Following up on the angst of Anne Applebaum, the Washington Post devotes ample front page ink to the devastating news that Great Britain’s defense budget has shrunk from $57.7 billion to $57.7 billion from 2004 to 3013, or from 2.4 to 2.3 percent of total gross national product. To the surprise of absolutely no one who follows these things, the Post has assembled an array of experts who sound very, very worried about it all, despite the fact that the danger that anyone would attack Great Britain is, well, absolutely nil.
The Post is particularly worried by the fact that “Despite a too-close-to-call election in less than two months, neither major party has stepped up to shield the military from further cuts, reflecting a public weary of foreign interventions after campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya that are widely seen as failures”—“widely seen as failures” being WP journalese for “total fucking failures”. Perhaps the British public is, you know, smarter than the Washington Post, which enthusiastically backed all three wars and clearly lacks the courage to admit its egregious—its most egregious—errors? Could be! Could be!
Afterwords
The initial invasion of Afghanistan was entirely necessary and would have been entirely successful if the U.S. had continued it aggressively to achieve the elimination of Osama Bin Laden and then withdrew. But that would have ended the “War on Terror”, which, for the purposes of the Bush Administration, had barely begun.
