Blogs

The agreement that ended a hunger strike by as many as two thousand of the Palestinians held prisoner by Israel is modest, uncertain and shaky. Negotiated with the involvement of Egypt and the Palestinian Authority, the deal calls for Israel to ease the conditions of detention in several respects. About twenty prisoners will be taken out of solitary confinement. Family members from the Gaza Strip will be permitted prison visits, which have been denied them in recent years. Prisoners under “administrative detention”—incarceration in which neither they, their families, nor anyone else in the outside world are told anything about why they are imprisoned—are supposed to be detained beyond six months only if evidence about them is brought before a military court. The prisoners reportedly made some vaguely defined commitment about not engaging in any activity that would support terrorism. It is unclear whether a couple of the prisoners who have been engaging in hunger strikes longer than the rest will end their fasts.

Of all the commentary unleashed by "The Life of Julia," the Barack Obama campaign’s interactive web ad that follows a faceless cartoon "everywoman" through life, probably the most perceptive is Jessica Gavora’s analysis in the Washington Post Outlook section. Gavora notes that the ads touch on such life milestones as education, work, motherhood, retirement. But one is missing: marriage.

There is a reason for this: Democratic operatives increasingly see unmarried women as a crucial voting bloc. Indeed, she says, these women represent "the most reliably Democratic voting group outside African Americans" –manifest in Obama’s 71-to-29 percent majority among such voters in 2008.

But there is a problem. These women don’t vote in the same numbers as married women. So "Julia" really is a clever get-out-the-vote effort aimed at luring to the polls a much higher proportion of these reliable Democratic voters. And the way to do that is to tout government programs designed to assist and benefit women—educational assistance at early stages of life, equal-pay requirements for later life stages, set-asides for entrepreneurial women seeking Small Business Administration loans, free health screenings, insurance for contraceptives, retirement benefits. In other words, just about cradle to grave.

American leaders are reliably more hawkish than Americans. That gap marks a failure in democratic decision making. Under some circumstances, the free marketplace of ideas not only fails to produce good policy but actually thwarts it.

That problem underlies a new joint study published by the Stimson Center. Based on a survey of 665 Americans, the study shows that when presented with arguments for and against cutting the defense budget, Americans want to cut it—a lot. Respondents rated general arguments for and against cutting total defense spending, finding most arguments convincing but dovish arguments generally more so. They preferred cutting defense spending to raising taxes or cutting other spending (though Republicans somewhat preferred cutting other spending). Asked to set a defense-spending level for next year, nine-tenths of Democrats and two-thirds of Republicans cut it. The survey then listed defense-spending categories, gave standard pro and con arguments for each, and asked respondents for their recommendation on each. Their biggest cuts, by percentage, came from the war in Afghanistan and nuclear weapons. The average total cut amounted to about 18 percent of the nonwar defense budget.

A new report published today by the Project on Defense Alternatives argues for $17–$20 billion in immediate savings to the fiscal-year 2013 defense budget. I coauthored the report along with Benjamin Friedman of Cato and PDA’s Carl Conetta, Charles Knight and Ethan Rosenkranz. Those savings come from eighteen line items—personnel, weapons systems and programs—that could be implemented quickly. Adjustments to U.S. national-security strategy are not a prerequisite for these options, which are relatively low-hanging fruit.

The 2013 defense-authorization bill will move to the House floor this week. Many members are expected to offer amendments, some allowing savings in the defense budget. During the debates that are about to ensue,, it is important to keep in mind just how large the defense budget has become. As our paper notes, the national defense base budget constitutes 52 percent of discretionary spending, separate from the war account. Since 2000, it has risen by 90 percent in nominal terms and 42 percent in real terms. If Washington is serious about addressing the nation’s massive fiscal challenge, many programs will have to be cut or reformed. The Pentagon should not be expected to bear all of the costs; other departments and agencies will also have to contribute. But there has not yet been a significant decline in the Pentagon’s base budget, contrary to what some have claimed.

The only current American prisoner of war, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, remains in captivity largely because of the mistaken equating of war fighting with counterterrorism. That false equation has contributed to the suffering of many other Americans in uniform and their loved ones. It lent believability to the Bush administration's rationale to launch the Iraq War, and it has underlain continuation of the Afghanistan War for a decade after Operation Enduring Freedom achieved its immediate counterterrorist objectives. The hardship of Sergeant Bergdahl and his family simply adds to that toll.

The exact circumstances of Bergdahl's capture in Paktika Province in Afghanistan in June 2009 are somewhat in doubt, but not in doubt is that he was a combat soldier in a military unit conducting counterinsurgency operations. His capture was not some block-the-street-with-a-car terrorist kidnapping in a city. His captors were insurgents against whom NATO is waging its counterinsurgency campaign.

A recent lead editorial in the Washington Post is one of those pieces of writing where every sentence may well be true, but the overall result is dangerously misleading. The subject is Syria, where the Post blasts the Obama administration for its handling of the ongoing crisis.

The Post contends that Washington’s approach, working through the UN and the “Annan plan,” has been a failure. It argues that continued inaction “will allow Mr. Assad to go on killing indefinitely.” It also notes that the longer the conflict goes on unresolved, the greater the risk will be of other developments more directly threatening to U.S. interests. These include extremist groups such as al-Qaeda taking advantage of the chaos and sectarian war spreading across Syria’s borders to countries like Iraq and Turkey.

These critiques are all fair. But the editorial does not advance a single policy prescription for what the United States ought to do instead. Of course, as many have noted before, there are no good options for what to do about Syria now. Should Washington arm the Syrian rebels? What if that only leads to a prolonged and intensified civil war? Should the United States then send in troops to remove Assad? The Post doesn’t openly suggest any of these steps, but it nonetheless bashes President Obama as if there is some magical solution out there that he’s simply too afraid to advocate for.

New York Times correspondent Thom Shanker broke the story on May 5 that the U.S. military had established three base camps in Honduras to help that country combat the increasingly powerful Mexican drug cartels. The Obama administration authorized this new, and potentially quite dangerous, military operation without congressional approval or the slightest public debate by the American people. That aspect is merely the latest evidence that Obama is as much a devotee of the imperial presidency as any of his predecessors.

But this move should not have come as a great surprise. The Mexican cartels have become a major force in nearly all of the Central American countries, especially Honduras and Guatemala, over the past four years. Political leaders in Central America, as well as their U.S. counterparts, have grown increasingly worried that one or more of those countries could become de facto narcostates.

The increased cartel activity in Central America is a direct result of the vigorous, military-led offensive against those organizations in Mexico during President Felipe Calderón’s presidency. That offensive has been a fiasco for Mexico, resulting in the deaths of more than fifty thousand people in the past five and a half years and turning portions of the country into full-fledged war zones.

Sam Schulman, writing in The Weekly Standard, exposes what he calls "the liberal habit of sanctimonious betrayal" of beleaguered peoples around the world whose plight these liberals previously had embraced as solemn causes. Fair enough. But in the process he takes a few digs at foreign policy "realists," such as Harvard’s Stephen Walt—who, concedes Shulman, was right in saying the Obama administration is preparing to "bug out" (Schulman’s words) on Afghanistan. 

"But," he adds, "only true realists can forget that the Taliban have been beaten again and again on the battlefield by the Northern Alliance, NATO, and our own military forces….Only card-carrying realists can explain (though they never bother to do so) how it might be in our national interest to hand over a country in the neighborhood of several troublesome and often hostile powers—Iran, Russia, China, Pakistan—to a groupuscule of racial and sectarian supremacists…."

On the first point, Schulman seems to think that his pronouncements must be correct because they are his pronouncements. Consider what Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairman of Senate Intelligence, said on CNN recently (with her Republican House counterpart sitting next to her) following a trip to Afghanistan: "I think we’d both say that what we found is that the Taliban is stronger." Schulman might want to read (but he will never bother to do so) TNI’s March/April cover story by Michael Hart, a British military officer whose very different assessment of the situation in Afghanistan emanates from his own military experience there. He makes Schulman’s pronouncement about the Taliban having been "beaten again and again" look ridiculous.

Jim Webb, the one-term (by choice) senior U.S. senator for Virginia, has been able to observe from several vantage points the multiple issues involved in going to war. He is a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, father of a Marine who served in the Iraq War, observer as an embedded journalist of the Afghanistan War, a former assistant secretary of defense and secretary of the navy, and currently a member of the Senate committees on armed services and foreign relations. This week he spoke on the floor of the Senate about the executive branch's appropriation for itself of decisions to go to war, notwithstanding the U.S. Constitution's assignment to Congress of the power to declare war. “What has happened,” asked Webb,

to reduce the role of the Congress from the body which once clearly decided whether or not the nation would go to war, to the point that we are viewed as little more than a rather mindless conduit that collects taxpayer dollars and dispenses them to the President for whatever military functions he decides to undertake?

Webb acknowledged that the military's role in national security since World War II has been more continuous, with more need to operate on short notice, than warfare as the Founding Fathers knew it. But “the fact that some military situations have required our Presidents to act immediately before then reporting to the Congress,” Webb said,

Jeffrey Goldberg is exasperated. With adverbs.

His latest piece in Bloomberg caustically criticizes Obama’s approach to the Syrian crisis, calling out the president for condemning Assad but refusing to take action. Goldberg snarkily congratulates Obama for “[helping] Syrians understand, among other things, that the English language contains many synonyms for ‘repulsive’” and “[carpetbombing] Damascus with powerful sentences and, at times, whole paragraphs.” He then warns of an approaching crisis in which “America’s stockpile of vivid adjectives is being depleted rapidly” and calls for more action—“a ‘surge’ of new adjectives and adverbs in their campaign” to ensure “even Assad must understand that his time is nearly up.”

The piece is subtle as jackhammer. Goldberg, appalled at the administration’s refusal to arm rebels, create safe havens or otherwise intervene in Syria, sees the increasingly strident rebukes of Assad as laughable—and makes this view abundantly clear. That his flippant tone is inappropriate for the subject matter almost goes without saying. He speaks, by his own admission, about “one of the most blood-soaked acts of political repression” in decades, yet he does so with tongue firmly in cheek.

Perhaps Goldberg believed sarcasm and open hostility would somehow enliven a debate weighed down by heavy questions of ethics, human rights, national interest and humanitarian intervention. Perhaps he sought to interject some levity and humor to an overwhelmingly sad subject—without doubt, there are chuckle-worthy lines. But the overall result is disconcerting.