How much are we spending for defense these days? Apparently, as much as the Bush Administration wants. According to — you guessed it — Fred Kaplan, military budgets are an outmoded concept. We sort of limit the spending in the formal budget and then spend any additional amount requested as a "supplemental" with little or no oversight.
And while I'm hectoring you into reading Fred Kaplan, I might as well go the distance: Mr. Kaplan has gifted me with an autographed copy of his new book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, and I'm about halfway through it. It's a stunning, chilling account of mistakes that G.W.B. and his minions have made with regard to defense and foreign relations, not just in Iraq but around the globe. In case after case, someone — often Rumsfeld but there were others — had some new theory about what America should do, how we should position ourselves vis-a-vis some other nation…and it not only didn't work but actually achieved the opposite of the intended goal. The book is not angry and not intended to rouse rabble. It just lays out a pretty sorry history that will scare the bejeesus out of anyone looking for the government to make a safer world for us to all live in.