by David Swanson

Global Research, February 2, 2011

warisacrime.org/

And anyone paying attention at all almost certainly believes that President Obama is cutting the military. When he has increased it in the past, the media has made so much noise about particular weapons being cut, that nobody's noticed the overall increase. In Obama's 2011 State of the Union address he claimed:

"The Secretary of Defense has also agreed to cut tens of billions of dollars in spending that he and his generals believe our military can do without."

The English language is flexible enough to avoid calling this a lie if we want to avoid that. But consider these facts. Obama is not here talking about the 2012 fiscal year budget which he is about to propose and for which he will propose a larger military than ever. Instead he is talking about future years, years the budgets for which will not actually be set until they arrive -- at which point it's anybody's guess whether the "cuts" will be made. I put "cuts" in quotation marks because of this other key fact: Obama is not here talking about reducing the military budget even in future years, but rather about scaling back the military's dreams for much larger budgets. That is to say, even with these "cuts" (of $78 billion over 5 years, as proposed by Secretary Gates) the Pentagon budget will still be increasing beyond the rate of inflation. The cuts are not being imagined as made to the current budget level. Instead what's being cut are the projected budgets for future years as dreamed up by the military.

Read article here: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23049.