Month: February 2013

Via Matthew Feeney at Reason, The Washington Post has some nice charts up about US “defense” spending.

The first illustrates the oft-quoted factoid that the US spends as much on defense as most major countries in the world combined.

It’s a powerful image that really undercuts those in Washington who perpetually inflate the threats we face abroad (and sometimes simply invent them). But note the measurement of US military spending is the more traditional amount acknowledged in federal budgets. Broader measurements which take into account all kinds of spending on the national security state put the number at about $1 trillion or above.

Putting this graphical dichotomy into context, most politicians from both parties have been screaming bloody murder (no pun intended) about the relatively minor cuts to defense included in the sequestration deal. The worst case scenario for the Pentagon budget is about $500 billion in cuts over the course of ten years. Which isn’t really a cut at all – it’s a reduction in the rate of growth in defense spending.

And that might even be putting it generously. As Feeney notes, the Mercatus Center’s Veronique de Rugy has crunched the numbers and concludes, “After sequestration, the FY 2013 defense budget will be comparable to its FY 2006 level (in real terms). Adjusted for inflation, over the next ten years, the spending is projected to remain relatively constant.”

The next graph specifies how Washington allocates its defense dollars and shows that, as Feeney writes, “engaging in war happens to be expensive. ”

The minuscule defense cuts being contemplated could easily target areas of waste. The major source of growth in annual defense budgets since 2001 has been mostly 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.

“But what about jobs!?” ask those unwilling to cut. Well, defense spending is not a jobs program. At least, it’s not supposed to be. As far as the health of the economy is concerned, defense budgets are a net drain.

Via the Cato Institute’s Malou Innocent, this study from the Center for International Policy finds that “Pentagon spending is an especially poor job creator” compared to “virtually any other use of the same money, from a tax cut to investments in infrastructure to spending on education.”

Warnings of doom to the economy, or to national security, are groundless scare stories coming from the groups of people who benefit most from the government’s most lucrative and deadly welfare program.

“While the professional threat inflation complex will no doubt get in gear shortly,” writes Robert Farley at The Diplomat, “recent scholarship suggests caution in coming to the conclusion that North Korea’s nuclear capabilities pose a relevant threat.”

North Korea is at dire nuclear and conventional disadvantage relative to the United States and its allies; North Korea will remain at dire disadvantage effectively forever. Consequently, a new nuclear test does little-to-nothing to alter the real balance of power on the Korean Peninsula. It’s worth noting that the more-or-less successful tests of 2006 and 2009 have, thus far, allowed North Korea to accomplish none of its important foreign policy and security goals, apart from deterring a South Korean-U.S.-Japanese attack that likely would never have happened in the first place.

Last night, North Korea expended a significant fraction of its fissile material to achieve nearly nothing, beyond possibly the irritation of Beijing and the strengthening of right-wingers in Japan and the United States. The appropriate policy response to North Korea remains the same; containment until the regime collapses. Whether that requires five years, twenty-five years, or fifty years, the U.S. and its Northeast Asia allies have time on their side.

I think Farley is right to criticize the threat inflation that fumes out of Washington, D.C. every time North Korea launches something into the air. Some of the time, as we learned last April, the DPRK can’t even manage to conduct a successful launch, and sometimes they even use toy weapons in military parades, illustrating how little their belligerence conceals their essential weakness. There is, as Farley says, little to no threat and the DPRK has “achieve[d] nearly nothing.”

But further containment until the regime collapses is probably not the appropriate policy response. Sanctions and isolation have been tried for decades and have only locked in the regime’s power, encouraged their bellicosity, and worsened conditions for the North Korean people.

“A policy of not engaging Pyongyang,” writes former CIA officer Paul Pillar, “was tried for several years under the previous administration, without success in preventing North Korea’s first nuclear tests.”

“Wise statesmen learn to abandon obsolete or unworkable policies,” writes Ted Galen Carpenter, senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. “President Richard Nixon did so with his opening to China in 1972, and President Bill Clinton did so with his normalization of diplomatic and economic relations with Vietnam in the late 1990s.”

“The results have been clearly positive in both cases” and Obama “needs to show the same judgment and courage by making a sustained effort at the highest level to establish something at least resembling a normal relationship with Pyongyang.”

One possible impediment to dealing with North Korea more constructively is Washington’s soured relationship with Beijing. Our aggressive, militaristic efforts to contain a rising China obstruct any chance to engage with North Korea’s only great power ally on this issue.

Legendary Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said in an interview with Juliana Forlano (on the sidelines of a panel discussion which can be seen here) that President Obama “has conducted clear cut impeachable crimes.”

Ellsberg is currently involved in a legal case against President Obama (Hedges v. Obama) regarding the provisions in the NDAA that grant the power to detain individuals, including US citizens, indefinitely without due process. Read more about that here, here, and here.

Judge Napolitano discusses Obama’s illegal drone war and the potential for “assassination courts” with Fox News’s very own Brick Tamland.

Here’s the Judge’s recent elaboration on Obama’s license to kill.

In Hedges v. Obama, journalists and academics including Chris Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, et al. are battling against the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which includes provisions granting the power to indefinitely detain individuals, including US citizens, suspected of allying with or supporting “terrorists.”

Late last year, Judge Katherine B. Forrest blocked the government from enforcing those particular statutes on grounds that they violate Constitutionally guaranteed rights to due process. In response, the Obama administration immediately appealed Forrest’s ruling, asking for an “immediate stay,” or suspension of the case’s proceedings. When Forrest denied the request, the government went to the Second US Court of Appeals in Manhattan and asked another judge for an emergency stay, which Judge Raymond J. Lohier granted. The latest appeals court extended the stay, undermining Judge Forrest’s ruling that the government should be barred from enforcing the law.

Consider how panicked the government’s response here was. Following Forrest’s decision, they scrambled to get a hold of Lohier at 9:00 AM the following day, and overrule the injunction. Chris Hedges, the lead plaintiff in the case, speculates that this is an indication that the Obama administration is already depriving citizens of due process under the NDAA provisions. The hurried response to Forrest’s decision was done, he says, because the US government might otherwise have been in contempt of court.

Here’s Hedges writing at Truthdig about the stakes of the case:

If we lose in Hedges v. Obama—and it seems certain that no matter the outcome of the appeal this case will reach the Supreme Court—electoral politics and our rights as citizens will be as empty as those of Nero’s Rome. If we lose, the power of the military to detain citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military prisons will become a terrifying reality. Democrat or Republican. Occupy activist or libertarian. Socialist or tea party stalwart. It does not matter. This is not a partisan fight. Once the state seizes this unchecked power, it will inevitably create a secret, lawless world of indiscriminate violence, terror and gulags. I lived under several military dictatorships during the two decades I was a foreign correspondent. I know the beast.

The right to due process is one of the most essential devices to check state power, going back to the Magna Carta in 1215. The King of England almost 800 years ago didn’t have the arbitrary power to detain citizens that Obama is trying to claim.

See NSA Whistleblower Thomas Drake speak eloquently about the case: