Chuck Hagel, Ploughshares, and the Deliberate Gutting of the US Military

Considering the increasing instability of the international situation and the growing threat communist China and other rivals pose to America, patriots are gasping in shock at this:

The Pentagon plans to scale back the US Army by more than an eighth to its lowest level since before World War II…

Saying it was time to “reset” for a new era, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel recommended shrinking American forces from 520,000 active duty troops to between 440,000 and 450,000.

But no one should be surprised that the laughably unqualified Chuck Hagel is on board with Obama’s evisceration of the military — especially considering his close ties to a radical peacenik outfit calling itself the Ploughshares Fund:

From its inception, the Ploughshares Fund’s purpose was to support the nuclear-freeze movement, a Soviet-sponsored initiative that sought to further solidify the nuclear and military superiority which the USSR had gained during the post-Vietnam War era. …

Also during the Cold War, Ploughshares claimed that U.S. militarism—particularly that of the Reagan administration—was far likelier to spark a nuclear holocaust than anything the Soviet Union might do. Identifying U.S. belligerence and aggression as the chief source of tensions between America and the USSR, Ploughshares pressured the United States but not the Soviets to initiate disarmament measures. To advance this agenda, Ploughshares pooled donations from a number of wealthy contributors and charitable foundations (including the Rockefeller and Stern Foundations) to bankroll and almost singlehandedly create a left-wing “peace” movement that denounced American defense policies and featured the progressive icon Edward Kennedy as one of its spokesmen. …

It also opposes America’s development of a missile defense system.

Ploughshares has doled out hundreds of grants totaling tens of $millions to a laundry list of organizations, many of them conspicuously left wing (e.g., the Center for American Progress, Greenpeace USA, National Public Radio, Netroots Nation, the Nonviolent Peaceforce, the Sierra Club, the Tides Foundation, etc.). The nefarious connections don’t end there:

Ploughshares identifies itself as a partner of such groups as Code Pink, Demos, the Institute for Policy Studies, the National Priorities Project, United for Peace & Justice, and the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

That is to say, they are way, way out there. Americans are not the good guys from this political perspective.

According to its boastful talk, Ploughshares has already managed to render US allies more vulnerable to attack:

When the Obama Administration in September 2009 canceled U.S. plans for the deployment of a missile defense shield in Central Europe—a decision that pleased Moscow but angered America’s allies in Eastern Europe—Ploughshares boasted that its influence had “informed the decision” by the Administration.

It isn’t only Russia that Ploughshares sides with against the hated USA and its allies:

Of a piece with Ploughshares’ Iran policy is the organization’s support for the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), the Iranian regime’s principal lobbyist in the United States. …

In November 2011, Ploughshares gave NIAC $125,000 “to shape the debate among policymakers and in the media on credible, non-military approaches to resolving the impasse over Iran’s nuclear program.”

That is, to make sure no one forcibly disrupts Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Surprise surprise. Among the sources of the money Ploughshares distributes to malign causes is George Soros’s Open Society Institute.

Ploughshares must be loving Obama’s defunding of the military to free up more money to pay people to vote for a living.

The executive director of the Ploughshares Fund is Naila Bolus, who also serves as co-chair of the Peace and Security Funders Group. Bolus is a former co-director of the environmentalist and anti-war group 20/20 Vision, and she co-founded the Women Legislators’ Lobby, whose goal is to “persuade Congress to redirect excessive military spending toward unmet human and environmental needs.”

In 2009, with American troops under fire in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hagel joined the Ploughshares Board of Directors.

Yet Obama chose this pacifist kook to be Secretary of Defense. This is like choosing Ted Kaczynski to be Secretary of Technology.

As Thomas Jefferson said, those who hammer their guns into plowshares will plow for those who do not. But of course we deserve this role for being racist homophobic capitalists, according to the ideology of the ruling elite.

Hat tip: The Anti Liberal Zone. Tips from Jester and Ben S.