to maintain an empire requires a very large standing army, huge expenditures on arms that leads to a military-industrial complex, and generally speaking, a vicious cycle sets up of interests that lead to perpetual series of wars.
It goes back to probably the earliest warning ever delivered to us by our first president, George Washington, in his famous farewell address. It's read at the opening of every new session of Congress. Washington said that the great enemy of the republic is standing armies; it is a particular enemy of republican liberty. What he meant by it is that it breaks down the separation of powers into an executive, legislative, and judicial branches that are intended to check each other -- this is our most fundamental bulwark against dictatorship and tyranny -- it causes it to break down, because standing armies, militarism, military establishment, military-industrial complex all draw power away from the rest of the country to Washington, including taxes, that within Washington they draw it to the presidency, and they begin to create an imperial presidency, who then implements the military's desire for secrecy, making oversight of the government almost impossible for a member of Congress, even, much less for a citizen. It seems to me that this is also the same warning that Dwight Eisenhower gave in his famous farewell address of 1961, in which he, in quite vituperative language, quite undiplomatic language -- one ought to go back and read Eisenhower. He was truly alarmed when he spoke of the rise of a large arms industry that was beyond supervision, that was not under effective control of the interests of the military-industrial complex, a phrase that he coined. We know from his writings that he intended to say a military-industrial-congressional complex. He was warned off from going that far. But it's in that sense that I believe the nexus -- or, that is, the incompatibility between domestic democracy and foreign imperialism comes into being.

a fair point texdem, one i've been pondering myself, since the prospect of defunding first came up: how to keep them from draining resources from elsewhere?

you can't, really, absent a law specifically targeting this approach. even at that, with the complexity of today's systems, it would be nearly impossible to actually keep it from happening.

the one way to do it would be for it to come to light in the media, from those working in the affected agencies. good internal controls would also be helpful.

aside from that, you'd have to depend on the personal integrity of the parties in question.

This could end tomorrow if they wanted it to. It could have ended last week.

If you are not for this approach for ending the war, tell me what you do support.

You write as if the only correct thing to do is end the war. Cut (Our lossess) and Run(Leave the battlefield to our enemies. Also called Surrender.)

First, we haven't lost except in the mind of the anti-war Left and what I now, based on their actions, call the Despicable Demos Leadership (DDL.

What have we accomplished?

1. Whether or not Saddam had WMD's, we know they aren't there now. Unsettled is the question did he destroy them before it became apparent we were coming in, destroy them in 1998 during the bombing by the Clinton Administration, sometimes between then and later,or did he manage to hide/get them to Syria when he realized that we were coming in.

My guess is that it was a combination of all three.

2. We also know that, based on David Kay's reports and comments that Saddam wanted to get back into the WMD business, and he had purchased rockets with a 1000KM range, and was trying to go further.

That has stopped.

3. We also know, based on Fitzgerald's testimony to the 9/11 Commission that Iraq and al-Qaida had agree to cooperate on a "an enemy of my enemy is my friend" basis.

That has stopped, although al-Qaida is busy now trying to kill Iraqis, both to terrify the Iraqis and the anti-war Left and DDL.

4. We have also demonstrated to the world that if you pis* us off enough, we will come get you. That
demostration may be loosing creditability with the
continual crying of the anti-war Left and the DDL.

5. We have also demonstrated that our intentions are to create a democratic government, and help that government become stable.

I submit that, with the exception of the Left's and DDL's actions, these are all very good things.

So you think that our war-mongering foreign policy or bogus war on drugs or the paralell over-medication of America or the popular culture being in the toilet has nothing to do with big business or big profits?

Not to mention the export of millions of jobs to overseas sweatshops or the 12 million+ cheap labor "undocumented aliens?"