Disbelief.

Editor,

Trimming unwanted weapons purchases from the so-called "defense" budget misses the point entirely that pax Americana is a foolish, deadly, and ridiculously expensive exercise in futile and unnecessary killing. Remember that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was an act of aggression by George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others that never could have been undertaken if belligerence and militarism did not permeate so thoroughly the corporatocracy that rules the United States.

Casting this country as victim of economic dumping because China has pegged its currency to the dollar, while never mentioning the dumping of heavily-subsidized American agribusiness grains like rice and corn on developing economies' markets -- driving millions of small farmers into poverty, into the arms of corporate sweatshops in over-crowded cities, and into the United States as undocumented workers to survive -- and selling the impending assault on Marja in Afghanistan as a latter day Iwo Jima, when this town in the middle of nowhere is just another spot on the map of a country that the United States never should have invaded but did because troops, troops, troops has become our answer to everything from addressing Muslim hatred of our government's unquestioning support of Israeli war crimes in Gaza to feeding earthquake survivors in Haiti, is so baldly apologetic for a "defense" policy that is out of control that a reader of your newspaper can only shake his head in disbelief.

re: "The Defense Budget" (2/4/2010)