By Robert Dreyfuss

Add it all up, and the US will spend nearly $1 trillion on defense, intelligence gathering and homeland security this year, even though it faces no credible state enemy. The amazing thing is that nobody dares question this extravagance, not even the leading Democratic presidential candidates.

War critics are rightly disappointed over the inability of Democrats in the US Congress to mount an effective challenge to President George W Bush’s Iraq adventure. What began as a frontal assault on the war, with tough talk about deadlines and timetables, has settled into something like a guerrilla’style campaign to chip away at war policy until the edifice crumbles.

Still, Democratic criticism of Bush administration policy in Iraq looks muscle-bound when compared with the party’s readiness to go along with the president’s massive military buildup, domestically and globally. Nothing underlines the tacit alliance between so-called foreign-policy realists and hardline exponents of neo-conservative’style empire-building more than the Washington consensus that the United States needs to expand the defense budget without end, while increasing the size of the armed forces.

In addition, spending on the 16 agencies and other organizations that make up the official US “intelligence community” - including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) -and on homeland security is going through the roof.

The numbers are astonishing and, except for a hardy band of progressives in the House of Representatives, Democrats willing to call for shrinking the bloated Pentagon or intelligence budgets are in essence non-existent. Among presidential candidates, only Congressman Dennis Kucinich and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson even mention the possibility of cutting the defense budget.

Indeed, presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are, at present, competing with each other in their calls for expanding the US Armed Forces. Both are supporting manpower increases in the range of 80,000-100,000 troops, mostly for the US Army and US Marine Corps. (The current, Bush-backed authorization for fiscal year 2008 calls for the addition of 65,000 more army recruits and 27,000 marines by 2012.)

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