Wednesday, August 22, 2007

The Wisdom of Dwight David Eisenhower

Presumably, the budgetary neglect of both health coverage for poor children and education benefits for veterans of Iraq can be attributed to the mismanagement of funding in Iraq itself, which seems more concerned with maintaining the support of war profiteers than seeing to the need of the troops. In this context it is good to see John Nichols, in his blog for The Nation, reminding us of what former President Eisenhower had to say in 1953, when one of his highest priorities was getting our troops out of the quagmire on the Korean peninsula:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. [...] This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.

Eisenhower was far from the "great communicator" that Ronald Reagan was; but it is valuable to recall that his texts often embodied far more substantive content!

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