vets diagnosed with cancer in 2010 and 2011 to appointment backlogs and delays at VA hospitals and clinics and resulting hindrances in care….
That this is something entirely correctible from within the VA is corroborated by the VA’s continued coverup of responsibility. The VA so far has refused to identify those responsible for these veterans’ deaths or for the delay-caused or exacerbated injuries of many other vets, and the VA has refused to discipline or fire anyone—anyone at all—regarding this…problem, according to Congressman Jeff Miller (R, FL), House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman. Miller also said
I don’t want to hear the excuse anymore that “It was multi-faceted. … There were many people involved.” If there were many people involved then they all need to go.
We are not asking for one particular person, we want to know exactly why things happened and who was held responsible. At this point publicly, we haven’t seen anybody held responsible.
“They all need to go” must include General Eric Shinseki, Secretary of Veterans Affairs, who seems disinterested, or unable, to correct these problems.
Enough. This VA needs to be gotten rid of entirely, and the function absorbed into the Department of Defense, where fellow veterans, both active and now-civilian, will be more likely to take such matters seriously. That a Cabinet-level functionality like the present VA should behave in this way is utterly reprehensible and wholly unacceptable.