Thursday, June 22, 2006

Bring on Neo-Imperialism: More Federal Tax money should be given to our military and our security

Now only 21% of US Federal tax money and 6 % of Canadian goes to the military

by Ferdinand III

You discover and claim a new land – call it ‘Egostan’. Egostan is a great place, full of resources, trade routes, rivers and plenty. You build up your own country, populate it, develop it and wealth is generated which attracts envy and hate, and eventually war from those who want to steal and plunder your creation. As the dear leader and ruler you must protect Egostan and you spend money on border control, security, migration prevention, and of course the armed forces. Now say for every dollar you generated in tax money, taken from Egostani citizens you spent only 6 % on the military and a further 1 % on border and security measures, even as Egostan is clearly marked as a target for destruction by fanatics that want to wipe our your way of life. Would your citizens feel safe? Of course not. Imagine that the numbers rise to 21 % and 10 % respectively. Is that good enough? Possibly but probably not. Put it another way. Your Egostani government is taxing people and spending in one example 70% on social service payments and transfers to buy votes and only 30 % on security. In the other example it is even worse at 92 % and 8 % respectively. In both cases we have a failure to acknowledge that military preparedness is the only way to guarantee freedom and our way of life and that projecting military strength abroad to secure Egostan is expensive but ultimately vital.

Using tax dollars to properly defend a society, and project our strength abroad, while decreasing the destructive transfer and welfare payments is mandatory. The current Iraq war, which is about as successful an enterprise as one could hope for in the fascist cesspool of the Middle East, is an obvious example. Not only do we need to project force abroad to eradicate terrorism and fascism, but we will need billions if not trillions of other dollars to rebuild these failed pagan societies in our own image. This is not mere hubris but reality. Iraq will cost the US and the West well over a Trillion dollars before the country is stable and able to embark on a path to prosperity. Yet there is no other choice. Islam has failed and needs to be replaced with something intelligent. Not only will war be a drain on our treasury but the recreation of nations and states will require our own economies to be dynamic and free enough to produce the necessary wealth to allow us to implement an intervention, neo-imperial foreign policy.

Pre-emption is the only policy choice left open, and this necessitates a drastic reduction in the welfare state model, a limitation of payments and vote buying transfers and a re-dedication to military, security and power projection excellence. Again Iraq is the key test and example. Think back to 1993. We had Islam fighting its bloody border wars, to paraphrase Huntington. In the Balkans, [un]Orthodox Serbs were at war with Bosnian Muslims. In the Sudan, an Islamist government in Khartoum was waging a campaign of murder and enslavement against the Christian south. Israel was fighting Hezbollah in southern Lebanon even as it signed a peace agreement with the Palestinians -- one that would, in time, literally explode in its face. In the Caucasus, Muslim Azeris and Christian Armenians were battling over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, while 200 miles north Muslim Chechnya had declared independence and was about to be invaded by Russia. Further east, India and Pakistan were lobbing artillery shells across the Line of Control in Kashmir.

Now fast forward to 2006. The US invasion has changed all of this. The violence at the periphery of Islam has, for various reasons, faded but the flux at its center has grown and this portends massive change. The Arabs, Iranians and Libyans all know that the US will use military muscle to reform the Middle East if pushed, and this has radically altered all balances of power throughout the region. In Palestine, we can see the supposedly secular Fatah party of Abbas and the fundamentalist Hamas of Prime Minister Haniyeh heading towards the early stages of a civil war unless Abbas miraculously conjures a union between the two factions. In Darfur, Arab Muslims are slaughtering African Muslims. The dynasts of Jordan and Saudi Arabia are being forced to confront the terrorism of al Qaeda. In Egypt, liberals oppose the Muslim Brotherhood, the Brotherhood opposes the government, and the government suppresses them both. In Iran, the youth confront the clerical establishment. Pro-independence factions in Lebanon are struggling to survive a campaign of assassination and terror by Syria. Shias and Sunnis murder each other in an orgy of revenge killings and terror designed to destroy the new Iraqi government and allow certain gangs to control its oil money.

By invading Iraq America has roiled the fascist kleptocracies that dominate the Arab-Islamic world.

So-called Islamic ‘civilization’ and its paganism has long been in need of a reformation. In every Islamic country we can see the same forces at work: liberals and democrats fighting the clerical and corrupted elite; rival mafia gangs vying for power and spoils; terrorists fighting liberators; and moderates demanding Islamic reform. These variegated struggles are hard to control and will lead to both good and bad consequences. Yet there is no stopping it now. Indeed we need more of it.

Regime change throughout the entire region is mandatory. For those who think that Iraq was cowboy Bush’s sop to Halliburton you should grow up. Regime changing all fascist regimes is necessary to slap down Islamo fascism and eradicate terror. Libya and Syria both understand this. And now the Saudi’s and others are starting to get the idea. Before Sept. 11 the Saudi government lived in denial and refused to acknowledge that its blind support for Wahhabi religious institutions and preachers was breeding extremism, intolerance and violence. But a succession of al Qaeda attacks, beginning in May 2003, on residential complexes, government offices, oil facilities and foreigners changed the Saudi’s view of the world. Suddenly there was no external enemy to blame for the shattering of the Saudi’s world. The Jews and Americans did not attack the Saudi’s – it was extremist Muslims. The Saudi’s now belatedly recognized that without significant reform there Kingdom will fail and will fall prey to more terrorist attacks.

The deranged, blinded, and asinine among us chatter about pulling out troops from Iraq and Afghanistan at certain dates. The more morbid and deceitful prattle on about losing the war. How about this? We need to increase our military presence in the Middle East; stay for 20 years; regime change all nations that oppose us and eradicate on the ground fascist groups and governments that dare to threaten our liberty. To do this we need vibrant, mommy-state-less domestic polities with a huge reduction in socialist spending; a burgeoning military and security spend, and an awareness of what makes civilizations enduring and peaceful – namely the threat and hammer of war.