Un coup d’œil sur le Pentagone, — mille milliards de dollars !

Le Pentagone est l’une des sources classiques d’“horror stories” du système de l’américanisme. On a pourtant et toujours du mal à mesurer l’ampleur qu’a prise l’expansion de ce ministère qui est un monde en soi, avec sa vie propre, sa doctrine, ses influences, etc., — un “monde en soi” qui n’est pas loin d’être la source fondamentale et l’inspirateur principal du développement du système de l’américanisme.

Le budget du Pentagone est bien entendu une mesure extraordinaire de ce gigantisme du Pentagone. Il faut lire le texte de Robert Dreyfuss sur le site TomDispatch.com, de Tom Engelhardt, en date du 5 juin. Robert Dreyfuss est chroniqueur dissident très expérimenté des questions de sécurité nationale (auteur de Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam, collaborateur de Rolling Stone, The American Prospect, The Nation, Mother Jones, Washington Monthly). Son évaluation, qu’il présente comme modérée, des dépenses du Pentagone réelles dépasse les $1.000 milliards par an.

«However, since September 12th, 2001, defense spending has simply exploded. For 2008, the Bush administration is requesting a staggering $650 billion, compared to the already staggering $400 billion the Pentagon collected in 2001. Even subtracting the costs of the ongoing "Global War on Terrorism" -- which is what the White House likes to call its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- for FY 2008, the Pentagon will still spend $510 billion. In other words, even without the President's two wars, defense spending will have nearly doubled since the mid-1990s. Given that the United States has literally no significant enemy state to fight anywhere on the planet, this represents a remarkable, if perverse, achievement. As a famous Democratic politician once asked: Where is the outrage?

(…)

»By one count, U.S. defense spending in 2008 will amount to 29 times the combined military spending of all six so-called rogue states: Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. The United States accounts for almost half — approximately 48% — of the entire world's spending on what we like to call “defense.” Again, according to the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, U.S. defense spending this year amounts to exactly twice the combined military spending of the next six biggest military powers: China, Russia, the U.K., France, Japan, and Germany.

»Despite this, like presidential candidates Clinton and Obama, the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council is pushing hard to tie the party to increased military spending. Writes journalist Aaron Glantz:

»“‘America needs a bigger and better military,’ reads an October report by Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute, the policy arm of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council that counts Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Evan Bayh (D-IN) among its members. ‘Escalating conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the all-volunteer force to the breaking point,’ the report says. ‘Democrats should step forward with a plan to repair the damage, by adding more troops, replenishing depleted stocks of equipment, and reorganizing the force around the new missions of unconventional warfare, counterinsurgency, and civil reconstruction.’”

(…)

»And it's important to keep in mind that the official Pentagon budget doesn't begin to tell the full story of American "defense" spending. In addition to the $650 billion that the Pentagon will get in 2008, huge additional sums will be spent on veterans care and interest on the national debt accumulated from previous DOD spending that ballooned the deficit. In all, those two accounts add $263 billion to the Pentagon budget, for a grand total of $913 billion.

»Then there are the intelligence and homeland security budgets. Back in the 1990s, when I started reporting on the CIA and the U.S. intelligence community, its entire budget was about $27 billion. Last year, although the number is supposed to be top secret, the Bush administration revealed that intelligence spending had reached $44 billion. For 2008, according to media reports, Congress is working on an authorization of $48 billion for our spies.

»Again, when I first wrote about “homeland security” in the late 1990s — it was then called “counterterrorism” — the Clinton administration was spending $17 billion in interagency budgets in this area. For 2008, the budget of the Department of Homeland Security — that mishmash, incompetent agency hurriedly assembled under pressure from uber-hawk Joe Lieberman (even the Bush administration was initially opposed to its creation) — will be $46.4 billion.

»To a rational observer, such spending — totaling more than $1 trillion in 2008, according to the figures I've just cited — seems quite literally insane. During the Cold War, hawks scared Americans into tolerating staggering but somewhat lesser sums by invoking the specter of Soviet Communism. Does anyone, anywhere, truly believe that we need to spend more than a trillion dollars a year to defend ourselves against small bands of al-Qaeda fanatics?»

Mis en ligne le 7 juin 2007 à 05H39