Can someone please explain to me how we can afford to have a larger defense budget than the next 25 countries combined, but we're not going to make the deadline for screening all airline baggage for explosives?
Can someone please explain to me how we can afford to have a larger defense budget than the next 25 countries combined, but we're not going to make the deadline for screening all airline baggage for explosives?
Swerdloff
Easy:
We're also paying to police the rest of the world, and for primacy. The price of being number one is 25 times that of being number two.
barry
But we're not really policing "the rest of the world", or doing anything that would actually make the world any safer for Americans or anyone else.
Bombing Afghanistan from 30,000 feet, but being unwilling to commit enough ground troops to capture anyone significant, or to stabilize the country for the new government, doesn't make any sense. We have done the equivalent of bombing Palermo to "get" the Mafia without actually accomplishing much other than making some poor Afghans even more miserable.
I'll be posting some info on a recent NY Review of Books article by Tony Judt on this subject soon.
P.S. Good to meet you last night. Choire and Philo certainly know how to attract sexy men of all sorts of persuasions.
Swerdloff
Barry, just because you don't read about it in the Times doesn't mean it's not happening.
They haven't reported on the first outbreaks of fighting in the war in Iraq, either, but sure as I'm sitting here, they've happened.
We've got enough ground troups in Afghanistan to do the job. Why send more?
Other than that, we're currently involved in peace keeping missions worldwide, which, I don't know if you remember Yugoslavia, are working.