XDA

Why is the military not on the chopping block too? You're ridiculous.
 

Looks like a republican is writing this...whatever we do...lets be sure to keep our military funded. If we would stop going destroying every country and then spending trillions to build back what we spend billions destroying...that deficient could be in check.
 

I'm just going to refer to a little recent history. Post Kellogg-Briand Treaty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellogg%E2%80%93Briand_Pact), we and a lot of Western Europe cut way back on defense spending. When war came, it killed about 50 Million people because the West could do little to stop the Nazis and Imperial Japanese in the frost parts of the wars they started. You want to repeat that with a nuclear armed Pakistan, Iran, etc.? Western Europe has already disarmed itself, again.
 

Yeah, we're launching unmanned drone strikes throughout the region, indiscriminately killing civilians, indefinitely occupying 3 countries (and counting) and they're the ones who are starting World War III. That really makes sense.
 

We're using drones to kill an enemy (al Qaeda) who declared war on us and then waged war against us. As with the bombing of Germany and Japan, there is what they now call collateral damage,unavoidable civilian casualties. If al Qaeda types didn't hide behind their women and children's skirts, there wouldn't be collateral damage; but they clearly want civilian casualties as a propaganda weapon which apparently has been effective on you and your ilk. What countries are we occupying indefinitely? Germany Japan and South Korea? Let me know. And yes, they started it. Just as clearly as Germany started WWII in Europe (9/1/39 by invading Poland) and Japan started WWII in the Pacific (July, 1937 by invading China) al Qaeda attacked us outside America in the 1990s and here in America on 9/11/01. You had to know that. It was in all the papers.
 

Al Qaeda is limited to less than two dozen leaders. They haven't successfully performed an attack on American soil that wasn't easily defeated by normal law enforcement operations in ten years. The two countries in which our military is literally murdering innocent civilians on a regular basis have had a democratically elected government in place for years now. And yet somehow spending billions of dollars a day on operations, given the current fiscal crisis at home, still somehow makes sense to you? We could drastically scale back operations, and military equipment, and production, and still have more defenses than your newly designated axis countries combined. That you refuse to see the currently bloated and overreached military as anything but absolutely necessary is utterly absurd.
 

And why has al Qaeda had so much trouble since 9/11? Because of our forward defense efforts in Afghanistan. It's tough to plan a big operation when you're looking each night under the bed for SEALs. It's not murder and you cheapen actual murder to call it such. Knock it off. Billions of dollars a day? You might want to check your math on that. We would have a substantial defense bill each year absent our necessary actions in Afghanistan and Iraq (and soon in Iran). Your rhetoric is getting away with you. It does not good for your argument to call the other stupid or his position absurd, unless you've shown it stupid or absurd. Try to convince me, with facts and logic, that you are right. Don't just yell epithets. We could get out of Afghanistan soon and I would not feel bad. We are getting out of Iraq. Bloated? If our military is not sufficiently strong, the only thing that bloats are the corpses of the millions of innocent victims the new aggressors kill. I think it's more prudent to have a large and proficient (veteran) standing force to prevent the slaughter of the innocents. You have to be willing and able to use it though.
 

$650 Billion a year on defense. Divide that by 365, and that's more than a billion dollars a day. So it's a valid point. Check your own damn math.

And I was referring specifically to the cases in which soldiers were murdering civilians and making it look like accidents. You remember that, right? And they mentioned that this wasn't an isolated incident, so that's also a valid point about the reality of the situation in those countries.

And you say we're getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan, but politicians have been saying that for five years. The number of troops still in Afghanistan, even after Obama keeps his promise of withdrawing that surge, is still more than the number of troops there before he even took office. And just because we'd have a bloated defense bill without three wars being fought still doesn't mean that we should.

And if you want to lecture me about proper rhetorical technique, you probably shouldn't use a lame ass emotional appeal, and misdirection. It's still possible to have prevent as much innocent civilian deaths as we are doing so now and scale back the military in proportion with every other government program you want to cut.

My point, without yelling epithets, is that I think it's hypocritical to say that the country is in terrible financial straits, but we can still be the militaristic superpower of yesteryear. I think the future of defense should lie not in amassing ships/tanks/planes/soldiers but in efficient intelligence gathering with proportional responses.
 

If the entire budget is not quite 2 billion/day, I can assure you that we are NOT spending billions of dollars a day on operations, which is a relatively small subset of the entire budget. I just checked my math there and I'm still right and you're still wrong. We punished the guys who murdered the civilians. It is not our policy to kill civilians. Aberration is by definition not allowed conduct. I agree that we need better intelligence, it's just that I think the CIA completely sucks. Finally, acting as the world's policeman so that the rest of the world don't fully devolve into a savage, always at war situation is good policy for us here at home. As the mightiest manufacturing nation with the most productive workers on Earth, we need at peace markets around the world to whom we can sell our goods. It's not personal, Andrew, its just business. Good business to have a strong military, as history shows us again and again.