Investor’s Business Daily | Jun. 6, 2008
In the middle of a war on two fronts, Barack Obama plans to gut the military. He also wants to dismantle our nuclear arsenal. And he wants to keep you in the dark about it. The Obamatons of the mainstream media have failed to report one of the most chilling campaign promises thus far uttered by the presumptive Democrat nominee for president.
He made it before the Iowa caucus to a left-wing pacifist group that seeks to reallocate defense dollars to welfare programs. The lobbying group, Caucus for Priorities, was so impressed by Obama’s anti-military offering that it steered its 10,000 devotees his way. In a 132-word videotaped pledge (still viewable on YouTube), Obama agreed to hollow out the U.S. military by slashing both conventional and nuclear weapons.
Obama and the Military Budget (in Obama’s own words)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0du8wMLzEY
The scope of his planned defense cuts, combined with his angry tone, is breathtaking. He sounds as if the military is the enemy, not the bad guys it’s fighting. Here is a transcript:
“I’m the only major candidate who opposed this war from the beginning; and as president, I will end it.
“Second, I will cut tens of billions of dollars in wasteful spending. I will cut investments in unproven missile defense systems. I will not weaponize space. I will slow our development of future combat systems.
“I will institute an independent defense priorities board to ensure that the Quadrennial Review is not used to justify unnecessary defense spending.
“Third, I will set a goal for a world without nuclear weapons. To seek that goal, I will not develop nuclear weapons; I will seek a global ban on the production of fissile material; and I will negotiate with Russia to take our ICBMs off hair-trigger alert, and to achieve deep cuts in our nuclear arsenal.”
You can bet that Obama will not make this sweeping indictment of our security forces again as he tries to move to the center in the general election. But this is what he thinks, and this is what he plans to do.
His campaign Web site doesn’t list a separate category for military or defense under “Issues.” But search shows near-identical language there regarding nuclear weapons.
His plan, needless to say, is frighteningly irresponsible given the world threats.
While there is fat in the defense budget, defense spending both as a share of GDP and the total federal budget are still at historically low levels, despite the war.
And while cutting fat out of the defense budget is a worthy goal, Obama would cut beyond fat to bone.
Caucus for Priorities aims to redirect 15% of the Pentagon’s discretionary budget away from “obsolete Cold War weapons towards education, health care, job training, alternative energy development, world hunger and deficit-reduction.”
On the chopping block: the F-22 Raptor, the V-22 Osprey, the Virginia-class sub, the DDG-1,000 destroyer and the Army’s Future Combat System.
Cutting allegedly “unproven” missile defense systems is music to Kim Jong Il’s and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s ears, let alone all the PLA generals wishing our destruction.
Yet Obama wants to kill a program that’s yielding success after success, with both sea- and land-based systems. The military just this week intercepted a ballistic missile near Hawaii in a sea-based missile defense test.
Proposing “deep cuts in our nuclear arsenal” amounts to unilateral disarmament, and it’s suicidal given China’s and now Russia’s aggressive military buildup.
Meanwhile, Iran and North Korea threaten nuclear madness, and Osama bin Laden dreams of unleashing a nuclear 9/11 on America.
In contrast, John McCain has vowed: “We must continue to deploy a safe and reliable nuclear deterrent, robust missile defenses and superior conventional forces that are capable of defending the United States and our allies.”
We’ve been down this road before. President Clinton pursued a denuclearization program, including his 1995 pledge to sign a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and it led to him kicking open our nuclear labs to the Chinese, who proceeded to steal our warhead secrets and strengthen their own arsenal.
Like the Ben & Jerry’s crowd that supports him, Obama believes “real” national security is “humanitarian foreign aid” — essentially using our troops as international meals-on-wheels in Africa.
We’ve been down that road before, too, in Somalia and elsewhere. Thanks, but we don’t need a third Clinton, or a second Carter, term.
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