Over at PPS Equity, in an excellent discussion about eradicating poverty as a primary tool for real school reform, teacher-in-training Ken suggests
Ken correctly identifies the tension between the Pentagon and public education over the allocation of public resources. The defense budget for fiscal year 2008, with supplemental spending for Iraq and Afghanistan plus additional funding necessary to sustain the global war on terrorism, totals $716.5 billion. Add in the budget for Veterans Affairs, and the total expenditures for the military alone consume nearly a quarter of the budget.
Federal spending on education amounts to a mere 2% of the total budget.
How is the money for "defense" being spent? Well, for starters, the Pentagon has built and maintains 761 military bases in at least 39 countries around the world --more actually. As Chalmers Johnson writes,
"The official figures omit espionage bases, those located in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and miscellaneous facilities in places considered too sensitive to discuss or which the Pentagon for its own reasons chooses to exclude—e.g. in Israel, Kosovo, or Jordan."
The precise extent of the worldwide American military presence, then, is not public knowledge. Suffice it to say that our military footprint is larger than the government is willing to admit. Johnson calls the 761 acknowledged sites "a remarkable example of imperial overstretch."
You read that right --"imperial", as in empire.
"To garrison its empire, [Johnson says] as of last December, the United States had 510,927 service personnel (including sailors afloat) deployed in 151 foreign countries. This includes some 196,600 fighting in Iraq and 25,700 in Afghanistan."
It costs a lot of money to maintain such a worldwide military presence, money that some argue could be more effectively spent to combat terror in other ways.
David Oliver Relin, writing in today's Oregonian, suggests a better use for taxpayer money:
"The cheapest and most effective way to fight extremism is not by military means alone, but by improving people's lives, by building schools, roads, medical facilities, clean water supplies and seeding the ground with economic opportunity."
Relin is the Portland author of Three Cups of Tea, the remarkable chronicle of an American ex-mountain climber, who does just that --builds schools for poor Pakistani children, both boys and girls, in the remote Karakoram region near the disputed border (Kashmir) with India. It costs Greg Mortenson roughly $12,000, with volunteer help of Pakistani villagers, to build a four room school house with desks, books and school uniforms.
I predict that one day Greg Mortenson, the ex-climber, will win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to "improve the lives" of impoverished Muslims who might otherwise succumb to the siren call of Islamic extremism.
I also recommend --urge, in fact-- Barack Obama read Three Cups of Tea in the weeks before his inauguration.
*(One hundred thousand additional troops, according to Ken's figures, would actually cost $20 billion, not $200 million.)
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