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US waging wars to push economy: Prof. Cook

Thursday, 26 February 2015 7:20 PM [ Last Update: Thursday, 26 February 2015 7:22 PM ]

The United States is waging overseas wars in order to reflate its economy, Professor William A. Cook says.

The United Sates is engaged in overseas military ventures in order to reflate its economy, an American academic and political commentator says.

“The United States should not be waging more wars. It has not the capacity economically to support” these wars, said William A. Cook, a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California and author of several books.

According to a new report by the Heritage Foundation, the United States military is slipping in its capabilities and does not currently have the resources to fight two major wars simultaneously as demanded by the Obama administration’s latest national security strategy.

Professor Cook told Press TV on Thursday that the United States is in trillions of dollars of debt because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“And it has been going further and further into that debt during the Obama administration, despite assured by [Obama] that we would be exiting Iraq and exiting Afghanistan,” he said.

“The consequences of that to my perspective is that the United States is acting in this fashion in order to sustain the military operations that have been the only fuel to push its economy in these past ten years,” he noted.

President Barack Obama’s budget proposal for 2016, released on February 2, showed that the president asked Congress to raise federal caps on military spending by $35 billion, allowing a base Pentagon budget of $534 billion for 2016, the largest in American history.

The blueprint also calls for nearly $51 billion in funding for the war in Afghanistan as well as the military campaign against the ISIL terrorist group in Iraq and Syria.

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