Yeah, told ya

Yesterday I pointed out that -- misleading spin dutifully regurgitated by The New York Times aside -- Defense Secretary Robert Gates is not proposing any actual cuts in total Pentagon spending, but is rather seeking to reshuffle funds so he can spend more money on killing poor foreigners Defending America and less on the military bureaucracy itself, with the military one of the few institutions immune from budget cutbacks amid the ongoing recession. Despite this, I noted it was readily apparent that the GOP (and more than a few Democrats) would blast the out-of-control-commies in the White House for risking the lives of good, god-fearing Americans by spending marginally less on some politician's pet weapons system.

From Businessweek, the oh-too-predictable fallout from Gates' announcement:

Republican Rep. J. Randy Forbes was livid at the decision, calling it "further evidence of this administration allowing its budget for social change to determine defense spending."

"What we are witnessing is the piecemeal auctioning off of the greatest military the world has ever known," he said.

[Virgina Republican Gov. Bob] McDonnell shared Forbes' sentiment, saying he sensed a fundamental reordering of priorities by the Obama administration.

"When I see the federal mandates being put on Virginia by various federal legislation, when I see spending growing at $1.16 trillion a year, it appears to me that there are being cuts in defense made to fund other programs that are, in my view, much less important," McDonnell said.

I know actual facts have no place in politics, but worth pointing out: President Obama is spending more on the U.S. military than George W. Bush ever did, with his administration seeking a record $708 billion in defense budget for 2011 -- excluding the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because the godless Blue Team is in power, I understand that Republicans are legally bound to blast the administration for engaging in cr-a-zy liberal social engineering no matter what they do; they'd have a stronger case, though, if they noted that social engineering is primarily taking place in Kabul, not Kansas.

Who's cutting what now?

According to The New York Times, Defense Secretary Robert Gates has just announced a plan "to cut billions of dollars from the Pentagon budget." Great! With states running massive budget deficits and the official unemployment rate hovering around double-digits, what better time could there be to "trim back on unaffordable defense spending," as the Times puts it in its lede, right?

Except, of course, no one's talking about actually cutting the amount spent on the Defense Department. In fact, all Gates is proposing is basically reshuffling the money the Pentagon spends on its army of private contractors and retired advisers so it can spend more on its military occupations overseas. The Times, though, waits until the 12th paragraph to inform us of that:

The goal is to convert as much as 2 percent or 3 percent of spending from “tail” to “tooth” — military slang for support services and combat forces. Mr. Gates argued that if Congress guaranteed a 1 percent increase in real defense spending over years to come, the savings he seeks would be reinvested in the combat forces and would be sufficient to pay for national defense.

The budget measures go beyond what many previous defense secretaries have done to cut redundancies and inefficiencies.

But they do not represent an actual decline in year-to-year total spending.

So despite the fact Gates is not actually slashing spending -- the announced cuts merely intended to insulate his department from calls for real reductions at a time when cities are turning off their streetlights in a desperate attempt to save money -- the paper of record acts as if the big story is that a few DOD bureaucrats and contractors may lose their jobs rather than the offensive reality that the department is immune from budget cuts during the worst recession in decades, presenting the Defense Secretary as a stern, committed budget-cutter while neglecting the crucial detail that his vaunted cuts are simply part of an attempt to free up more tax dollars for killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan (and for not-so-covert ops in Iran, Yemen and Somalia).

Perhaps the most depressing aspect of it all? I fully expect to see a press release from the Republican National Committee tomorrow and impassioned speeches on the floor of Congress denouncing the Obama administration for "cutting defense spending" and putting us all at risk of Another 9/11 (TM); real men know that if you aren't going to increase war funding by at least 10 percent a year you might as well wave the white flag and surrender to the terrorists, after all. And so the charade continues.

US officials accuse Iran of complying with its treaty obligations

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, acting as someone overseeing history's most expansive empire would, is concerned the Obama administration is not prepared to do what it takes to confront Iran over its nuclear program -- so concerned, he's issued a memo about it, The New York Times reports:

[I]n his memo, Mr. Gates wrote of a variety of concerns, including the absence of an effective strategy should Iran choose the course that many government and outside analysts consider likely: Iran could assemble all the major parts it needs for a nuclear weapon — fuel, designs and detonators — but stop just short of assembling a fully operational weapon.

In that case, Iran could remain a signatory of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty while becoming what strategists call a “virtual” nuclear weapons state.

According to several officials, the memorandum also calls for new thinking about how the United States might contain Iran’s power if it decided to produce a weapon, and how to deal with the possibility that fuel or weapons could be obtained by one of the terrorist groups Iran has supported, which officials said they considered to be a less-likely possibility.

The Obama administration's response:

Pressed on the administration’s ambiguous phrases until now about how close the United States was willing to allow Iran’s program to proceed, a senior administration official described last week in somewhat clearer terms that there was a line Iran would not be permitted to cross.

The official said that the United States would ensure that Iran would not “acquire a nuclear capability,” a step Tehran could get to well before it developed a sophisticated weapon. “That includes the ability to have a breakout,” he said, using the term nuclear specialists apply to a country that suddenly renounces the nonproliferation treaty and uses its technology to build a small arsenal.

The bolded part is important: that Iran could remain a signatory to the NPT while maintaining a "virtual" weapons capability is a concession that developing such a capacity is perfectly legal under the treaty. That being the case, what then would be the justification under international law for taking action -- in the form of economic or aerial warfare -- to stop Iran from possessing the enrichment capacity and knowhow to possibly someday build nuclear weapons, if it chose to do so (which even U.S. intelligence agencies don't believe the Iranians have decided to do)? My money's on a Security Council resolution.

Still, what is clearly illegal is not having a nuclear "breakout" capacity -- as Iran stands accused not of possessing, but seeking to possess -- but "the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State," as the non-proliferation treaty itself notes. That's something to be remembered the next time a U.S. official declares "all options are on the table" when dealing with Iran, and contrasted with the Obama administration's recently stated policy in its Nuclear Posture Review of maintaining the right to use nuclear weapons against those it deems in violation of the NPT (e.g. Iran).

Indeed, Harvard's Stephen Walt observes on his blog for Foreign Policy that Obama's official nuclear posture "amounts to saying that Iran is still a nuclear target even when it has no weapons [of] its own." And beyond the illegality of threatening force against a state in compliance with its treaty obligations -- which also violates the long-standing U.S. pledge to "not use nuclear weapons against any non-nuclear weapon state party to the NPT" -- the administration's policy makes no sense on pure pragmatic grounds, as it only gives Iran "additional incentives to pursue a nuclear weapons option," says Walt. Declaring that "we reserve the right of 'first use' against Iran now (when it has no weapons at all)," however, sure sounds "like a good way to convince them that their own deterrent might be a pretty nice thing to have."

It's sometimes alleged that Ayatollah Khamenei & Co. are irrational, driven by ideology rather than pragmatism. But what should non-proliferation advocates fear in light of the years of bellicose rhetoric from Washington? That they're not.

'Murtha's personal efforts on behalf of the Afghan Resistance'

Washington is mourning the passing of Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman John Murtha today, with everyone from President Obama on down issuing somber remarks praising his long legislative career. Notably, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who in the '80s headed the CIA when the Reagan administration was funneling arms and money to the Afghan mujahideen (folks who later would join the Taliban, and some guy named Osama bin Laden) as they fought the Evil Empire -- the other one -- dedicates much of his statement to praising "Murtha's personal efforts on behalf of the Afghan resistance fighting the Soviets - efforts that helped bring about the end of the Cold War."

And helped bring about 9/11. But it would be uncouth, I understand, to say so at a time like this. And why not take the opportunity of a man's passing to try and further embed a convenient mythical narrative in the national psyche?

History, as told by the U.S. government

"We think we have a strategy that will create the space and time for the Afghans to stand up their own security forces and take responsibility.  But we're not going to be, you know, walking away from Afghanistan again.  We, we did that before, it didn't turn out very well.  So we will stay involved, we will stay supportive, and I think that's exactly the right approach."

-- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Meet the Press, December 6, 2009

Advocates for a “strong” foreign policy of U.S. empire, beyond suffering the ills of projection and overcompensation, possess a remarkable capacity for ignoring inconvenient aspects of history. That is, while those of the bomb-them-‘till-their-free school of thought can point to a long list of countries and conflicts where they argue an American intervention could have prevented massive loss of life -- Rwanda, Darfur, etc. -- they are remarkably unconcerned with any of the negative consequences befalling a policy of constant war (such as the establishment of permanent and sizable constituency directly benefitting from empire and armed conflict that might agitate for wars not always on the basis of Samantha Power’s superior moral sensibilities) or the demonstrated failings of past U.S. interventions (Vietnam, Cambodia, East Timor, Iran, Iraq...). Conveniently, these are often the same people ordering the bombs to be dropped in the first place.

So when Hillary Clinton, alluding to the presence of al Qaeda in Afghanistan before 9/11, suggests that was a result of the U.S. “walking away” from the region, she’s conveniently gliding over more than a decade of American arms and funding that went to groups we now collectively label “the Taliban” -- and a few folks, like Osama bin Laden, that would later on make a name for themselves turning their fire against their former patrons -- as one would expect from a person in her position. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who as a high-ranking CIA official helped direct funding to the Afghan mujahideen beginning in 1979, has made the same self-serving claim, arguing the the hypothetical actions the U.S. did not take in Afghanistan are more responsible for its present state that the demonstrable, having-actually-occurred actions successive American administrations did take. For those who gain power and prestige from the maintenance of a global American empire -- people like Gates and Clinton, and the countless hangers-on at Washington think tanks and within the State and Defense bureaucracies -- it serves one’s interests well to contrast make-believe accounts of interventions that could be with the less than holy interventions of the real world.

Preferring a fairy tale straight out of Hollywood, Gates and Clinton neglect to mention the very real blowback that came about as result, not of some policy of backwards isolationism, but imperial Cold War proxy fighting aimed at undermining the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan by arming and funding -- via the always reliable Pakistani intelligence service, financial backing courtesy of our theocratic friends in Saudi Arabia -- many of those we now call the Taliban and al Qaeda (who, mind you, are not the same thing). Rather than a failure to build more schools and playgrounds following the Soviet exit, it was a proactive U.S. policy aimed at strengthening the mujahideen with money and arms that ultimately led to their being strengthened. One needn't possess a PhD in international affairs to grasp that cause and effect. The staggering number of Muslims the U.S. government has killed since the late 1980s has only further strengthened those groups by fueling opposition to the United States, often labeled "anti-Americanism" by the media as if it were some sort of irrational religious phenomenon and not a perfectly understandable reaction to American policy in the Middle East.

As becomes more obvious the more you observe those in power, it simply pays to be blissfully unaware -- or to appear that way -- if one wishes to rise to the top of the hierarchy. Consider Gates’ comments rejecting there being any historical comparison between the Soviet and American occupations of Afghanistan:

"First of all, the Soviets were trying to impose an alien culture and, and political system on, on Afghanistan.  But more importantly, they were there terrorizing the Afghans. They killed a million Afghans.  They made refugees out of five million Afghans.  They were isolated internationally.  All of those factors are different for, for us, completely different.  We have the sanction of the U.N. We have the sanction of NATO.  We have the invitation of the Afghan government itself.  We have 42 military partners in Afghanistan."

Boiled down, Gates' defense of the U.S.-led war is this: we’ve got more friends, which I doubt would pass good old St. Augustine’s litmus test. And spoken by a man who oversees another U.S. war that has created five million refugees and, by some accounts, led to the deaths of more than one million people -- to say nothing of the very real death and destruction U.S. policy has wrought on Afghanistan in the last decade alone that Gates so blithely elides -- the remarks are offensively asinine. Again, though, that’s just par for the course, to be expected.

And given the historical illiteracy of much of the major media's celebrity journalists, why should Gates be bothered with repeating uncomfortable truths that don't help the preferred U.S. narrative? It's not like he will ever be challenged on his history, certainly not by the likes of NBC's David Gregory, whose idea of a tough question is asking Gates -- no joke -- "Is failure an option in Afghanistan?" Well, David, no it isn't, I suppose. Practicing real journalism isn't one either, from the looks of it.