Oh, joy.

In the first week of 2010, there is one thing certain in this new year and first year of the second decade of the 21st century: more war.

Tom Engelhardt and Nick Turse at Tomgram explain: "...let’s pause a moment as the New Year begins and take stock of ourselves as what we truly are:  the preeminent war-making machine on planet Earth.

"...according to military expert William Hartung, the Pentagon budget has risen in every year of the new century, an unprecedented run in our history.  We dominate the global arms trade, monopolizing almost 70% of the arms business in 2008, with Italy coming in a vanishingly distant second.  We put more money into the funding of war, our armed forces, and the weaponry of war than the next 25 countries combined (and that’s without even including Iraq and Afghan war costs).  We garrison the planet in a way no empire or nation in history has ever done.  And we plan for the future, for “the next war” -- on the ground, on the seas, and in space -- in a way that is surely unique.  If our two major wars of the twenty-first century in Iraq and Afghanistan are any measure, we also get less bang for our buck than any nation in recent history.

"Strange, isn’t it, that the debate about hundreds of billions of dollars in health-care costs in Congress can last almost a year, filled with turmoil and daily headlines, while a $636 billion defense budget can pass in a few days, as it did in late December, essentially without discussion and with nary a headline in sight?  And in case you think that $636 billion is an honest figure, think again -- and not just because funding for the U.S. nuclear arsenal and actual “homeland defense,” among other things most countries would chalk up as military costs, wasn’t included.

"If you want to put a finger to the winds of war in 2010, keep your eye on something else not included in that budget: the Obama administration’s upcoming supplemental funding request for the Afghan surge.  In his West Point speech announcing his surge decision, the president spoke of sending 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan in 2010 at a cost of $30 billion.  In news reports, that figure quickly morphed into “$30-$40 billion,” none of it in the just-passed Pentagon budget.  To fund his widening war, sometime in the first months of the New Year, the president will have to submit a supplemental budget to Congress -- something the Bush administration did repeatedly to pay for George W.’s wars, and something this president, while still a candidate, swore he wouldn’t do.  Nonetheless, it will happen. 

"......The question is:  How high will it go or, if the president doesn’t dare ask this Congress for more all at once, how will the extra funds be found?  Keep your eye out, then, for hints of future supplemental budgets, because fighting the Afghan War (forget Iraq) over the next decade could prove a near trillion-dollar prospect. 

"Neither battles won nor al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders killed will be the true measure of victory or defeat in the Afghan War.  For Americans at home, even victory as modestly defined by this administration -- blunting the Taliban’s version of a surge -- could prove disastrous in terms of our financial capabilities.  Guns and butter?  That’s going to be a surefire no-go.  So keep watching and asking:  How busted could the U.S. be by 2011?

"When it comes to war, the only questions are:  How wide?  How much?  Not:  How long?  Washington’s answer to that question has already been given, not in public pronouncements, but in that Pentagon budget and the planning that goes with it:  forever and a day. 

"Of course, only diamonds are forever.  Sooner or later, like great imperial powers of the past, we, too, will find that the stress of fighting a continuous string of wars in distant lands in inhospitable climes tells on us.  Whether we “win” or not in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and now Yemen, we lose.

"....welcome to the grim spectacle of war American-style as the second decade of the twenty-first century begins in turmoil."

Constant, never-ending war in our and our children and grandchildren's future as maintaining and expanding US militarism defeats any domestic priorities like jobs and health care for all.   A sad, tragic future, indeed.