While Washington is fixated on President Trump’s tweets, antics, lies and Russiagate, the administration is ramping up a stealth escalation of our military involvement across the Middle East. As Naomi Klein warns, Trump’s “rolling shock of the chaos and spectacle” distracts from radical actions both at home and abroad. Across the Middle East, the administration drives the United States ever further into wars without end, increasing the dangers of direct military confrontation with Russia and Iran, with little awareness and no mandate from the American people. This is a recipe for calamity.
The deepening military involvement has accelerated in recent weeks. The administration will dispatch 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan, plus 400 to Syria. The president fired 23 cruise missiles at a Syrian air base in retaliation for alleged Syrian use of chemical weapons against civilians. In recent weeks, U.S. forces have bombed Iranian-supported militia forces moving forward in southern Syria and shot down a Syrian jet flying over Syrian airspace. Russia has cut off coordination designed to avoid air collisions and announced that U.S. planes flying west of the Euphrates would be targeted. As the battle against the Islamic State reaches its final stage, the Pentagon seems intent on sustaining a presence in Syria, aimed at preventing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from regaining control of the country.
[source : Katrina vanden Heuvel, Trump’s Chaos is Covering for Stealth Escalation Overseas, Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/06/27/trumps-chaos-covering-stealth-escalation-overseas, 27th June 2017]
And to add to this, the Pentagon could get $700 billion a year! I suggested that by the end of Trump's first term the US military budget would be approaching $1 trillion.
The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously passed its $700 billion version of the annual defense policy bill, the committee announced Wednesday.
The bill, broken down into $640 billion for the base defense budget and $60 billion for a war fund, follows the funding levels Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) has pushed for months and flies past the administration’s budget request.
War fund?
WAR FUND?!
What war(s)?
Senate committee unanimously passes $700 billion defense funding bill https://t.co/l7u1p9BX8F pic.twitter.com/hyYTCKe4Ci
— The Hill (@thehill) 28 June 2017
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