Dick Cheney Broke US Military, now blames Obama for Cuts

http://www.juancole.com/2014/02/cheney-military-blames.html

Dick Cheney Broke US Military, now blames Obama for Cuts
By Juan Cole | Feb. 27, 2014

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has lambasted the Obama administration for its announcement that it will cut 8% out of the military budget and reduce standing army troop levels to the lowest level since before World War II (from 550,000 at the height of the Iraq War to 440,000). Cheney told CNN he believed that Obama would rather spend the money on food stamps than on the military.

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According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, Cheney is the one who insisted on two big tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans in the first years of the Bush administration, which has been a structural contributor to persistent budget deficits. America has become an extremely unequal society, with the top 1% taking home 20% of the national income every month, and obviously if they pay dramatically less in Federal taxes, it causes a shortfall that cannot be made up from the 99%. Those deficits provoked the ‘sequester,’ automatic across the board cuts in the government budget, which are among the impetuses for Hagel’s budget.

Cheney also pushed hard for the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq, which has already cost $1 trillion, all of which he borrowed and so contributed to the budget crisis and to the difficulties the country had getting out of the 2008 Great Bush Depression. The care for the tens of thousands of wounded veterans will over the decades likely cost the government another two or three trillion.

Given that Cheney helped prosecute a naked act of aggression on false pretenses, he is a war criminal and ideally should be prosecuted and jailed rather than being given a megaphone in corporate media to continue to push for militarism.