Barney Frank's final comments on DOD spending bill

the retiring congressman spoke without notes.  "America is not the indispensable nation."

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself my remaining time.

Mr. Speaker, I have some differences with particular provisions here, I would agree with the gentleman from New York, but that’s not my major reason. That’s not my reason at all for commandeering the time of this de- bate, and I apologize to those on the committee who worked so hard and who had an expectation to be able to talk about this specifically. I tried to accommodate that some, but here is my dilemma: it’s partly the structure of this institution and of our rules and of our task.

The committee does a very good job of operating within the given parameters of America’s military engagement. They discharge very well their obligation to fund that level. What we

don’t have in our structure is a form in which to debate the most important question we face as a country: What level of worldwide military engagement should we be committed to pursuing? Because that level of military engagement dictates the funding.

Members have said this is a good bill because it supports the men and women who we send into battle and into harm’s way. Of course it does. It would be immoral to do anything less for them. The question is not whether having made a decision to be engaged on a worldwide basis we fund them adequately, but whether we are asking them to do too much. I would say my general principle in part is this.

We have a superior military, wonderful men and women, very well-equipped thanks to this House and this Senate and the administration. They do very well what a military can do. A military can stop bad things from happening.

Where we make the mistake is of asking these wonderful people to do something that militaries are not good at: make good things happen, take on roles in societies, quite literally and metaphorically, foreign to us and deal with the deepest human problems of religious and cultural disagreements.

I would be morally conflicted if I thought those kinds of interventions could be successful. I would like to alleviate the people in Afghanistan who suffer from some of these problems or in Iraq or elsewhere, but the point is we can’t do that. The best trained and armed 30-year-old Americans can’t re- solve the problems that rack those societies. They can repel enemies, but they cannot create good societies.

Beyond that, we are suffering, I be- lieve, from cultural lag. Sixty-seven years ago, at the end of World War II, America needed to be there for vir- tually every society in the world out- side of the vicious Communism presided over by Joseph Stalin. The na- tions of Western and Central Europe had been weakened by World War II. They were vulnerable to Stalin.

Russia had been weakened, too, but he was able to use the brutal force of his system to put whatever resources he had into a military that not only threatened, but ate up freedom in many European countries. And Harry Truman, to his credit, with the bipar- tisan support from Congress said, No, no further, and inserted American troops and American money to keep the weak nations of Western and Cen- tral Europe from being overrun by Sta- lin.

Stalin, thank God, is dead, and the terrible system over which he presided has crumbled. That does not mean that I believe Russia is a wonderful place to live. I continue to be grateful to my grandparents for getting the heck out of there, but it’s not a threat to the United States’ competence.

On the other hand, the European na- tions that we went in there to protect are now strong and prosperous. We no longer have weak nations in Central and Western Europe, and there is no longer a belligerent threat to them. One thing that hasn’t changed is we’re still there, with tens of billions of dollars of American money protecting the strong nations against a nonexisting threat.

Japan was disarmed 67 years ago be- cause of understandable fears. Japan, today, is a very different country, and an American policy that insists on sub- sidizing the defense of Japan because of what happened 67 years ago is a dis- service to the American people.

I want us to be the strongest nation in the world, Mr. Speaker. Some of my liberal friends say that sounds xenophobic. It’s very simple. Some- body’s going to be the strongest nation in the world by the process of elimi- nation. I look at the candidates, and I’m for us.

I will be honest with you, if Denmark had the possibility of being the strongest nation in the world, I would be pretty relaxed about it, but they can’t handle it. It’s either going to be us or some country I’m not that crazy about. But we can be the strongest nation in the world much less expensively than we are.

Let me read from some who are critical because this President hasn’t gone far enough. And a couple of my col- leagues have praised the bill for put- ting more weapons into play than the Pentagon wants for objecting to their retirement of these weapons; in other words, it’s more money than the Pen- tagon wanted in some cases. Here’s the viewpoint that I think is being ex- pressed here.

In an article in The Wall Street Journal on November 7, the day after the election—hope springs eternal for some people—Mr. Jack David and Michael Dunn wrote an op-ed piece. Mr. David was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Bush administration; Mr. Dunn had the former presidency over the Air Force Association. Here’s what they say in support of more air- craft, part of which the committee ap- peared to be responding to. It wasn’t directly, but it was in consonance with it. They complain that the Air Force has been a victim of its success. They say:

Ironically, the inattention and repeated cuts that have taken a toll on this branch of the military haven’t received the public attention they deserve because the Air Force has been so successful. No U.S. soldier has been killed by enemy airpower since 1953. For six decades, the Air Force has been able to deny operational airspace to adversaries, so U.S. ground forces have operated with little fear of enemy aircraft attacking their positions.

This is in The Wall Street Journal, written by a former Bush Assistant Secretary of Defense and the head of the Air Force Association.

But they say it’s not enough to have had no American killed since 1953—for which I’m very pleased—and have to-tally dominated every battlefield for six decades. Here’s what we have to do, they say:

But the U.S. relies on the Air Force to do much more than that—including to hold at risk any actual or potential enemy target, anywhere in the world.

At a time when I’m being asked—I’m not going to do it—to cut back on the cost of living for Social Security, when we don’t have adequate funds for health research, when we have had cit- ies lay off police and fire—you’re wor- ried about the safety of Americans? Let’s give the cities the resources not to lay off police and fire—I don’t want to vote money to hold at risk any actual or potential enemy target any- where in the world.

By the way, we have to do this ourselves, because the next thing we have to do is ‘‘protect the ground forces of friends and allies.’’ Why can’t some of our allies protect their own ground forces? Is there something about Germany and Italy and France and Spain and England and Japan that renders them genetically incapable of having their own air forces? I know we were told we have to stay in Iraq and Af- ghanistan because they don’t have their own air force, but neither do the people attacking them.

The next thing we are told is ‘‘to protect the U.S. from a nuclear attack.’’ I agree. We have a nuclear capacity that far exceeds any potential combination of enemies. We had, during the height of the Cold War, the triad. We could de- stroy the Soviet Union in a thermo- nuclear war, and they had the capacity to go after us by missiles, submarines, or strategic air command.

I have a proposal that sounds like I’m kidding. Sometimes I’m kidding; this time I’m not. Can we not go to the Pentagon and say, You know what? Now that there is no Soviet Union, there is a much weaker Russia—and I agree, Russia won a war against Georgia. They won a war against the coun- try of Georgia. I think the way that we have armed the State of Georgia, I’m not sure what the outcome would be if that was the war. But Russia does not have anything like the capacity it had at the height of the Cold War. We still have the capacity to destroy them. Can we not say to the Pentagon, You know those three ways you have for destroying the Soviet Union? Please pick two. Would we not be very secure against a Soviet nuclear attack if we had two in- stead of the three and can save billions of dollars?

Now we’re told, also, we must ‘‘provide navigation through its global positioning systems.’’ We have to protect, I’m told, the trade routes everywhere in the world, we have to protect them against China.

Mitt Romney got something right in his debate with the President when he said he’s not afraid of toughening sanctions against China for currency manipulation because, he says, people say they’re going to cut off their trade.

They make an enormous amount of money out of that trade. Why would they cut it off? Agreed. Why would the Chinese shut down the navigation

route over which they make an enormous amount of money? It’s like Dominos decided to tear up the street so they couldn’t deliver the pizza. We are spending money on the Navy that protects every shipping lane every- where in the world as if we were the only ones who had that interest.

Now let me give this one—surprising from conservatives—which is to airlift humanitarian aid anywhere in the world. I wish we were doing more in Haiti, and I wish we were doing more to stop children from dying of illness in Africa—but we have to give humanitarian aid anywhere in the world to our wealthy allies and others? Frankly, I wish we were better able to deliver humanitarian aid to New Jersey than to rich countries elsewhere. I don’t say that as an isolationist. I wish we were doing more in some ways. I regret the attack on the International Monetary Fund—that I hear from my Republican colleagues—which would destabilize Europe. I would like to increase economic aid. I would like to do more to fight AIDS and malaria. I would like to do it in a more effective way.

Now, I’m told, in part, well, it’s bad for jobs if you cut the military. That is a head-swiveling degree of inconsistency. I am told by many of my Republican colleagues, when the Federal Government provides aid to cities to keep firefighters on the job, when it builds roads, when it builds housing for the elderly, that somehow that’s just something called ‘‘stimulus,’’ which doesn’t add to the economy; but apparently, when we spend money to main- tain bases in Germany or in Okinawa, when we build weapons that aren’t needed, and even more when we maintain a nuclear arsenal we don’t need, that somehow, magically, that creates jobs. It’s as if Keynes were only right if he were armed. It’s military Keynesianism.

The government does not help with the economy. Of the people who have said no government stimulation of the economy, how can they, Mr. Speaker, then turn around and say, We’ve got to do this for jobs? By the way, I think there is a government role in stimulating the economy. Defense tends to be, on the whole, the least efficient way to do it. The largest percentage of it is spent overseas. If we close down bases in NATO, it’s going to hurt some people—but not here—and people who can afford it. Now I’m told, Well, that’s mean because you’re allies, and you’re supposed to have troops where your al- lies are. Then how come I never saw any Belgian troops at the border in the United States? It’s a one-way street.

Now, let me say of the President— and he has done a very good job, and I appreciate his withdrawal from Iraq and his resisting of some of the pres- sure, but he should go further. I did note—and the country is ready for this—that during that memorable moment when Clint Eastwood lost the de- bate to a chair he said that got enormous applause at the Republican convention was, Let’s get out of Afghanistan right away. The American people understand we have long since stopped doing a lot of good there. That’s not because there is any lack of bravery or skill on the part of those wonderful young people who are there. It’s not their fault that we have put them in a place they no longer ought still to be. We ought to withdraw them.

I have one difference with the President, let me say in closing. On this, he says—however he’s the President, and when you’re the President, they all tell you these things—that America is the indispensable Nation. We were in 1945. We should not consider ourselves to be the indispensable Nation today. We are not indispensable to the defense of Ger- many and Italy and England, and we act as if we are. We’re not indispensable in keeping open sea lanes for other countries. Frankly, Mr. Speaker, the time has come for us to urge wealthy nations that face no significant threat to dispense with us from the standpoint of our military activity.

So that’s my objection to this bill. It does a reasonable job—with some dis- agreements some of us would have—of funding the current level of commitment, but the current level of commit- ment far exceeds any rational definition of ‘‘national security.’’ It’s zero sum. It comes at the expense of every other program we try to maintain to promote the quality of life in the United States. I hope the bill is defeated.