Todd Harrison, Washington’s defense-budget wizard, says letting Pentagon spending grow along with inflation, between now and 2023, actually will yield more than the $400 billion in savings Obama is seeking. Keep your eye on the ball here: the $400 billion in cuts aren’t cuts as you and I understand them — they are reductions in the projected future rate of growth. And because defense spending has close to doubled over the past decade — with future spending increases folded into future budget plans as naturally as dew forms on the morning grass — the U.S. military finds trimming its future spending to the rate of inflation a near-death experience.

“I think we need to cut defense,” Obama said Friday, “but as commander-in-chief, I’ve got to make sure that we’re cutting it in a way that recognizes we’re still in the middle of a war, we’re winding down another war, and we’ve got a whole bunch of veterans that we’ve got to care for as they come home.” But as Harrison, the budget whiz at the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments makes clear, the Obama Administrations has proposed no real spending cuts for the Pentagon. ~Mark Thompson

Harrison highlighted some details of the FY 2012 budget request in his analysis.

Harrison identifies what he calls hollow growth in the military budget:

Overall, nearly half of the growth in defense spending over the past decade is unrelated to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—personnel costs grew while end strength remained relatively flat, the cost of peacetime operations grew while the pace of peacetime operations declined, and acquisition costs increased while the inventory of equipment grew smaller and older. The base budget now supports a force with essentially the same size, force structure, and capabilities as in FY 2001 but at a 35 percent higher cost [bold mine-DL]. The Department is spending more but not getting more.

Sen. Coburn has released his fiscal plan, and in the section on the Department of Defense he makes the same point:

Over the last thirty years, Congress increased annual appropriations to the Department of Defense by about 44 percent in constant, inflation adjusted dollars. Today‘s non-war defense budget is larger than the total defense budget during the Vietnam War when we had over 500,000 troops fighting overseas.

However, this significant increase has not increased the size and strength of our military as traditionally measured. Despite higher levels of funding, active duty troop levels have decreased by 30percent, the number of Navy ships is down 45percent, and the Air Force‘s fighter and attack aircraft are down more than 50 percent. Former Secretary Robert Gates noted in a speech last year that current submarines and amphibious ships are three times as expensive as
their equivalents during the 1980s and we have fewer of them.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) releases an annual report of cost overruns of major weapon systems. Between 2001 and 2008, they found nearly $300 billion in cost overruns and schedule delays for major defense acquisition program.

Coburn has proposed a very ambitious (and therefore almost certainly doomed) $9 trillion reduction plan over ten years, of which $1 trillion would come from spending on the military. The $1 trillion figure is comparable to the amount envisioned by Domenici and Rivlin, and Coburn’s specific reductions include recommendations from both Domenici-Rivlin and Bowles-Simpson. Philip Klein summarizes some of the more notable recommendations:

On defense, Coburn proposed ways save money by reforming the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, reducing the nuclear weapons stockpile, limiting the growth of the defense workforce, returning to pre-2007 levels of active duty military personnel, and reforming the department’s health care programs, among other changes.

Writing at Commentary, Alana Goodman expressed the knee-jerk hawkish view of the plan:

Getting rid of wasteful spending in the defense budget is one thing, but strangling it with cuts will endanger our troops and dangerously diminish America’s standing in the world.

All that one needs to do to appreciate why this is such a ridiculous response is to read through the recommendations Coburn makes. The changes to TRICARE that Coburn recommends account for $184 billion by themselves, and Coburn has identified $963 billion of discretionary spending in the military budget to be cut. There is no danger of Coburn’s spending reductions “strangling” the military’s budget. As Goodman’s reaction indicates, there is also no danger that Republican activists, pundits or other politicians are going to endorse what may be the most credible fiscal plan on offer.

Update: For a good description of Coburn’s specific cuts, read Michael Warren.

The assumption of the inevitability of a war is allowed to rest exclusively on the fact that “we” and “they” are both preparing so intensively for it. No other reason is needed for the acceptance of its necessity. ~George Kennan, The Fateful Alliance

Paul Pillar has an interesting response to two articles on the unwise use of military force. Pillar describes the second article’s thesis:

The authors ground their explanation in a finding from experimental psychology that people shift from a “deliberative” mind-set before deciding to take an action to an “implemental” mind-set after their decision. The latter frame of mind entails several psychological biases, including closed-mindedness, biased processing of information, cognitive dissonance, self-serving evaluations, an illusion of control, and excessive optimism, all of which add up to overconfidence. Expectations for what can be accomplished through armed force get inflated, and the costs and challenges of the coming war get less attention. The authors apply their concept to pre-war situations, including the months leading up to World War I. They point out that the shift to the biased “implemental” way of thinking occurs whenever war seems inevitable, regardless of whether the decision-makers in question are initiating the war or have it forced on them. The whole dynamic can help to make the prediction of war a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What Kennan’s reconstruction of the diplomatic history behind the Franco-Russian alliance suggests is that the leaders of the major powers in Europe in the decades prior to WWI already had the “implemental” mind-set to one degree or another, and this only became worse over time. Just before he made the concluding remarks quoted above, Kennan wrote:

But in a more general sense this assumption of the inevitability of a German-Russian war, and the concentration of attention in both military establishments on the preparations for such a war, arose simply from the internal compulsions normally engendered by the cultivation of large armed forces–by the mutual anxieties, that is, which such a competition invariably arouses, and by the preoccupation of both the governments and the public with the dangers that it appears to present. So powerful are such compulsions, at all times and in all places, that the absence of any rational motive for a war, or of any constructive purpose that could be served by one, is quite lost sight of behind them.

Obviously, Kennan was writing this with the U.S.-Soviet arms race in mind, so the specific danger he was warning against has receded greatly, but the observation is a sound one. Pillar was discussing the dangers of considering a war with Iran to be in some way “inevitable,” which requires us to adapt Kennan’s observation slightly. What keeps raising the specter of an attack on Iran is not a massive Iranian military build-up. The sort of competition that Kennan described isn’t the issue. There is nonetheless the compulsion “engendered by the cultivation of large armed forces” that leads to an overestimation of what those armed forces can achieve, and it encourages the illusion that military action can solve a complicated policy problem. This illusion will seem more real if there is a mistaken belief that military action has temporarily “solved” similar problems in the past.

While the more honest Iran hawks acknowledge that attacking Iran’s nuclear sites would be much more involved, risky, and less certain than Israel’s attack on Osirak, there is always the underlying assumption that the Osirak bombing “worked” and successfully delayed the development of Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. According to the finding of the other article Pillar discusses, this is simply wrong. Pillar explains:

Braut-Hegghammer’s conclusion is that the Israeli attack was counterproductive, for two sets of reasons. One concerned the state of the Iraqi nuclear program at the time of the attack, which was basically drifting and, although providing some of the technological base that possibly could have been used in the future toward acquiring nuclear weapons, was not geared up to produce such weapons. The political momentum to develop a weapons option was “inconsistent at best.” The Osirak reactor itself was not well designed for purposes of supporting a weapons program. The International Atomic Energy Agency later assessed that visual verification and materials accounting would have detected any diversion to a weapons program. On-site French engineers constituted an additional safeguard. Saddam Hussein had not “secured the basic organizational resources or budget.” Iraqi pursuit of a nuclear weapons capability was “both directionless and disorganized.”

The other set of reasons involved the Iraqi response to the Israeli attack, which was to establish for the first time a nuclear weapons program that not only had direction and organization but also was clandestine and kept away from international scrutiny.

This should actually come as a surprise to no one, since governments of all kinds are very likely to (over)react to attacks on their territory by trying to find deterrents to future attacks. Following the attack on Osirak, then, Iraq pursued nuclear weapons with much more determination than it had shown before:

The resulting clandestine program to build nuclear weapons using enriched uranium as the fissile material accelerated through the 1980s and brought Iraq much closer to a nuclear weapons capability than could have been projected from anything Iraq was doing prior to the Israeli attack.

Of course, a government’s decision to develop nuclear weapons is no more inevitable than its decision to go to war, but launching an attack on it makes that decision much more likely. A “preventive” strike pushes a government into a corner and makes it believe that it has no other alternative to secure itself from future attack. Whether or not an attack would be successful in temporarily halting Iran’s nuclear program, it would make its later development of a nuclear weapon a virtual certainty.

Daniel Pipes asks:

How should Western governments deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which Washington labels “the most active state sponsor of terrorism”?

If you guessed that his answer is to lend support to an anti-Iranian terrorist group, you would be right. This is Pipes’ example of meting out “tough” treatment to Tehran. Like all other American boosters of the MEK, he fails to understand that aligning the U.S. with a group that the vast majority of Iranians hates is a gift to the Iranian regime. Even if it were true that the MEK is no longer a terrorist group, that wouldn’t make it a useful ally in building up opposition to the Iranian regime. As far as most Iranians are concerned, the MEK will always be tainted by its violent and fanatical past. Providing any kind of help to them, including removal from the list of terrorist organizations, will be taken as an insult by Iranians regardless of their support for the regime. Going beyond that and attempting to use them to subvert the Iranian government is bound to undermine the legitimate Iranian opposition, and it will solidify the impression that U.S. policy is hostile to Iranians and not just the to the regime.

Of course, it isn’t true that the MEK has really abandoned its old ways. Ray Takeyh testified before Congress on the subject of the MEK earlier this month, and he addressed the idea that the MEK has changed:

The core of MEK’s ideology has always been anti-imperialism which it has historically defined as opposition to U.S. interests. The MEK opposed the Shah partly because of his close associations with the United States. MEK’s anti-American compulsions propelled it toward embracing an entire spectrum of radical forces ranging from the Vietcong to the PLO. Given its mission of liberating the working class and expunging the influence of predatory capitalism, the United States has traditionally been identified as a source of exploitation and injustice in MEK literature. As the organization has lost its Iraqi patron and finds itself without any reliable allies, it has somehow modulated its language and sought to moderate its anti-American tone. Such convenient posturing should not distract attention from its well-honed ideological animus to the United States [bold mine-DL].

Terror has always been a hallmark of MEK’s strategy for assuming power. Through much of its past, the party exulted violence as a heroic expression of legitimate dissent. One of the central precepts of the party is that a highly-dedicated group of militants could spark a mass revolution by bravely confronting superior power of the state and assaulting its authority. Once, the masses observe that the state is vulnerable to violence, than they will shed their inhibitions and join the protest, thus sparking the larger revolution. Thus, the most suitable means of affecting political change is necessarily violence. Although in its advocacy in Western capitals, the MEK emphasizes its commitment to democracy and free expression, in neither deed nor word has it forsworn it violent pedigree [bold mine-DL].

Unless the goal is to strengthen the hand of the Iranian regime, sabotage the opposition, and reinforce every negative stereotype Iranians have about the U.S. government, de-listing the MEK would be a horrible mistake. No less important, it would be a disgrace.

Update: One-time Libertarian presidential nominee Bob Barr has joined the pro-MEK bandwagon:

In fact, the past three U.S. administrations have seriously and expressly weakened the ability of opposition forces in Iran to effect positive change. All three have done this by abusing U.S. law that permits the State Department to designate entities as “terrorist organizations” and thereby deny them recognition and access to resources. This is precisely what the federal government for 14 years has done to the single most important and best organized Iranian opposition group, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK).

Like Pipes, Barr puts great emphasis on the supposed preeminence of the MEK among Iranian opposition groups, but this is a huge disservice to the legitimate Iranian opposition. No doubt the MEK believes it is the “single most important” opposition group, but why are so many Americans repeating this nonsense? If the MEK is well-organized, this is no coincidence: it is a fanatical political cult.

Second Update: Takeyh also had this to say in his testimony on Iranian attitudes towards the MEK:

Despite its activism in Western capitals, the MEK commands very little support within Iran. Its alliance with Saddam and its cult-like dispositions have alienated even the radical segments of intelligentsia that once found its ideological template attractive. The main opposition force in Iran remains the Green Movement that features not just liberal activists but clerical dissidents, and middle class elements chaffing under the theocracy’s repressive rule. The Iranian populace is seeking ways of liberalizing its society and not embracing yet another ideological movement with totalitarian tendencies.

I suppose one could argue that Iranian public opinion shouldn’t affect what the U.S. government decides to do, but the MEK’s lack of support inside the country where it is supposedly the “most important” opposition group shows that the advocates for the MEK are just repeating falsehoods they’ve been told to say. It is also hard to miss that the sudden surge of interest in the MEK has largely overtaken American hawks’ former interest in the Green movement.

Third Update: The key legal criterion for continuing to designate the MEK as a terrorist organization is this one:

The organization engages in terrorist activity or terrorism, or retains the capability and intent to engage in terrorist activity or terrorism [bold mine-DL].

One of the more unfortunate things I have experienced recently was watching the extended version of the trailer for the new adaptation of The Three Musketeers. I’m not sure when they lost me, but it was probably when Orlando Bloom appears onscreen as “Buckingham,” the mastermind of those famous 17th-century aerial gunships under the control of the big, bad Cardinal Richelieu. I don’t begrudge remakes some of their liberties in changing things here and there, but must they be so painfully stupid? Granted, we’re a long way removed from the era when Three Musketeers movies meant having Oliver Reed as Athos and Richard Chamberlain as Aramis, but back then there was some minimal effort made to make the movies agree with the original stories. Now it has become little more than an excuse for the director who gave you the Resident Evil series and Alien vs. Predator to blow up early modern France on film. What a pointless waste.

The chain’s demise could speed the decline in sales of hardcover and paperback books as consumers increasingly turn to downloading electronic books or having physical books mailed to their doorsteps.

“When you lose literally miles of bookshelves, it’s going to have an impact,” said David Young, chief executive of Lagardère SCA’s Hachette Book Group, which Borders owed $36.9 million at the time of its bankruptcy filing. “I hope other retailers will now step up and make offers for what they consider to be the prime sites,” Mr. Young said. “It’s a tragedy Borders didn’t make it through.”

The loss of Borders may also make it more difficult for new writers to be discovered. “The liquidation of Borders is an irreplaceable loss of a big part of the book-discovery ecosystem,” said Michael Norris, a senior analyst at Simba Information, a unit of MarketResearch.com “Thousands of people whose job consisted of talking up and selling books will eventually being doing something else, and that’s bad for authors, agents, and everyone associated with the value chain in books.” ~The Wall Street Journal

Via Damon Root, Anthony Gregory rejoices:

The failure of Borders is a beautiful thing, coming as it does from the market process. If voluntary competition should one day bring Amazon.com down, in the midst of a competing commercial success today unimaginable but even more friendly to consumers than that wonderful online store, we will again have reason to celebrate.

Viewed another way, Amazon has flourished as much as it has thanks to the unfairness of being able to compete with physical bookstores without the burden of paying taxes to state authorities. It has gained at the expense of other firms by evading taxation that its competitors could not evade, and it has vigorously opposed attempts to subject it to the same rules. One man’s successful business model is another man’s example of gaming the system. Meanwhile, ten thousand Borders employees will have to find other work in a miserable labor market, and the book industry as a whole will suffer significantly from the loss of sales that will follow. If this is a “beautiful thing,” I’d hate to see what a disaster looks like.

Despite the optimistic public spin on the Libya campaign put out by the western allies, the fact that the “internal exile” option is being considered is, I think, a telling sign of anxiety. ~Gideon Rachman

The Transitional National Council (TNC) has floated the possibility of internal exile before, which prompted this pointed response from Spencer Ackerman:

Luckily, Gaddafi would never dream of using his exile to organize an insurgency against his successors. Even luckier, he would never find active or passive receptivity to such an insurgency when post-Gaddafi governance inevitably falters and the rebel front, held together only by opposition to Gaddafi, fractures. Best yet, it will find no attractive rallying cry for its cause in the presence of NATO peacekeepers. It’s a really great thing we got involved in this war, since nothing can go wrong.

Speaking of the Transitional National Council, it is worth noting that recognizing it as the Libyan government ignores a few other small problems:

But the problem is that it is only barely in control of the war; it clearly does not represent the full expanse of Libyan opposition; and it is very unlikely to remain a major political body after the war.

For all of the talk of the TNC being treated as the “legitimate governing authority,” it remains the case that its main source of legitimacy comes from outside the country. From the same Globe and Mail report:

“They are much more adept at building legitimacy among European governments than they are at building legitimacy among the Libyan people,” said a European diplomat who works with the council.

It isn’t simply that the TNC lacks the ability to exercise meaningful control in the areas nominally under its authority, but that the people in anti-Gaddafi areas outside Benghazi do not regard it as representing their interests:

Beyond this, there is the larger question of just how much of anti-Gadhafi Libya the NTC actually represents. That became clear this week during an interview with Mohammed Musa El-Maghrabi, who represents the rebel fighters of the war-torn city of Brega in the NTC.

“While obviously we feel that the NTC is better than Gadhafi rule, they are only representing Benghazi – we do not have any sense of them representing Brega,” Mr. El-Maghraba said before meeting NTC leaders Thursday. “To us, it looks like the NTC is a foreign government, full of nepotism and corruption. This worries us. Do we want to have a Gadhafi dictatorship replaced with a Benghazi dictatorship?”

Brega may be an unusual case. Nevertheless, Mr. El-Maghrabi’s outburst does raise an eyebrow: If the NTC is unable to create a sense of legitimacy among the people of Brega, two hours down the road, then how on earth will it ever win the respect of Tripoli?

Despite some recent successes against Gaddafi’s forces, the military situation has not changed very much. C.J. Chivers has continued his reporting from the western mountains:

On a broader level, the blue-tipped rocket — along with many other signs, including a shortage of rifles and machine guns in most of the fighting groups — was an indicator that expectations of a swift rebel advance out of the mountains toward Tripoli are unrealistic, barring a collapse from within of the Qaddafi forces blocking the way. The rebel military leadership has admitted this much, too. A force equipped as they are, they say, cannot expect to undertake an arduous open-desert march against a dug-in, conventional foe with armor, artillery, rockets, and more.

As Tony Karon wrote last week, this is why NATO governments are paying more attention to a political solution that they previously dismissed:

But while the rebels have recently been making a better fight of it, there’s still plenty of resilience in the regime’s forces, and little sign that the rebels are capable of overrunning the capital. Hence the growing talk of a political solution, particularly with a slowdown expected in the ground war with the onset of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan a little under three weeks from now.

The Telegraph‘s report over the weekend detailed the proposals now being considered by Western governments:

That is why, for all the talk of pressing on, more credence is also being attached than formerly to the negotiating powers of the African Union, to proposals like Turkey’s, and to the skills of Abdul Elah al-Khatib, the UN envoy who is now the outside world’s “sole intermediary” with the regime.

Even the Turkish “Ramadan ceasefire” proposal is being considered, one western diplomat said, while another admits that the idea of Col Gaddafi staying in Libya, once as much an anathema to the allies as to the rebels, is not an “red line”.

It may all seem rather shabby. It may all in fact be moot – after putting out feelers to the West in past weeks, Col Gaddafi himself is now promising, once again, to “fight on to the end”.

But unless an effort is made at least to try for peace, the alliance fears an already troubled campaign will not only stall, but implode in acrimony and humiliation.

Habsburg has recalled as an epiphany the day he first spontaneously answered the nationality question with “I am a European,” but his definition of that term was steeped in a rudely Huntingtonian paradigm vis-à-vis Orthodox Christianity. He supported the destruction of the Njegos Chapel on Mt. Lov?en in Montenegro and Montenegrins’ eventual conversion from Orthodoxy to some form of union with Rome. His attitude to Orthodoxy was in sharp contrast to his conciliatory benevolence to Islam. ~Srdja Trifkovic

There may be a temptation for traditional conservatives in the U.S. to confuse respect for some of the more admirable aspects of the Habsburg dynasty with straightforward enthusiasm for Otto von Habsburg on the occasion of his death, but Dr. Trifkovic’s article is a helpful reminder of why this is too easy. Obviously, his views on the Bosnian and Kosovo wars were wrongheaded, but it is the underlying antagonism towards Orthodox nations that is more significant. It was this same antagonism that helped to fuel the rivalries in the Balkans that led to the ruin of Europe, the destruction of the empire that Otto von Habsburg’s family had ruled, and the collapse of his family’s dynasty. More important, it reflects a basic misunderstanding of the nature of European civilization to exclude from its definition half of the European Christian inheritance.

Update: Foreign Policy has a number of pictures of Otto von Habsburg’s funeral in a slideshow here. Looking at them reminded me of a video of the funeral procession of the Zita that I had seen in my graduate course on Austrian history. The most interesting moment is when the procession reached the doors of the monastery where the crypt is located. As Armin Thurnher describes it in an article published today:

There, the Master of Ceremonies knocked three times on the door before the monks inside opened it to make way for the coffin.

Thurnher does not relate this about the most recent procession, but as I recall from the video the monks refused entry to the procession after Zita’s titles were read out and claimed not to recognize her, saying, “Wir kennen Sie nicht.” It was only when she was presented to the monks as nothing more than a sinful human being that her coffin was permitted to enter the building. Here is the video from Zita’s funeral in 1989.

Georgia’s main newspapers published front pages without any photographs today to make a coordinated protest of the arrests of three photographers accused of espionage, and claimed that their confessions had been coerced by the authorities. According to The Guardian‘s report, one of the accused photographers earlier explained why they had been targeted:

Shortly after his arrest Abdaladze passed a statement to a newspaper denying the accusation and saying he believed he and his colleagues had been targeted on Saakashvili’s orders for photographing the bloody aftermath of an opposition demonstration on 26 May when riot police clashed with protesters.

“Our photos travel around the whole world and the press of many countries where Mikheil Saakashvili proudly presents the image of himself as a champion of democracy,” wrote Abdaladze. “He did not forgive us that we spoiled the image.”

According to Thomas de Waal’s new report on Georgia for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the country’s governing elite brings significant pressure to bear on all journalists:

Bias in news coverage is less evident in Georgia than in other post-Soviet states, but the main news broadcasts nonetheless give strong and mostly favorable coverage to the activities of the president and government. The International Crisis Group writes, “The phrase ‘it came down from above’ has become part of journalists’ private vocabulary. Another major problem is that many journalists consider their job security is dependent upon self-censorship, whether they work for pro- or anti-government outlets.”

Recognition by the United States (and other countries) of the NTC as the “legitimate governing authority” of Libya is especially unusual under international law because the NTC does not control all of Libyan territory, nor can it claim to represent all of the Libyan people. Indeed, as a general rule, international lawyers have viewed recognition by states of an insurgent group, when there is still a functioning government, as an illegal interference in a country’s internal affairs [bold mine-DL].

Recognition of the NTC while the Qaddafi regime still controls extensive territory and exercises some governmental functions also raises other legal and practical problems, such as which group bears the responsibility for Libya’s treaty obligations. For example, does the Qaddafi regime still have international obligations under the Vienna Conventions on Diplomatic Relations and Consular Relations to protect foreign embassies or to provide consular access to captured foreign nationals, such as members of the press? Will the United States enter into diplomatic relations with the NTC? No doubt these are among the “various legal issues” that Secretary Clinton says the State Department is working through. ~John Bellinger III

It would be a bit late to start worrying about illegal interference in another country’s internal affairs at this point where Libya is concerned, but it is striking that standard U.S. policies and international law are both to be turned on their head for the sake of vindicating the weaker side in a civil war in a country of no great importance. If it were of vital importance to the U.S. and our allies who governed Libya, perhaps there might be some practical reason for making the rules up as we go along, cutting corners, and generally making a mockery of our support for a “rules-based” international order, but it has never been all that important. These are the kinds of haphazard decisions that follow from a poorly-conceived, hasty intervention that serves no discernible national interest.