Here’s how Bill Kristol, Fox News contributor and editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, summed up a panel discussion I attended at the conservative American Enterprise Institute:
This is a truly distinguished panel, and one I’m happy to say that’s fair and balanced. We have (former Republican Senator from Missouri) Jim Talent, a responsible, respectable hawk. We have a slightly crazed militarist in Tom Donnelly, and a really insane hegemonic imperialist… me. It’s the correct spectrum of opinion.
The crowd chuckled its DC chuckle, and Wild Bill began. As it turned out, he was ironically prophetic – these people are batshit crazy. That tens of newly-elected Tea Partiers – folks who have never had much to say on national security and foreign policy issues – are now taking their cues from these jokers is downright terrifying.
But before diving into the political angles, here’s what makes these nutcases tick:
My suspicions were first aroused when former Senator Jim Talent (MO) blamed Bill Clinton for Iraq. Would that I were joking! Indeed, Talent bemoaned Clinton’s decision to scale down the size of the military in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. He correctly claimed that we were “fully deployed” during Iraq and Afghanistan, meaning that we simply didn’t have the numbers of troops necessary to properly resource both conflicts. It’s painfully and unfortunately obvious that Talent learned exactly the wrong lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan:
How much money and how many lives would it have saved if we’d have had 14 divisions instead of 10 and had been able to do in Afghanistan at the same time as we were (doing) in Iraq? … The blood, the lives, the people who were dying… we could have been years ahead of that schedule!
In other words, not only was invading Iraq the right call, we should have gone bigger and harder. It’s just too bad that all those people had to die and we had to waste all that money there because Bill Clinton decided to cut the size of the military after the Cold War.
Is Jim Talent a co-author on Decision Points or something? And here I was thinking that the decision to go to war without fully understanding what we were getting ourselves into caused all the slow progress.
Then there was Kristol’s fundamentally misguided view of defense spending. And that’s odd because he starts out with a correct general premise: “We should cut what should be cut and shouldn’t cut what shouldn’t.” That’s all well and good, provided you think that there are things to be cut. So over to you, Bill:
The best possible spending you can have is defense spending! We got out of the Great Depression by having a big defense build up…. The Pentagon has plenty of shovel ready projects!
F-22? No way! Foreign aid? Why not? It was deliciously ironic that while Kristol supported the idea of foreign assistance, he was open to restructuring its $45 billion budget; at the same time, Kristol lauded Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), incoming House Appropriations chairman, saying Ryan “knows how little can be saved in the defense budget — maybe $20 billion.” Pssst: Bill, that’s almost half of the foreign aid budget you think is big enough to reexamine. It’s also half of State’s.
It all seems so obvious to Talent: The defense budget “is affordable. To argue that it’s not affordable just isn’t right.” It’s especially affordable if we keep cutting taxes, right Jim?
Talent wrapped it all up in a nice big Fox News bow by tying alleged American declinism to Obama’s nefarious plan to nominate Joseph Stalin’s ghost as Tim Geithner’s replacement: “A socialized economy will not let America remain a great power.” But hold on there –- does a socialist want to “position our nation for success in the global marketplace” via a “strong, innovative, and growing U.S. economy in an open international economic system that promotes opportunity and prosperity”? Then Talent has some explaining to do, because that’s what the president says in this year’s National Security Strategy.
Thankfully, there was one area these mental dwarfs didn’t completely screw up: New START. Let’s be clear: Their partisan glasses won’t let them whole-heartedly endorse a very sensible treaty. Instead, they’re holding it hostage to more missile defense spending. But they’ll vote for it… hopefully.
Now, this all gets incredibly fascinating when you put it in a political context. The major take-away from this session is that the conservative establishment is pissing down their collective leg at the Tea Party’s soon-to-be dominant position on the Hill. Their plan is to co-opt the Tea Party by supplying it with mainstream conservative positions in an area the Tea Party doesn’t spend much time thinking about.
Kristol liquored up new Tea Partiers in hopes of bringing her home after the prom:
I think the Tea Party gets a bum wrap. They don’t believe we should lose wars, they don’t believe we should weaken the military, they do believe the world would be safer if Iran didn’t have nuclear weapons.
Jim Talent poured a few shots into Kristol’s punchbowl by hitting the “DC Republican establishment” (note to Talent: you’re a member.)
People who sat around and didn’t do what had to be done in 2001-2004 (specifically: Don Rumsfeld)… it’s a little much for them to be all up in arms because one Tea Party candidate said something that sounded vaguely not quite correct from the point of view of a strong U.S. foreign policy.
They’re pandering, and hard. Rand Paul doesn’t know it yet, but the Tea Party’s biggest spending hawk is about to vote for an ever-increasing defense budgets soon enough.
It was a mind-blowing Friday morning for yours truly, but was very reassuring in a way: The conservative establishment is as out of touch and irresponsible as always on national security, and they’re trying to take advantage of the strongest but most impressionable subset of their caucus. That’s why now more than ever, progressives have to offer strong, smart, rational approaches to U.S. national security, military, and foreign policy challenges.