Month: January 2012

At Reason‘s Hit & Run, Jacob Sullum highlights the utterly disingenuous politicking on the part of nearly everyone in Washington with regard to cutting defense budgets. The Obama administration and most of both parties in Congress have been lying through their teeth for years now about the doom our national security would face if we decrease the rate of growth in projected defense spending.

This week Defense Secretary Leon Panetta is expected to unveil detailed plans for about $260 billion of the $450 billion in savings that President Obama has asked him to find in the Penatgon’s budget over the course of the next decade. Because those savings represent reductions in projected spending, as opposed to actual cuts, the defense budget would continue rising, but not as fast as it would under current law. Assuming all the “cuts” are enacted, total military spending will be about 8 percent less than currently projected. If you add the $500 billion in “automatic” defense cuts imposed by the legislation that resolved last summer’s debt-limit dispute, the total reduction from projected spending is about 17 percent, bringing the Pentagon’s base budget all the way down to a level last seen in 2007, when the country was not exactly helpless against its adversaries. Yet Panetta says that result would be “catastrophic,” and every Republican presidential candidate, with the notable exception of Ron Paul, agrees, promising to prevent or reverse the cuts. Mitt Romney, who deems even the 8 percent reduction “irresponsible,” says the additional cuts would “put our national security on the chopping block.” At the October 11 debate, Newt Gingrich declared, “It is nonsense to say we’re going to disarm the United States unilaterally because we’re too stupid to balance the budget any other way.”

Disarming the United States? If only.

I wasn’t being hyperbolic about the prophesies of doom if minuscule cuts are imposed. Panetta, by far the loudest money-grabbing warmonger of all, described the sequestration cuts that were supposed to automatically kick in if the Super Committee failed to reach a deal as a “doomsday mechanism.”

The minuscule defense cuts being contemplated could easily target areas of waste. As a recent report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments found, while the source of growth in annual defense budgets since 2001 has been mostly (54%) due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, much of the rest has been spent on wasteful superfluous weapons technology, bloated salaries and benefits plans, and expensive peacetime operating costs for the 900-plus military bases in 130-plus countries around the world. Still, ending the unnecessary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq alone would free up billions of dollars. Or, to take something most don’t typically consider in budget talks, McClatchy reported today that the solitary confinement cellblock that Guantanamo detainees inhabit if they are “non-compliant” in the tyranny that keeps them there without trial cost $700,000. It makes you wonder how much the rest of the CIA’s blacksites that nobody hears about is costing us.

The United States could cut defense spending by half and still outspend every other country in the world. Panetta voiced concern that any decrease in spending would make it harder to face threats from Iran and North Korea, two countries with comparatively pathetic defense budgets and which present no credible threat. The cost of waging a covert U.S. campaign of cyber-terrorism, commercial sabotage, targeted assassinations, and proxy wars in Iran is probably costing a pretty penny. And all it’s doing is increasing the threat environment for Iran, which will do anything but make them give up their nuclear program (which all available evidence suggests is still entirely civilian in nature).

Probably referring to China, Panetta has also mentioned the responsibility “to project our power in the world in order to make sure rising powers understand that the United States still has a strong defense.” This adheres closely to imperial grand strategy, which insists on a foreign policy actively militarist enough so as to prevent military competitors and keep all the world’s nation’s dependent on the U.S. as military superpower. Clearly, this has nothing to do with defending the country and wasting hundreds of billions of dollars on it every year is what is putting the country at risk. Not, as Washington would have you believe, making trivial cuts in the rate at which the war machine expands.

I wrote last week about the Obama administration’s $11 billion deal to send Iraq military arms and equipment, despite the descent into tyranny of the Maliki government. That same day, it was announced that the Obama administration was also sending $30 billion worth of weapons – including 84 F-15 fighter jets – to Saudi Arabia, easily one of the worst authoritarian regimes in the world. Loren Thompson, writing at Forbes.com, has caught on to this (excuse his tardiness) and has a few things to say that are revealing both because of his insight and his exemplary Beltway attitude which omits the ugly parts of Washington’s dangerous foreign policies.

Thompson rightly points out, as I have before a few times, that Obama’s excessive arms sales to allies in the Middle East and East Asia, aside from serving as aggressive military postures to threaten Iran and China, serve a domestic purpose as well:

It doesn’t hurt that such sales create tens of thousands of jobs in the U.S.  Boeing assembles the F-15 fighters at the center of the deal in Missouri, and General Electric will build the engines in Ohio.  Both are swing states whose electoral-college votes could determine the outcome of the 2012 presidential race.  Many additional jobs will be created at the sprawling Raytheon missile complex in Arizona, a state already poised to benefit from an earlier Saudi buy of 36 Boeing Apache tank-killer helicopters.  Raytheon’s radar facility in Massachusetts should also be a big beneficiary.

What the president and his advisors have figured out is that, unlike sending troops to fight overseas, there is almost no downside to sending weapons.  They allow partners such as Saudi Arabia to meet more of their own security needs indigenously rather than relying on an overstretched U.S. military, and they stimulate economic activity in America’s industrial heartland at a time when well-paying, unionized manufacturing jobs are hard to come by.

Leaving aside the bad economics of these kinds of policies, boosting domestic economic numbers and keeping the military industrial complex fat and happy are surely factors in Obama’s peppering of deadly weapons around the world. It is notable that this President, whom crunchy “liberals” continue to defend, is making such shrewd political calculations at the expense of the well-being of millions of innocent people whose tyrannical governments are now armed to the teeth thanks to U.S. policy.

And what is this talk about “almost no downside to sending weapons”? I’ve already talked about how the leadership in Iraq is systematically ruining the freedom and safety of its own people, and Saudi Arabia is in the same camp, sporting a long record of repressive policies, human rights violations, and violent crushing of dissent. And the arms trade certainly doesn’t end there. Thompson seems to think this is just great, a brilliant confluence of savvy foreign and domestic policy.

Thompson then tries to describe these policies as novel, “a striking departure,” in fact, “from the ideological preferences of the post-Vietnam Democratic Party.” Please. You really don’t have to do much digging to figure out that’s not true: Presidential administrations, both Democrat and Republican, have heavily relied on arming regimes in developing countries and client states for decades, at approximately the same standard. Under Bill Clinton, according to this CRS report on conventional arms transfers published in 2000, “Developing nations continue[d] to be the primary focus of foreign arms sales activity by weapons suppliers,” and “the value of all arms transfer agreements with developing nations in 1999 was nearly $20.6 billion” which “was the highest total, in real terms, since 1996.”

During the 1996-1999 period, the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) ranked first among developing nations in the value of arms transfer agreements, concluding $7.7 billion in such agreements. India ranked second at $7.3 billion. Saudi Arabia ranked third with $7.1 billion. In 1999, South Africa ranked first in value of arms transfer agreements among all developing nations weapons purchasers, concluding $3.3 billion in such agreements. Egypt ranked second with $2.6 billion in such agreements. Israel ranked third with $2.3 billion.

The numbers for the Clinton era are not substantively different than the latest such report released for the 2003-2010 years, and no different from Obama’s current wielding of weapons welfare. And there is just as much harm-potential generated from Obama’s doing it as Clinton’s. Clinton’s support with money and arms of Turkey resulted in major atrocities against Kurds in the southeast, leaving the countryside devastated with tens of thousands killed and millions displaced. Money, arms, equipment, and training were also sent to the regime in Indonesia during the Clinton years despite Jakarta’s veritable genocide in East Timor. Obama’s weapons welfare and so-called containment/projecting-power policies are equally dangerous. Whatever Thompson thinks, it is neither novel, nor savvy. It’s deadly, menacing, and savage.

In no way do I entirely endorse Micah Zenko’s latest post at the Council of Foreign Relations blog, but he does put forth a healthy dose of skepticism about the Iranian nuclear issue and the clambering for war since the IAEA’s latest hyperbolic report. Zenko points out the misleading official lines about Iran being one or two years away from the bomb and how those same warnings have been going on for decades. He also says that, given international monitoring and inspections of Iran’s reactors, “it is virtually impossible that Iran could covertly make, divert, and reprocess spent fuel to make eight kilograms of plutonium, or the ‘special quantity’ amount that the IAEA contends is required for one nuclear weapon.”

He then poses eight questions he thinks Obama must consider before taking the advice of the “growing chorus of hawks and authorizes a preventive attack against Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons facilities”:

• Are its violations of the NPT, UN Security Council resolutions, and ongoing inadequate cooperation with the IAEA sufficient grounds for suspecting that Iran will soon achieve nuclear weapons capability?
• Last February, the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified before Congress, stating, “We continue to assess Iran is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.” But, “we do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons.” What new information has emerged that now confirms senior leaders in Iran have decided to pursue the bomb?
• It is unlikely that Iran would needlessly test a nuclear weapon, since it would not be required to verify that it worked, and would only rally further international opposition against them. What sort of credible information will the Obama administration declassify and make public that would justify a preventive attack on Iran?
• Does the Obama administration truly believe what Senator John McCain first said six years ago?: “There’s only one thing worse than the United States exercising a military option. That is a nuclear-armed Iran.”
• Iranian nuclear ambitions extend back thirty-five years. According to a CIA estimate in 1974: “If other countries have proceeded with [nuclear] weapons development, we have no doubt that Iran will follow suit.” Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta conceded in December that an attack “might postpone [Iran’s nuclear program] maybe one, possibly two years.” Are the costs of a preventive attack worth twelve to twenty-four months of peace of mind?
• What is the expected air and ground requirements, scope of targets, duration, and financial costs of an attack against Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons facilities?  What percentage of this burden would be met by partners and allies?
• What is the expected collateral damage and civilian casualties within Iran to such an attack?
• What is the desired endgame of attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities? What is the plausible diplomatic and military plan for how this happens?

When people talk of “remembering” the service of military soldiers, it’s typically associated with vague, irrational, nationalistic appreciation the supposed virtues of taking orders of violence while in uniform. Memorial day is supposed to memorialize the greatness, valor, sacrifice, benevolence of a nation’s warriors in the military.

Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli invasion and assault of Gaza, took place three years ago now. Up to 1,400 Palestinians were killed in attacks by Israeli forces, while some 5,000 were injured. Hundreds of those killed, up to half by some estimates, were unarmed civilians, including some 300 children, more than 115 women and some 85 men over the age of 50. Billions of dollars of infrastructure damage and numerous incidents of IDF attacks on civilian facilities, among other crimes, were committed. The Israeli government to this day is imposing barriers to justice for the victims of that war.

On the third anniversary of that adventure, Amira Hass will be turning the nationalistic memorializing on its head:

On the third anniversary of the Cast Lead onslaught, we remember the anonymous soldiers who fired on a red car, in which a father, Mohammed Shurrab, and his two sons were returning home from their farm lands…

We will remember the pilot who delivered the bomb that killed Mahmoud al-Ghoul, a high-school student, and his uncle Akram, an attorney, at the family’s home in northern Gaza. We will remember the soldiers who analyze photographs taken by drones, who decided that a truck conveying oxyacetylene cylinders for welding, owned by Ahmad Samur, was carrying Grad rockets – a decision that led to an order to bomb the vehicle from the air which, in turn, led to the deaths of eight persons, four of them minors.

It goes on like that as Hass highlights one serious war crime committed by Israel Defense Force soldiers and makes clear that it was Israel who broke the ceasefire that led to Operation Cast Lead, not Gazans.

To me, that’s a far more palatable way to remember our own martial offensives. Of course, its the farthest thing from what is done in “polite society.” But next time someone like Defense Secretary Leon Panetta praises the “sacrifice” of those U.S. troops who served in the Iraq war, insisting that they left “with great pride – lasting pride,” one should instead try to institute a memorial for the nameless U.S. soldiers who raided an Iraqi home in 2006, bound up the limbs of one man, four women, two children, and three infants and shot them all in the head before calling in an airstrike to destroy the evidence. When Memorial Day comes around again, let us not miss the opportunity to commemorate the U.S. Special Operations Forces who surrounded a house in a village in the Paktia Province in Afghanistan in February 2010 and murdered two men, a pregnant mother of ten, a pregnant mother of six, and a teenage girl and then falsified evidence, blaming it on the Taliban before being later found out. Let us memorialize the drone operator who pressed the button and mutilated the one year old Pakistani girl now seeking medical treatment in Texas.

Maybe that will be the first step in abandoning the distorted memorializing of government’s greatest crimes.