Where Progressive Democrats And Libertarians Can Agree

Congressmen Barney Frank and Ron Paul are working together to bring Americans troops home from around the world. As Frank said on CNN (below), “We are committed to defending America’s strategic interests…but we have a military establishment that gets into a worldwide situation far beyond our legitimate military needs.” Paul points out that one of the reasons there is an insurgency in Afghanistan is because we’re there in the first place.

We believe that the time has come for a much quicker withdrawal from Iraq than the President has proposed. We both voted against that war, but even for those who voted for it, there can be no justification for spending over $700 billion dollars of American taxpayers’ money on direct military spending in Iraq since the war began, not including the massive, estimated long-term costs of the war. We have essentially taken on a referee role in a civil war, even mediating electoral disputes.

In order to create a systematic approach to reducing military spending, we have convened a Sustainable Defense Task Force consisting of experts on military expenditures that span the ideological spectrum. The task force has produced a detailed report with specific recommendations for cutting Pentagon spending by approximately $1 trillion over a ten year period. It calls for eliminating certain Cold War weapons and scaling back our commitments overseas. Even with these changes, the United States would still be immeasurably stronger than any nation with which we might be engaged, and the plan will in fact enhance our security rather than diminish it.

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.