Jonathan Chait, writing in the Los Angeles Times has an, er, interesting suggestion:
“The Bush administration’s foreign policy is centered around fighting a highly expensive counterinsurgency in Iraq. The administration’s domestic policy is centered around driving federal tax revenues to ever-lower levels.
“Some observers say there’s an unsolvable contradiction here. I say those people just aren’t thinking creatively enough. There’s a simple, logical way to reconcile President Bush’s foreign and domestic policies: Start demanding tribute from foreign countries.”
The Old Right curmudgeon Garet Garrett once remarked that ours is an empire unique in human history, one where “everything goes out and nothing comes in.” But such altruism is bound to put a strain on the Treasury, as Chait observes, and yet the War Party’s demand for more invasions and foreign adventurism only heightens the contradictions between domestic and foreign policy. Tax cuts and imperialism are ultimately a fatal combination, and we can only avoid total bankruptcy, opines Chait, if we get over our pre-9/11 conception of modernity:
“Some might object that demanding tribute is a hoary, barbaric practice long ago repudiated by civilized countries. Well, sure, but so is torturing enemy combatants, or those suspected of being enemy combatants, or those merely living in the same general vicinity as enemy combatants. The administration understands that, if we’re going to win the war on terror, we can’t allow our hands to be tied by the quaint and obsolete requirements of the so-called civilized world. The war isn’t going to pay for itself, you know.”
But of course someone is already paying tribute, and that someone is the American taxpayer who is forced to subsidize neocon social engineering projects from Iraq to Ukraine and beyond. And a good many of the people on the receiving end of this largess are Americans, government contractors, “consultants,” and vendors who feed from the public trough. Innocuous-sounding NGOs abound, virtually al of them on the government dole, aggressively pursuing their own little agendas and spreading around lots of dollars in dirt-poor places.
War is a racket, said General Smedley Butler, and the war means fat profits not only for the weapons manufacturers and huge corporate outfits like Haliburton, but also for a small but growing group of professional do-gooders. An imperialist foreign policy, devoted to wars of conquest and “nation-building” amid the ruins, is a big drain on the ordinary American, but a tiny fraction does reap tangible benefits, and these children of the Empire constitute a key component of the War Party.
