My wife and I are planning a summer trip to Europe and, as usual, our first source for travel info is Rick Steves guidebooks and videos. We learned in preparing for our trip to Italy last year that this is a great series of travel guides with humor and a famous "back door" approach to tourism that focuses on helping people experience the wonders of the old country without spending a fortune. It also doesn't hurt that Steves is an articulate and thoughtful progressive with a conscience. I can't imagine this is always good for his business, seeing that many of his clients are likely to be rich Republican Americans who are likely to boycott his services when they discover the shocking ideas he doesn't mind sharing. Among these is that
The greatest risk to our society today is not Islamo-fascist terrorism, but the people who use that term to scare us.
In an essay originally posted on his website, Steves writes an opinion about American foreign policy that is so much at odds with corporate owned media propaganda that I'm amazed it was picked up by the Seattle Times. It's well worth a read in its entirety, but I'll share a few morsels here.
The United States spends as much on its military as the rest of humanity combined: more than $400 billion annually (not including the hundreds of billions of dollars for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan)...
It's hard to imagine what 400 billion means, but more than the rest of humanity combined? That puts it in focus just a bit.
What if we gradually scaled down military spending, chose not to rush off to foreign wars based on questionable motives, and began to take the name of our "Department of Defense" literally?
The worst thing about our defense budget is how offensive it is. Not only are we spending almost all of our resources on stuff that is designed to destroy and be destroyed, but we're doing so largely in the interest of making the richest Americans richer while making it more and more difficult to explore the planet and meet the people out there in harms way.
When I was younger, in the closing decades of the cold war, the whole red scare thing made no sense to me because I intuitively knew that Russia was not a threat to us- their missiles were- but not their people. They already had a terrible time managing most of a huge continent of their own well, why would they want to take on the burden of trying to control a bunch of pissed off Americans as well. Rick Steves has a similar view towards our current great threat.
Let's be honest: Is there anyone out there who would actually want to -- or, more importantly, be able to -- invade the United States? Consider today's biggest perceived threat, al-Qaida. Do Osama bin Laden and his gang want to ride into Washington, D.C., take over our government, and turn us into an Islamo-fascist nation? Or -- as his recent offer of a "truce" suggests -- do they instead want dignity for the Palestinians, Christian armies out of sacred Muslim territory, and freedom for the Arab world to control its own natural resources?
Uh oh, Rick. Now you're getting into dangerous territory. You're guilty of attempting to understand the thinking of our demonic foe. Don't you understand that they are simply evil? Of course, being pure evil, their motives are irrelevant. They only want death and destruction on an immense scale. Besides, that's our oil over there, isn't it?
So let's try something different. Imagine if we required our military to manage with a budget no bigger than all the militaries of our hemisphere combined: That's Canada -- $15 billion; Mexico -- $6 billion; everyone from there to Tierra del Fuego -- about $16 billion. Round the total up to $40 billion. Add to that a healthy sum to support the United Nations and our allies in their peacekeeping work (say $60 billion a year). Grand total: $100 billion.
That saves more than $300 billion a year ($400 billion less $100 billion), which we could use to tackle not "Islamo-fascism," but more-fundamental concerns: dependence on oil, both foreign and domestic; a skyrocketing debt that allows other nations (such as China and Saudi Arabia) to gain economic and political leverage over our homeland; progressively violent weather and a rising sea caused by global warming; and a lower class that's chronically in need of affordable housing, good education and reliable health care. We could even let the wealthy keep their tax cuts.
Sounds great until that last line. As long as the obscenely wealthy are getting wealthier at the expense of the rest of us they'll be tempted to spend that wealth on buying congressmen to do their bidding (and maybe some of them will go on vacation to Europe?). Still, I'd take the deal if it was offered. It's too bad this eminently sensible approach has to be an impossible fantasy. No, I'm afraid the only way that our "defense" budget will be brought in line with reality is by collapse of the status quo. There will eventually be one war too many- maybe we've already started it in Iraq or maybe Osama did on 911. Either way, it will probably take something like what Athens did with their disastrous attack on Syracuse in the Peloponnesian War to realize the empire is over and retreating to a real defensive posture will be the only reasonable alternative. Too bad the rest of the world will have no pity on us by then.
But Rick isn't as pessimistic as I am so I'll include his rallying cry for a close.
The prospect of al-Qaida attacks is frightening. But America is being held hostage not by a man in a cave, but by clever people with a different agenda. They use Osama bin Laden to scare us -- even terrorize us -- into funding an agenda that's weakening our country.
It's time for patriots to stand up to fear-mongering and broaden our definition of "sanctity of life" and "homeland security." It's time for some courage and eloquence on the left. And it's time for our electorate to wake up and see the real threats to our for-the-time-being-still-great nation. If we rose to this challenge, I think we could report that "the state of our union is strong" -- and it would be true.
Rick Steves has made a great reputation for himself as one of the premiere authors in the tourist industry, and there are many of his detractors who will say he should stick to writing guidebooks, but I think the man is a true patriot who should be thanked for speaking his mind. Here's his contact info.
Originally posted on New Worlds.