Today is one of those days when blogging is difficult -- lots of meetings through the day, office hours for students, and then I take off for Korea. So no time for extended reflection on anything, except...

I sometimes think the U.S. Congress is working overtime to prove my point about the domestic origins of our screwed-up Middle East policy, and to set a new record for fealty to the Israel lobby. Of course you already saw that those enlightened and courageous patriots up on the Hill have voted to slash our foreign aid budget, except, of course, for the biggest chunk, which happens to go to one of the wealthiest recipients. Translation: Israel will still get its $3 billion per year, even though its per capita income is now 27th in the world and even though lots of other countries and programs are getting their aid totals whacked. Moreover, as Lara Friedman of Americans for Peace Now runs down here, they are also targeting the Palestinian Authority because it had the temerity to apply for recognition as a state a week or so ago. Those fiends! How dare they seek a state of their own!

Needless to say, it is hard to imagine a policy that could be better designed to solidify regional resentment and hatred of the United States, and at a moment when local populations are finding their own voice for the first time in decades. And it's equally hard to find an approach to this conflict that is more likely to do long-term harm to Israel itself, by encouraging it to continue the policies that have squandered so much international acceptance and directly contributed to various social and economic problems there. Not to mention the dubious morality of punishing stateless peoples while rewarding the country that is continue to expand its illegal settlements. Talk about hitting the negative policy trifecta: bad for the United States, bad for the Palestinians, and bad for Israel too.

Meanwhile, I'm off to Seoul this evening, to attend a conference on regional security issues at the Institute for Foreign Affairs and National Security. It is a very impressive group of American and Korean scholars, including several who know a lot more about these issues than I do. I expect to learn a lot, but mostly I'm interested in figuring out just who worries the South Koreans most: China, North Korea, or us?

Just when you think your contempt for Congress could not get any higher, our elected representatives manage to do something to ratchet it up another notch. After congressional shenanigans helped spark a major market sell-off and sparked fears of a double-dip recession, you'd think every single one of them would be heading back to their districts to figure out what their constituents wanted and to try to explain how they were going to help make things better. Or maybe a few of them would even spend the recess taking a crash course in macroeconomics and public finance, so that they could start exercising their public duties more responsibly.

But what did 81 of them decide to do instead? You guessed it: they are off on junkets to Israel, paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation, an AIPAC spinoff that has been funding such trips for years. That's right: during the August recess nearly a fifth of the U.S. Congress will visit a single country whose entire population is less than that of New York City.  

Such behavior is especially disturbing in light of our current woes; even Greta Van Susteren of Fox News found it appalling (h/t Mondoweiss here and here). But it's not really a new pattern: in recent decades about 10 percent of all Congressional trips overseas have been to Israel, even though it is only one of the nearly 200 countries in the world.

Why do Congresspersons do this, especially at a moment when it is obvious that they ought to be worrying about conditions here at home? Mostly because such junkets burnish a legislator's ‘pro-Israel' credentials and facilitate campaign fundraising. Such trips also expose these visitors to the policy preferences and basic worldview of Israel's leaders, which is of course why AIEF pays for them.   

I suppose I ought to be grateful that AIPAC and its sister organizations continue to work overtime to prove me and my co-author right. But there are bigger issues at stake here, which is why I hope that every one of those eighty-plus Congressmen faces a lot of nasty questions from their constituents upon their return. 

And in a related story, the Israeli government has just announced a new round of settlement building in occupied East Jerusalem. (For apt commentary, see Matt Duss of the Center for American Progress here.) If you've been wondering why most people have lost faith in U.S. stewardship of the peace process and are turning to other strategies--such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement or the push for a Palestinian state at the UN --well, I think you have your answer. And if "two states for two peoples" is never achieved and Israel ceases to be either a Jewish majority state or a true democracy, you'll know exactly which misguided or feckless Americans helped bring that about.  

UPDATE:  American taxpayers will be pleased to know that Representative Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) has reassured Israelis that financial challenges "will not have any adverse effect on America's determination to meet its promise to Israel."  Translation: we may be cutting Medicare and Social Security for U.S. citizens, but Israelis--whose country has the 27th highest per capita income in the world--will continue to get generous subsidies from Uncle Sucker.

Remember the 1990s? Back in those days, the U.S. was recognized as the world's sole superpower. Our economy was booming, we ended the decade with a budget surplus, and there was a widespread sense around the world that the United States really had its act together.  True, we had some pretty bitter partisan politics, misguided polices like "dual containment" were helping pave the way for 9/11, and corrupt financiers were busy sowing the seeds for the 2007 meltdown, but most of the world had the impression -- rightly or wrongly -- that the United States knew what it was doing. People like Tom Friedman extolled America's virtues in books like The Lexus and the Olive Tree, arguing that the rest of the world would have to embrace "DOS.Capitalism 6.0" (in other words, our system), or fall by the wayside. Overall, a powerful aura of competence enhanced U.S. influence and magnified our "hard power." 

Fast forward to right now. We are on the brink of a major self-inflicted wound, driven solely by the deep dysfunction that now seems baked into our political system. Why should Pakistanis, Afghanis, Europeans, Chinese, Thais, Mexicans, Venezuelans, or anybody else take our advice on how to govern, when they watch the sorry set of ignorant clowns who are holding the rest of us hostage? If the worst case happens and the United States ends up defaulting, the economic costs will be significant enough. But it is also likely to do considerable damage to America's reputation for being a reasonably well-governed society, and it will accelerate the tendency for people around the world to look elsewhere for guidance. And while all this time and attention has been wasted on the debt ceiling, other problems are festering and will be there to bite us later.

I wonder if all those "patriots" in the Tea Party and the GOP ever thought about that. And if they did, would they even care?

Not that FP has suddenly become joke central, but there's an old joke that runs like this:

An accountant, a social scientist and a lawyer are seated in a room. A guy walks in and asks them: "how much is 2 + 2?" The accountant whips out a calculator, pencils and paper, scribbles for awhile, and then says: "The answer, sir, is 4." The social scientist grabs her laptop, fires it up a few minutes, and then says "Well, as you know this is not an exact science, but I can say with a 95% level of confidence that the answer is between 3 and 5."

The lawyer, meanwhile, gets up, looks under all the chairs, checks in the closet, opens the door to the room and looks both ways down the hall. Then he comes back, sidles up to the guy who asked the question, and whispers:

"I don't care. How much do you want it to be?"

I mention this because I learned that the Obama administration is claiming that it doesn't need congressional authorization for its Libyan intervention under the War Powers Act. Why? Because what we are doing doesn't amount to "full-blown" hostilities.

Oh, please. Let's start with the definition of "war" itself. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as "a state of armed conflict between different countries or different groups within a country." Now, let's see: what are we doing in Libya? What we know is that we've sent cruise missiles, and drones and U.S. aircraft to attack military targets in various places, including several attacks on Qaddafi's own compound. We are continuing to provide targeting information to our NATO allies, who are conducting additional raids on their own. Although U.S. ground troops are not present in force, it's a safe bet that U.S. special forces are operating in various places, probably helping provide some of that targeting info. And of course because the Obama administration isn't telling us everything that it's doing, we have no clear way of knowing exactly how involved we really are.

By any reasonable, common-sense standard, in short, we are at war. It doesn't matter that we aren't using our full strength to help the rebels or that other states are doing more than we are. The plain fact is that the United States is using its military forces and intelligence capabilities to attack Libyan forces. In plain English, we are killing (or helping to kill) Qaddafi loyalists (and occasionally innocent civilians), in an openly-acknowledged campaign to drive him from power. Sounds like war to me, and to anybody else who isn't being paid to find ways to evade or obscure reality.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether this war makes strategic sense or not. (I think not, but I can see the merits of the other side's case). They can also disagree about whether outside intervention was necessary to avert an anticipated "bloodbath" in Benghazi, or whether it was really a precipitous decision that may in the end make things worse. But let's not fall for the creative legal sophistry being offered up here. If Obama and his foreign policy team think this war (yes, war) is really in our interest, then they should make their case to the American people and their elected representatives and let the chips fall where they may. I don't have enormous respect for Congress (who could, these days?) but that's how a republic is supposed to operate. And let's not forget that Obama used to think so himself.

Postscript: Lest readers think that I'm ticked off because I'm jet-lagged, or because my trip is not going well, let me just say that I'm feeling perfectly fine, the weather here in Dublin is sensational and my Irish hosts at the IIEA couldn't have been more gracious. I'm just disappointed, but not for the first time.

Responding to E.J. Dionne, Andrew Sullivan wants to know at what point the U.S. political system became "decadent," and he offers up a number of possibilities: the Weiner scandal (E.J. Dionne's nomination), the odd notion that Sarah Palin could be considered a serious candidate for any office above a local Parks and Recreation board, or congressional "assent to torture" in 2006.

I'm glad he (and Dionne) raised the issue, but trying to pinpoint a single moment or cause is probably futile. Corruption and decadence don't occur all at once; it's a progressive disease with no clear tipping point. Part of it lies in the rise of the conservative movement post-Goldwater, when wealthy conservatives began to bankroll think tanks and media organs that were more interested in waging political warfare than getting facts right. Part of it is a pop-media culture that lets an ignorant buffoon like Rush Limbaugh or a bizarre whack-job like Glenn Beck become influential voices in our national debate. Part of it is the culture of non-accountability that is pervasive in official Washington, where the frauds that helped produce the financial crisis of 2007 barely get investigated, or where a deputy secretary of defense can play a key role in causing the Iraq debacle and then get rewarded by being named president of the World Bank, screw that up too, and bail out to a safe sinecure at a D.C. think tank. As L'affaire Weiner demonstrates, in today's America you're more likely to derail your career by sending some lewd and idiotic tweets than by sending thousands of your fellow citizens to their deaths (along with tens of thousands of Iraqis) in an unnecessary war.

What else is to blame? A political order that creates enormous incumbency advantages through gerrymandering. An electoral system that depends on an ocean of campaign contributions, thereby empowering special interest groups with deep pockets and focused agendas. A presidential election cycle that lasts for more than one-fourth of a term, thereby forcing candidates to spend too much time running for election and too little time actually governing. A Senate that spends more time preventing the appointment of needed judges and other government officials than it does debating the wisdom of going to war. And I could go on.

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Mark Twain once described members of Congress as having "the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes." Twain's mordant assessment provides a parsimonious explanation for the predictably rapturous reception that Bibi Netanyahu received there yesterday. All one can say about the vast majority of our courageous elected officials is that they aren't genuine friends of Israel, because every burst of applause was another nail in the coffin of the Zionist dream.  

Why? Because Netanyahu's central message yesterday was an emphatic rejection of a genuine two-state solution. While professing to be willing to make major sacrifices for the sake of peace, his lengthy list of preconditions made it abundantly clear that he thinks Israel is entitled to rule the Palestinian population in perpetuity-even when it becomes numerically larger than Israel's Jewish citizens -- and that the United States should back this effort no matter what. And even though the only alternatives to a two-state solution are 1) further ethnic cleansing, 2) a binational, one-state democracy, or 3) permanent apartheid, Congress is just fine with that.

It would be both tiresome and fruitless to fisk Netanyahu's speech in its entirety, but you can find intelligent commentary on it here, here, here, and here. And don't miss Lara Friedman's hilarious annotated version here. Among his various applause lines, my personal favorite was the claim that Israel has to keep its settlements because 650,000 people (i.e., about 10 percent of Israel's population) now live in them. (It's not entirely clear where Netanyahu got that number, as most estimates of the settler population put it "only" half a million or so.)

The key point, however, is that the settlements didn't sprout spontaneously, and the settlers themselves didn't just show up by accident. On the contrary, the vast majority of the settlers are there because every Israeli government since 1967 has actively promoted and subsidized the colonization of the West Bank, even though this policy is contrary to international law and at odds with measures such as U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. Not only does 242 say that Israel should withdraw from territories occupied in the Six Day War (the French version of the official text  says "the territories") but it begins by emphasizing "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force." The United States played a key role in drafting the resolution, and then effectively ignored its implications for the next forty years.

Some people still believe that settlement building was just a wacky project undertaken and backed primarily by religious extremists and by rightwing parties like Likud. In fact, colonization of the West Bank began under the Labor-led governments in the 1960s and 1970s, and governments of all stripes have backed it without exception. Read Gershom Gorenberg's Accidental Empire, Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar's Lords of the Land, or Shlomo Gazit's Trapped Fools, and you will learn that settlement building was a deliberate policy designed to "create facts," so that future prime ministers like Netanyahu could claim it was simply impossible for Israel to withdraw.  And the location of key settlement blocs like Ariel and Ma'ale Adumim were chosen to secure Israeli control over key aquifers and make it difficult-to-impossible to create a viable Palestinian state. 

As I said in my previous post, Israel faces a choice -- a two-state solution or apartheid -- and it is now crystal-clear which one Netanyahu has chosen. I see this situation as genuinely tragic, as he is condemning several more generations to live in bitter conflict and putting his own country's future at risk. That's his privilege, I suppose, but America's blind support for this foolish policy is also a serious threat to U.S. national security. So if your Congressman or Senator was clapping loudly yesterday, you might drop him or her a note and ask why they care more about subsidizing an illegal and unjust occupation than they do about America's long-term welfare and well-being. You'll probably discover that Twain was on to something.

Was the decision to intervene in Libya justified by the threat of imminent massacres, and possibly even a genocide?  And did President Obama have the authority to intervene? 

If you're still wondering about either of those questions, I have two suggestions for further reading.  The first is an op-ed by Alan Kuperman, which casts further doubt on the likelihood that Qadhafi's forces were about to engage in the indiscriminate slaughter of thousands of innocent bystanders in Benghazi.  Kuperman points out that Qadhafi loyalists did not conduct massacres in any of the cities that they have recaptured, and that the Libyan tyrant's threats to show "no mercy" applied only to rebels.  He also notes that the reported casualties are overwhelmingly male, which suggests that it is primarily combatants (i.e., rebels) who are being killed.

Note that Kuperman is no apologist for Qadhafi.  He does not deny that Qadhafi is a thuggish ruler, that his loyalists were killing civilians, or that some of their actions constitute war crimes.  The question, however, is whether there was an imminent risk of a bloodbath that "would stain the conscience of the world," as Obama put it. 

Notice also that although Obama did not use the word genocide himself, both current and previous members of his administration did raise the spectre of a genocide in order to make the case for U.S. action.   Anne-Marie Slaughter, the former head of Policy Planning in the State Department, tweeted ""The international community cannot stand by and watch the massacre of Libyan protesters. In Rwanda we watched. In Kosovo we acted."   Similarly, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said ""We learned a lot in the 1990s.  We saw what happened in Rwanda."  The clear implication was that failure to act in Libya would produce hundreds of thousands of deliberate murders (which is what occurred in Rwanda in 1994).

Given that Qadhafi is a heinous ruler of dubious legitimacy, why does this matter?  It matters because the case for intervention depends heavily on the magnitude of the humanitarian calamity that we sought to forestall.  If the danger really was that grave, then the case for intervention goes up.  But if the likely consequences of a Qadhafi victory were regrettable but not that large, then the case for intervention diminishes.  And the case for action is even weaker if there is a genuine risk that intervention might prolong the fighting, produce a stalemate or a failed state, or provoke the government into acts of brutality that it might not have conducted otherwise.  

Second: did Obama exceed his powers when he ordered the use of force?   The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel has issued an opinion on this issue (perhaps coincidentally, on April 1^st), and--surprise, surprise--they've concluded that it was perfectly ok.  The OLC makes three arguments: 1) it's not really a war, and the President has broad powers short of war; 2) we're enforcing a Security Council resolution, which gives the President even more authority, in part because he has to uphold the credibility of the Security Council; and 3) the War Powers Resolution permits the President to use force for sixty days without advance approval. 

Michael Glennon of the Fletcher School examines the OLC's arguments in the Harvard National Security Journal and finds them wanting on legal and constitutional grounds.  More tellingly, he also shows that these justifications are at odds with Obama's own statements before he became President.   In 2007, for example, Obama told the Boston Globe that "the president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involves stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."  (Obama used to teach constitutional law, so he's not exactly a tyro on these issues).  And back when she was a mere Senator, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that "I do not believe that the President can take military action--including any kind of strategic bombing--against Iran without congressional authorization."  More strikingly still, State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh has repeatedly argued--as a scholar--against precisely this sort of expansive interpretation of presidential power.  But not this time.

At this point in the history of the republic, it should come as no surprise that people working in the Executive Branch tend to think the President has the power to use military force just about any time the he and his advisors deem it necessary or advisable.  It is equally unsurprising that politicians and pundits tend to be hypocritical about this issuet: they think the President ought to have broad powers when they agree with the particular use to which it is being put, and they think those powers ought to be limited when they think the President is doing something foolish or unnecessary.  

Reasonable people can disagree about just how much authority the Executive Branch ought to have, just as they can also disagree about the course of action the United States and others should have followed with regard to the situation in Libya.  But let's be clear about the long-term effects of the de facto authority we are granting every President.  It's a messy world out there, and there will always be some trouble somewhere that people will want Uncle Sam to fix.  If you give a single individual the authority to decide when to order the world's mightiest military into battle, without having to consult anyone except his own appointed advisors, then you shouldn't be surprised when that mighty military gets used over and over and over.

The United States started out as thirteen small and vulnerable colonies clinging to the east coast of North America. Over the next century, those original thirteen states expanded all the way across the continent, subjugating or exterminating the native population and wresting Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California from Mexico. It fought a bitter civil war, acquired a modest set of overseas colonies, and came late to both world wars. But since becoming a great power around 1900, it has fought nearly a dozen genuine wars and engaged in countless military interventions.

Yet Americans think of themselves as a peace-loving people, and we certainly don't regard our country as a "warrior nation" or "garrison state." Teddy Roosevelt was probably the last U.S. president who seemed to view war as an activity to be welcomed (he once remarked that "a just war is far better for a man's soul than the most prosperous peace"), and subsequent presidents always portray themselves as going to war with great reluctance, and only as a last resort.

In 2008, Americans elected Barack Obama in part because they thought he would be different than his predecessor on a host of issues, but especially in his approach to the use of armed force. It was clear to nearly everyone that George W. Bush had launched a foolish and unnecessary war in Iraq, and then compounded the error by mismanaging it (and the war in Afghanistan too). So Americans chose a candidate who had opposed Bush's war in Iraq and bring U.S. commitments back in line with our resources. Above all, Americans thought Barack Obama would be a lot more thoughtful about where and how to use force, and that he understood the limits of this crudest of policy tools. The Norwegian Nobel Committee seems to have thought so too, when they awarded him the Peace Prize not for anything he had done, but for what they hoped he might do henceforth.

Yet a mere two years later, we find ourselves back in the fray once again. Since taking office, Barack Obama has escalated U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and launched a new war against Libya. As in Iraq, the real purpose of our intervention is regime change at the point of a gun.  At first we hoped that most of the guns would be in the hands of the Europeans, or the hands of the rebel forces arrayed against Qaddafi, but it's increasingly clear that U.S. military forces, CIA operatives and foreign weapons supplies are going to be necessary to finish the job. 

Moreover, as Alan Kuperman of the University of Texas and Stephen Chapman of the Chicago Tribune have now shown, the claim that the United States had to act to prevent Libyan tyrant Muammar al-Qaddafi from slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Benghazi does not stand up to even casual scrutiny. Although everyone recognizes that Qaddafi is a brutal ruler, his forces did not conduct deliberate, large-scale massacres in any of the cities he has recaptured, and his violent threats to wreak vengeance on Benghazi were directed at those who continued to resist his rule, not at innocent bystanders. There is no question that Qaddafi is a tyrant with few (if any) redemptive qualities, but the threat of a bloodbath that would "stain the conscience of the world" (as Obama put it) was slight.

It remains to be seen whether this latest lurch into war will pay off or not, and whether the United States and its allies will have saved lives or squandered them. But the real question we should be asking is: Why does this keep happening? Why do such different presidents keep doing such similar things? How can an electorate that seemed sick of war in 2008 watch passively while one war escalates in 2009 and another one gets launched in 2011? How can two political parties that are locked in a nasty partisan fight over every nickel in the government budget sit blithely by and watch a president start running up a $100 million/day tab in this latest adventure? What is going on here?

To read the full article, click here. 

Saturday's New York Times contained an interesting op-ed piece by Charles Blow, titled "American Shame." The main item was a table listing the 33 countries designated as "advanced economies" by the International Monetary Fund and comparing them on various social and educational characteristics. Specifically, Blow charted income inequality, unemployment rates, level of democracy, the "percentage thriving" (according to the Gallup Global Well-Being Index), food insecurity, prison population, and student performance in math and science. The bottom line: The United States is at the bottom of the heap on most of these measures, and at or near the top in none. 

It's a sobering collection of data, to be sure, but I wish Blow had added two more columns to his chart: 1) percentage of GDP devoted to defense, and 2) defense spending per capita. According to the 2010 IISS Military Balance, here's what those columns would have looked like (the countries are in the order presented by Blow, which reflected their summary ranking on the various measures, from best to worst):

Country            Defense $/GDP (%)     Defense $/population (2008)

Australia                 2.24                         1,056
Canada                     1.19                             597
Norway                     1.49                        1,264
Netherlands             1.41                            738
Germany                    1.28                            570
Austria                     0.77                            389
Switzerland                 0.83                             542
Denmark                  1.94                             344
Finland                      1.33                             693
Belgium                     1.10                             534
Malta                         0.60                             122
Japan                         0.93                             362
Sweden                      1.30                              736
Hong Kong                   n.a.                               n.a.
Iceland                         0.27 (200                  153 (2006)
New Zealand               1.39                             420
Luxembourg             0.43                             478
United Kingdom        2.28                             998
Ireland                        0.60                             382
Singapore                   4.20                            1,663
Cyprus                         2.16                              503
South Korea              2.60                             500
Italy                            1.34                              532
France                        2.35                           1,049
Czech Rep.                 1.46                              310
Slovenia                      1.53                               415
Taiwan                        2.76                              458
Slovakia                      1.55                               271
Israel                           7.41                           2,077
Spain                           1.20                              276
Greece                        2.85                             946
Portugal                      1.53                             349
United States            4.88                          2,290

And just for fun, let's toss in:

P.R. China                1.36                            45

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As someone who cares about politics and uses words for a living, I suppose I ought to be more interested in tonight's State of the Union address. Pundits and politicos are in the usual lather about it, either predicting or prescribing what Obama will or should say. I'm sure plenty of people will live-blog it tonight, and then spend tomorrow doing the usual array of post-mortems.

But I'm feeling more like Eliza Doolittle: "Words, words, words. ... I'm so sick of words." I say that because I don't think this speech is going to make much difference one way or the other. It will be mostly about domestic priorities (possibly justified by the need to compete more effectively abroad), and foreign policy is bound to get short shrift. Given the dearth of major foreign policy achievements, I'd say that's both predictable and wise.

But what will the speech accomplish? It's not going to tame House Republicans, or make obstructionist Senators more cooperative. Neither the Tea Party nor Fox/News (a wholly owned subsidiary of the GOP) is going to be won over by the president's words, no matter how eloquent he is or how effectively he triangulates. His oratory won't alter the calculations or conduct of the Taliban, sway the governments of Iran, or China, or turn Hamid Karzai into a popular and effective leader. And even in the wake of the Tucson shooting, I doubt that eloquent pleas for greater bipartisanship and a more civil discourse will end the vitriol on talk radio and in the blogosphere.

What matters isn't what Obama says tonight, but what he and his advisors, and the Congress ultimately do. The achievements of his first two years (such as health care, and rescuing the U.S. economy from the abyss), were based not on speeches but on a lot of gritty, messy, sausage-making policy work. By contrast, some of Obama's more conspicuous failures (the Middle East peace process, the half-hearted "opening" to Iran, and the Afghan quagmire), featured high-flying and well-delivered acts of oratory but were followed by ill-conceived or poorly implemented policies.

So I'll probably watch the speech, but I'm not expecting much. And my guess is that a couple of weeks hence, most of us will have forgotten about it.

Keeping up with Jeffrey Goldberg's errors is like trying to dam the Gulf Stream, and responding to his repeated smears is a mug's game. I suppose I could quote a bunch of snarky comments about him too, and we could have a nasty blogosopheric food fight for the entertainment of our readers. But I prefer to focus on the issues, instead of the name-calling that is J.G.'s stock-in-trade.

His latest silly sally is to chide me for my saying that there is no meaningful "Arab lobby" in Washington. As evidence, he points out that various Arab states have paid a lot of money to various public relations firms, in a rather transparent attempt to gain some influence in Washington. The question to ask is whether these activities produce "meaningful" influence on key foreign policy issues, especially when you compare them with the lobbying groups on the other side.

Once you ask that question, of course, his case collapses. Let's look at the vast influence that the "Arab lobby" has wielded in recent years.

1. It is undoubtedly the all-powerful Arab lobby that ensures that Israel gets $3-4 billion in economic and military aid each year, even when it does things that the United States opposes, like building settlements. And were it not for the Arab lobby, the United States would be putting a lot of pressure on Israel to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty and come clean about its nuclear arsenal.

2. It was the vaunted Arab lobby that convinced President Bush to delay a U.N. ceasefire resolution during the Lebanon War of 2006, so that Israel could try to finish off Hezbollah and continue bombing civilian areas in Lebanon. Pressure from the Arab lobby also convinced Congress to pass a resolution backing Israel to the hilt, and to remove language from the original draft that called for both sides to "protect civilian life and infrastructure."

3. When Ambassador Charles Freeman was nominated to chair the National Intelligence Council in 2009, the vast Arab lobby promptly launched a successful smear campaign to deny him the post, running roughshod over his outnumbered and powerless defenders at the New Republic, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic Monthly, and Washington Post.

4. When Obama asked Israel to implement a settlement freeze in 2009, the Arab lobby promptly swung into action and drafted open letters warning the President not to put any pressure on Israel. These resolutions passed overwhelmingly in both Houses, another sign of the Arab lobby's political clout.

5. When Israel attacked Gaza in December 2008, the Arab lobby was there to prevent the U.S. from interfering. And when the Goldstone Report raised the issue of possible Israeli war crimes in that war, the Arab Lobby no doubt called the Obama administration and told it to condemn the report, which it promptly did.

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Q. How can you tell when William Kristol is giving bad policy advice?

A. His lips are moving. Or he's typing. Or he's writing an open letter for a bunch of hawks to sign. Or launching some new letterhead organization.

I refer, of course, to Kristol's recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (co-authored with the presidents of the  the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute). The basic theme is that the world is very, very dangerous, and so the United States should not cut a nickel from its defense budget, even though we already spend more than the rest of the world combined, have most of the world's major powers on our side, and possess a robust nuclear deterrent. So even though the country is also facing massive budget deficits, at least partly due to policies that Kristol has previously promoted, we need to build a wall around the defense budget and make sure it doesn't get shrunk. At all.

Seriously, given Kristol's track record over the past decade, you'd think that people who were hoping to be taken seriously in Washington would shy away from any association with his policy ideas. But to think that, you'd also have to believe that there was some degree of accountability in American political discourse, which is of course not the case. So despite the various disasters that Kristol and his associates have helped cause over the years, they are back with another well-orchestrated campaign to convince the country to do something foolish.

This latest proposal (part of a new "Defending Defense" initiative) has already attracted ample fire from a diverse array of experts and pundits, including FP's Dan Drezner here. I see no need to pile on these various critiques, each of which makes good points. Instead, I want to focus on something that the critics have largely ignored; namely, how difficult it is going to be to make substantial cuts in defense spending, even in period of budgetary stringency, without simultaneously rethinking America's overall grand strategy.

To start with, any serious attempt to cut defense spending would face opposition from Congressional representatives who want to keep defense contractors busy and military bases open in their states or districts. Thus, when Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' proposed that DoD save some bucks by closing the Joint Forces Command, the suggestion drew howls of protest from Virginia's entire Congressional delegation. Was this because a separate Joint Forces Command was so essential to our national security? Of course not. It was because its headquarters was located in Virginia. When you consider how carefully the Pentagon scatters bases or sprinkles defense dollars in every Congressional district, you can see how hard it is going to be to make a significant dent in our current defense expenditures. And you certainly better not try to do so by trimming veterans' benefits.

Second, as I've noted before, defense spending (and an activist foreign policy) are proudly defended by most prominent DC think tanks, many of whom depend on military contractors for a substantial part of their funding. This has been true of AEI and Heritage for a long time, but take a look at the funding sources for supposedly more "progressive" think tanks like the Center for New American Security. Inside the Beltway, defenders of a large defense budget are bound to be more numerous and better-funded than critics, thereby ensuring a chorus of "expert" opinion defending the budgetary status quo (or at the most, disagreeing at the margins).

Third, national security wannabes (i.e., civilians who aspire to careers in the national security establishment) have learned that critics of excessive defense spending aren't taken as seriously in Washington and have a tougher time landing big foreign policy jobs. To be blunt, there isn't that much daylight between hardcore neocons and energetic liberal interventionists, especially when it comes to preserving U.S. military preponderance or using that power against anyone we've taken a dislike to. So even though a lot of national security jobs are likely to open up in the next year or so (as Obama's initial appointees cycle out) you shouldn't expect to see advocates of a more restrained U.S. foreign policy replacing the current group. Sadly, most of the bloggers who've been eviscerating the Kristol et al position are not in line for big jobs in DC.

Fourth, cutting defense spending is going to be hard as long as we are still fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, maintaining a globe-encircling array of military commitments, and letting most of our allies free-ride on our protection. As Drezner notes, Kristol and Co. vastly overstate the actual level of threat we face. But although U.S. forces are smaller than they were during the Cold War, we are still trying to patrol the same amount of real estate and the social engineering we've been trying to do in places like Afghanistan is very expensive, especially when compared to the strategic benefits it brings. Plus, we've burned up a lot of equipment over the past decade, and some serious money will have to be spent to re-equip U.S. forces once those wars are (finally) over.   

Which brings me to my main point. Although it is mind-boggling to realize that five percent of the world's population (the United States) now spends more on defense than the other 95 percent put together, this situation is hard to avoid when you see threats emerging virtually everywhere and when you think all of them are best met by an ambitious and highly interventionst foreign policy. If Americans want to be able to go anywhere and do anything, then they are going to have keep spending lots of money, even if all that activity merely reinforces anti-American extremism and makes more people want to come after us. (And for more on that latter point, read this book).

If you want to cut defense spending significantly, in short, you have to make some non-trivial adjustments in U.S. grand strategy. As some of you know, I think the United States would be both more prosperous and safer if we had a more restrained grand strategy and a more intelligent foreign policy. Until that happens, however, reducing defense spending itself is going to be an uphill fight, and our defense expenditures will be closer to the views of Kristol et al than to mine. Unfortunately.

I had dinner a couple of weeks ago with a group of Harvard colleagues (and a visiting speaker), and we got into an interesting discussion about America's future as a world power. Nobody at the table questioned whether the United States was going to remain a very powerful and influential state for many years/decades to come. Instead, the main issues were whether it would retain its current position of primacy, whether China might one day supplant it as the dominant global power, and whether U.S. standards of living would be significantly compromised in the future.

One participant (a distinguished economist), was especially bullish. He argued that the United States enjoyed a considerable demographic advantage over Europe, Russia, and Japan, largely due a higher birth rate and greater openness to immigration. These societies will be shrinking and getting much older on average, while the United States will continue to grow for some time to come. He also argued that the United States remained far more entrepreneurial than most other societies, and a better incubator of technological innovation. Despite our current difficulties, therefore, he was optimistic about the longer-term prospects for the U.S. economy and for America's position as a global power.

But then came the crucial caveat. After reciting this long list of American advantages, my colleague remarked: "of course, our political system could screw it all up." And everyone around the table nodded in agreement.

Read on

I hope that all of the people who helped push the UnitedStates to invade Iraq in 2003 read the front-page story in Sunday's New YorkTimes about a courageous soldier, Specialist Brendan Marrocco. It is heart-breaking. He lostboth arms and both legs to a roadside bomb in Iraq and is now in rehabilitation. Tens of thousands of others havesuffered or died in that unnecessary and foolish war. Marrocco's story, however, brings us face-to-face with war's horrible consequences and reminds us of the price that is paid when policymakers blunder into war.

I can't help but wonder what George Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, William Kristol, James Woolsey, and Doug Feith will think when they read about the damage done to Specialist Marrocco's life and his family? Do they feel a secret shame, which they are too proud or afraid to voice? Do they have any regrets for the pain that they have caused him? Do they still believe they were right, even though so many Iraqi and American lives have been shattered, and Iraq is still a wreck of a country? Or do they simply turn the page without reflecting on the consequences of their actions, and hope that the rest of us will forget the role they played?

Wars are sometimes necessary, but that was certainly not true of the Iraq war. War should always be a last resort, because many of those who get caught up in the maelstrom suffer and die. The decision to send our armed forces into combat should never be made in a half-baked way. The decision should only come after there has been a vigorous and serious public debate about the costs, benefits, and possible alternatives to fighting.

Of course, that is not what happened in the run-up to the Iraq war. Instead, we went to war on March 19, 2003 because a narrow clique of neo-conservatives dreamed up a bizarre scheme to "transform" the Middle East by spreading democracy across the region at the end of a rifle barrel, and eventually managed to sell that idea to a naïve and gullible president. We went to war because the Bush administration and its friends in the media and Congress deceived us about the dangers Iraq posed, and because they misled us about how easy it would be to win a decisive victory and exit Iraq. We went to war because the mainstream media, which is heavily into cultivating favor with influential policymakers, hardly ever asked our leaders hard questions about the case for war.  Indeed, many influential pundits became enthusiastic cheerleaders for the invasion. We went to war because many politicians in both parties were so worried about their careers that they were afraid to raise doubts about the war, even though some of them had serious reservations about whether we would succeed. And we went to war because experts who craved influence in Washington or future careers in government wanted to show how tough and resolute they were. 

The United States is a remarkably powerful and sheltered country, which is why it can afford to fight stupid wars in places like Iraq and Vietnam at only modest cost to its overall security. But we should never forget the human cost of these follies, which are paid by brave patriots like Brendan Marrocco as well as the 58,000-plus names on the Vietnam Memorial. And when the same people start telling us we need to attack someone else, we should remember just how foolish and ignorant their advice was in 2002 and remind ourselves that they show no sign of either learning or remorse.