POLITICS: Analysts See Sustained U.S. Anti-Terrorism Spending Rise

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

NEW YORK, Sep 14 2001 (IPS) - The deadly terrorist attacks on the United States Tuesday is expected to bolster U.S. defence spending over the next few years, say military analysts.

“We have already exceeded the average Cold War spending,” says John Isaacs of the Washington-based Council for a Livable World Education Fund. “And now, there is bound to be further increases – specifically for counter-terrorism.”

According to Pentagon estimates, U.S. spending on counter- terrorism is over 10 billion dollars annually. But this is expected to rise significantly, predicts Isaacs.

On Thursday, the U.S. Congress approved 40 billion dollars in emergency funding for rehabilitation and reconstruction and for counter-terrorism.

John Parachini, Executive Director of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, says the increase could go to airline security, military and human intelligence, and border, immigration and port control.

Parachini says the bulk of the money will go for rebuilding and reconstruction, compensation for families of the victims who died in the terrorist attacks, and also for expanded law enforcement.

Isaacs adds that average annual U.S. military spending during the height of the Cold War in the 1970s was about 340 billion dollars. The proposed spending for fiscal year 2002 is about 343.5 billion dollars.

“The U.S. is spending more on defense than the next 12 countries combined,” he says.

The high spenders include Japan (45.6 billion dollars in 2000), Britain (34.5 billion dollars), Russia (29 billion dollars), Germany (23.3 billion dollars), France (27 billion dollars), and China (14.5 billion dollars), according to the latest figures from the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Howard Zinn, historian and author of “A People’s History of the United States”, says “a 300 billion dollar military budget has not given us security.”

“Military bases all over the world, and our warships on every ocean, have not given us security”, Zinn adds.

“We need to decide that we will not go to war, whatever reason is conjured up by the politicians or the media, because war in our time is always indiscriminate, a war against innocents, a war against children.” Zinn says. “War is terrorism magnified a hundred times.”

Addressing reporters Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said Washington is in the process of building an international coalition to fight terrorism – on the lines of the military coalition it created to fight Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

“This will be a major priority of the administration,” Powell said.

Michael Khatana, a military analyst and author of the forthcoming publication “Global Insurgents/Terrorist Groups: Their Aims and Philosophies”, argues that the battle against terrorism cannot be fought single handed – even if the country is the world’s only superpower.

“The terrorist attacks against the U.S. on Tuesday were a sophisticated, well-coordinated operation. And if the U.S. wants to root out terrorism, it has to cooperate globally with other nations on other global political issues,” he added. “You cannot say: ‘Stop the world, I want to get off’.”

Khatana says that while the United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars on conventional warfare every year, it spends a relative pittance on combating terrorism “and its budget on human intelligence is even lower, much too low to be significant.”

Speaking on network television Wednesday, former Secretary of State James Baker pointed out that U.S. expenditure on human intelligence has been declining since the 1970s.

Although he did not provide figures, Baker said that one of the reasons for U.S. intelligence failure was because “we got out of the dirty, messy business of human intelligence.”

Asked to elaborate, he said Washington had long given up the practice of planting U.S. intelligence agents among various terrorist groups overseas.

He said the United States has remained averse to deploying such agents because they are usually called upon to prove their bona fides by murdering someone.

Baker called on the administration of President George W. Bush to revoke a longstanding Executive Order that forbids U.S. intelligence agents from assassinating world leaders and heads of terrorist organisations.

According to Khatana, U.S. spending on anti-terrorism (including research and development) amounted to about 6.7 billion dollars in 1997 and rose to 10 billion dollars in 2000 and a projected 10.5 billion in 2001, compared with the total military budget of more than 343.5 billion dollars.

This is “peanuts,” he says, considering what Washington is planning to spend on its proposed national missile defense system.

Addressing the National Press Club in Washington DC Monday, Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the cheapest anti-missile defense system could cost about 60 billion dollars over 20 years but the figure could eventually rise to as much as 120 billion dollars.

He said he had opposed the unilateral U.S. withdrawal from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which forbids building such a missile shield.

“Are we willing to end four decades of arms control agreements, and go it alone, a kind of bully nation, sometimes a little wrong- headed, but ready to make unilateral decisions in what we perceive to be our self interest?” he asked.