One would think, with all the time spent pressing Congress for the record 2011 Defense Department budget and the even more record 2012 Defense Department budget, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates would have a pretty full plate.
Not so, it seems, as the Defense Secretary spent today at the Senate Armed Services Committee, which was expected to be used to push for that 2012 Pentagon budget instead to press for a dramatic increase in funding for the State Department.
According to Gates, the $5.2 billion in funding for the State Department’s occupation of Iraq, which will begin at the end of the year when the Defense Department’s occupation is scheduled to end, is “a critically urgent concern.”
Gates insisted that the US needed to continue its programs going forward, and warned that the situation could end up like 1990s Afghanistan. Most Senators appeared eagerly on board with throwing the money at the State Department, much of which will be used to hire a “private army” for them, but many (including Gates) also expressed hope that the Defense Department could continue the occupation going forward.
I curse the proto-social-worker that first came up with the phrase "at risk." Now establishment whores get to make a sovereign nation sound like a wayward teen that just discovered weed. 'At risk' of what? Looking like the other US experiments? Moving on to heroine? …failing to move on to heroine?
"Gates cited…4,000 American lives …. and the expenditure…" The shoppers-fallacy again: it's still worth something because it cost so much. Got one uniform in my closet screaming "J#$@s, get this Gateshit off of me!"
How can the US plan quite openly to prolong an occupation in spite of a TREATY signed by them to leave completely this year? Are the congress people complete dummies? And the population, that feeds them? The journalists?
State department = assistant Pentagon. In one way, I'm glad they're so crazy and arrogant. The empire will collapse faster.
I guess sucking the life out of this country isn't much of a concern for this warmonger. One of the main causes we have for this huge deficit spending and debt is the military spending. Remember when Rumsfield wanted to investigate where the pentagon put 2.3 trillion dollars that couldn't be accounted for. Gates should start looking for that instead of coming to the Senate and saying words like urgent and critical that are absolutely meaningless. It is the foreign policy of the government elites that caused the problems in the first place and it is their continuing "war" that just makes more enemies. These people don't seem to have much on the ball except how to take the last drops of blood from a country once founded on good ideals.