Foreign Policy In Focus

This strange animal called sequestration is certainly wreaking havoc with our customary ideological boundaries. 

If you’re an advocate, Iike I am, for revamped federal priorities that shift resources from a bloated Pentagon budget toward neglected domestic priorities, your take on this animal can’t be simple. You say cutting everything indiscriminately is a bad way to run a government (this view is nearly universal). You oppose the cuts in the domestic budget that will leave us with fewer food safety inspectors, medical researchers, Head Start teachers, and airport baggage screeners on the job. But you can reel off long lists of ways to cut waste in the Pentagon budget to the levels prescribed by sequestration, and show that these cuts will leave us completely safe.

But you also know that the whole conversation is focused on the wrong topic. It’s past time to shift this conversation away from austerity and toward investment to create jobs, as clear majorities of voters said in November was what they wanted.

Now let’s look at the Washington Post’s blogger who says he writes “from a liberal perspective,” Greg Sargent. On Wednesday he went at the Republican position on sequestration, wielding a new report from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service. The report found that the single most important cause of increased income inequality in recent years is the favored tax treatment given to capital gains and stock dividends — i.e. what the rich have used to get richer.

The Democrats, as Sargent points out, want to change this, taxing the rich and using the proceeds to replace the sequester cuts. The Republicans want to stick with sequestration and keep this favored treatment for the rich.

But all of this puts the Republicans, says Sargent, in the position of “openly conceding that the sequester will gut the military.” It’s a concession that Sargent appears to be taking at face value. Or at least not calling into question.

Gut the military? That’s what the Joint Chiefs of Staff have been saying any chance they get. Sequestration would “invite aggression,” says lingering Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. It will “put the nation at greater risk of coercion,” says the Joint Chiefs Chair, Martin Dempsey. When asked at a recent congressional hearing which nation might coerce us, though, he couldn’t say.

In fact, sequestration will not “gut” our military. Our military budget has nearly doubled since 2001. Sequestration would take it back to the level it was in 2007 — when we were still fighting two wars. Adjusted for inflation, it would leave that budget higher than its Cold War average — when we had an adversary that was spending roughly what we were on its military. Now, as Michael Cohen notes in The Guardian, the closest thing to a peer adversary we have is China, and we are spending more on research and development of new weapons than the Chinese are spending on their entire military. We spend more on our military, in fact, than the next 14 countries put together.

After the longest period of war in our history, we are due for a defense downsizing. Sequestration would create a shallower downsizing than any of the previous postwar periods since World War II. We can do this, and we should. We need the money for other things.

As sequestration threatens to confuse us all, let’s be sure to stay clear on that, at least.

At Foreign Policy in Focus Stephen Zunes reports on a resolution (HR 568) that the House passed in a show of bipartisanship (401-11) that couldn't have come at a worse possible time (as is usually the case with bipartisanship these days). He explains that HR 568 calls for "the president to oppose any policy toward Iran 'that would rely on containment as an option in response to the Iranian nuclear threat.'"

… Congress has essentially told the president that nothing short of war or the threat of war is an acceptable policy. Indeed, the rush to pass this bill appears to have been designed to undermine the ongoing international negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program.

Even Colin Powell, as quoted by Dennis Kucinich, "has stated that this resolution 'reads like the same sheet of music that got us into the Iraq war.'"

First, the vote shows yet again that Democratic congress-persons would rather pander to their donors (in this case, lobbying groups such as AIPAC) rather than represent their constituents. Sure, talk tough on defense, especially with respect to Iran, plays well with most American voters. But many of those voters don't understand, as congress-persons do -- or would if the psyches of many of them weren't as compartmentalized as they are -- the extent to which such talk can pave the way to catastrophic war. Besides, though best left to legal scholars, HR 578 smells either illegal or unconstitutional.

What escapes most observers -- Professor Zunes conspicuously excepted -- is that as apocalyptic as war with Iran would be, the implications of HR 568 are even more sweeping. He writes:

The language of this resolution, however, significantly lowers the bar [for taking military action against Iran] by declaring it unacceptable for Iran simply to have "nuclear weapons capability" — not necessarily any actual weapons or an active nuclear weapons program. 

Nuclear weapons capability, which isn't technically illegal under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, is also known as "virtual deterrence," because the program has yet to become "bricks and mortar." One can't help but wish that the missiles and bombs with which we threaten Iran were also virtual and it were all a videogame.

More to the point, writes Professor Zunes:

There is enormous significance to the resolution’s insistence that containment, which has been the basis of U.S. defense policy for decades, should no longer be U.S. policy in dealing with potential threats. Although deterrence may have been an acceptable policy in response to the thousands of powerful Soviet nuclear weapons mounted on intercontinental ballistic missile systems aimed at the United States, the view today is that deterrence is somehow inadequate for dealing with a developing country capable of developing small and crude nuclear devices but lacking long-range delivery systems.

Indeed, this broad bipartisan consensus against deterrence marks the triumph of the neoconservative first-strike policy, once considered on the extreme fringes when first articulated in the 1980s.

According to this line of thinking, no need to rely on deterrence alone with non-nuclear weapon states: we're free to mount an offensive attack, as well. Meanwhile, with nuclear-weapons states, first strikes are almost entirely out of the question -- not only nuclear strikes, but conventional. Thus do states that aspire to nuclear weapons draw the inevitable conclusion that they need to develop a nuclear-weapons program to avoid offensive attacks and "qualify" to be handled with a deterrence policy by the United States.

In a similar vein, Martin Hellman, arguably the world's clearest quantifier of nuclear risk and proprietor of the site Defusing the Nuclear Threat, recently wrote:

The logical inconsistency – and danger – of nuclear deterrence should be obvious, but it still forms the foundation of our national security strategy. Yet, for nuclear deterrence to work:

• we must be irrational enough for our adversary's threats not to deter us, yet
• our adversary must be rational enough that our threats will deter them. 

As I commented at Defusing the Nuclear Threat in response:

I think I've got it: The rational us are supposed to act irrational in hopes the irrational them acts rational. Makes perfect sense!

In its final stages, debate over the supercommittee has boiled down to squeezing new revenues out of millionaires vs. cutting the social safety net. The largest portion of the discretionary budget, however, funds the military — and that fact has been mostly obscured in this equation. With the panel in its final death throes, military spending is emerging from the shadows in the form of “defense sequestration.” This is the requirement that failure would trigger $1.2 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years, half of which would come from the Pentagon's coffers.

Scare tactics don’t tend to produce entirely sensible legislation, and this one is no exception. Yet can these cuts be made with no sacrifice to our security? Emphatically, yes.

The Pentagon and its allies in industry and Congress are warning us over and over that this “doomsday” scenario will leave us weakened and vulnerable. They're ignoring several pretty important facts. The “sequestration” cuts, added to those already planned, would bring our military spending, in inflation-adjusted terms, to its 2007 level. Was anyone talking about doomsday then?

Thirteen straight years of military increases, moreover, have more than doubled the Pentagon's base budget (excluding war spending), bringing it to its highest level since World War II. And these increases have actually expanded the gap between U.S. military spending and the rest of the world. At the beginning of this period, we were spending about a third of the world’s total. Now we're spending about half.

Even if sequestration cuts across all military programs, this sort of ham-handed approach is safely doable. Our blank-check approach to military spending in this century has created waste in every program, waiting to be trimmed. Even as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta works to protect his budget at the expense of all others, his Pentagon remains the only federal department that can't pass an audit of its books.

The Project On Government Oversight has calculated that simply cutting back by 15 percent on the privatization of military functions that has occurred in this period would save $300 billion over 10 years.

Is sequestration the best way to manage a defense drawdown? No. For one thing, the best way would make choices based on how much we need to spend, on what, to keep us safe. A new security strategy could allow us to question, for example, the need for our current “forward presence,” which has between 105 and 125 ships cruising around three oceans nearly all the time, and target savings accordingly in the naval budget. Sequestration bypasses this kind of thinking.

Nor would the sequestration “haircut” do anything good for our enduring unemployment crisis. Military cuts, it is true, will have a smaller impact on jobs than other cuts in the domestic discretionary budget. A study by economists at the University of Massachusetts found that $1 billion in military spending sustains about 11,000 jobs as compared to about 17,000 from an equivalent amount of spending on clean energy. Let's cut spending on military programs we don’t need and invest those savings in job creation by making things we do need.

This is the kind of vision laid out in a new report from my organization, the Institute for Policy Studies. It outlines a set of cuts to those military programs we don’t need, and combines that with fiscal reforms and pollution taxes. The result would be more than $800 billion we can invest in building the kind of country we all deserve.

The U.S. Congress, like the mainstream media, has been frequently accused of having a terrible problem with memory. In either case the talking heads, whether on Fox and Friends or in a committee hearing, have often displayed an unfortunate tendency to propound political analyses and policy prescriptions that betray little insight into even the most recent history.

But perhaps attempting to buck this trend, members of Congress have imbued their calls for a no-fly zone over Libya -- read air strikes -- with a colorful palette of sordid historical moments.

Here’s the New York Times recounting Senator John Kerry’s (D-MA) remarks at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee:

“You want to be prepared if he is bombing people, and killing his own people,” he said, referring to Colonel Qaddafi. The Libyan people, he said, would “look defenseless and we would look feckless — you have to be ready.”

He added: “What haunts me is the specter of Iraq 1991,” when former President George Bush “urged the Shia to rise up, and they did rise up, and tanks and planes were coming at them — and we were nowhere to be seen.”

“Tens of thousands were slaughtered,” Mr. Kerry said.

President Bill Clinton, he said, “missed the chance in Rwanda, and said later it was the greatest regret of his presidency, and then was too slow in Bosnia,” where the United States ended up using air power, also in the defense of a Muslim population.

This call has been echoed by other prominent senators as well, notably Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT). 

But how curious is this newfound power of recollection! In order to bring up an Iraq of 1991, one must first bypass the Iraq of anytime from 2003 to the present. And absent from even this discussion of the 1991 tragedy is the understanding that the Iraqi Shiite and Kurdish uprisings were expressly encouraged by the first Bush administration before it decided to hedge its mission in the country. The 1991 debacle was thus part and parcel of a prior U.S. intervention. Of course, it should go without saying that the subsequent U.S. intervention permitted an even deadlier tragedy to unfold. 

Nor should guilt about the failure of the international community to stem the flow of blood in Rwanda or (to a somewhat lesser extent) the former Yugoslavia supplant our memories about the perils of intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan. Guilt must not supersede reason.

And the reasons are manifold. Phyllis Bennis and Adil E. Shamoo have already laid out the case against a U.S.-led no-fly zone or intervention in Libya. Citing not least that a no-fly zone would be of limited utility in stopping the largely ground-based attacks on Libyan rebels and civilians, they also note that the U.S. must not deprive the revolution of its wholly Libyan character, which would play directly into Gaddafi’s hands. And if such an assault would be of little assistance to Libyans, one can only imagine what yet another American incursion into an oil-rich Middle Eastern country would mean for the United States. 

But the Libya hawks press on. Members of the resistance have requested such assistance, they insist. True -- a few of them have. But spokesmen for the would-be interim government have also urged the West to stay out of it. Meanwhile the calls of pro-democracy protesters in Bahrain for even rhetorical support from the U.S. have fallen largely on deaf ears. One wonders what could explain the discrepancy.

For all their curiously selective appeals to history, Libya hawks in Congress seem blithely unaware of the gravity of taking military action -- or even what counts as military action. Setting up a no-fly zone, as Adm. Gary Roughead explained to Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MI), would mean “entering into combat operations.” “Air combat operations,” interjected Wicker, as though an attack from above were somehow less an act of war than one from below. Do American-made bombs somehow implicate the United States less than American-made tanks? Would they play into Gaddafi’s narrative any less, or make the United States less any less responsible for the outcome? 

But rest assured that the media and the Congress are once more on a similar page. In its dutiful quest for balance, the New York Times notes that “some would indeed regard  [missilestrikesonLibya] as an act of war.” But what else could it be?

Perhaps our Libya hawks are only now coming to terms with the indigenous character of the revolutions sweeping the region. Tired of playing a purely reactive role, liberals and conservatives alike are now champing at the bit to put an American stamp on what has thus far been an Arab-led phenomenon. But whether in Iraq, the Gulf states, or Libya’s neighbors in Egypt and Tunisia, surely the region has seen enough of these already.

One needn’t look to Rwanda or Bosnia for instructive examples about how the U.S. should proceed in Libya. The entire Middle East is already stained with the ink of old stamps that read “Made in the USA.”

Peter Certo is a contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus as well as the Institute of Policy Studies Balkans Project and the Global Day of Action on Military Spending.