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[Don Bowen <don.bowen AT earthlink.net>]

http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2005/01/what_could_go_wrong.html

This line has real relevance:

In addition, a national economy that cannot itself produce the things it 
needs and invests instead in military "security" will eventually find 
itself in a position in which it has to use its military constantly to 
take, or threaten to take, from others what it cannot provide for itself, 
which in turn leads to what Yale historian Paul Kennedy has described as 
"imperial overstretch":

"[T]hat is to say, decision-makers in Washington must face the awkward and 
enduring fact that the sum total of the United States' global interests and 
obligations is nowadays far larger than the country's power to defend them 
all simultaneously."

That descent into imperial overstretch explains how in the early 1940s an 
America much weaker in absolute terms, fighting more evenly matched 
opponents, could nonetheless prevail against its enemies more quickly than 
a state with an $11-trillion Gross Domestic Product and a defense budget 
approaching $500 billion (without even adding in the $80 billion budgetary 
supplement for Iraq and Afghanistan that the Bush Administration is 
reputedly preparing for the current fiscal year) fighting perhaps 
10,000-20,000 ill-armed insurgents in a state with a pre-war GDP that 
represents less than the turnover of a large corporation. The U.S. today is 
a nation with a hollowed-out industrial base and an increasing incapacity 
to finance a military adventurism propelled by the very forces responsible 
for that hollowing out.



Don Bowen
Awl Knotted Up Woodworking
Valley Center, CA             http://www.braingarage.com