Oh What a Lovely Budget Item

http://reason.com/archives/2011/04/01/oh-what-a-lovely-budget-item

Oh What a Lovely Budget Item
For a neocon, fiscal restraint stops at the water's edge.
Jesse Walker | April 1, 2011

When Bill Kristol endorsed America's intervention in Libya, the Weekly 
Standard editor was being completely consistent with everything else he has 
said about American foreign policy. He just wasn't being consistent with his 
pose as a proponent of fiscal restraint. It's bracing to watch Kristol twirl 
so easily from denouncing "the Democrats' orgy of spending" and complaining 
about Republicans who "don't have a credible plan to deal with the debt or 
the deficit" to jubilating that the president "didn't shrink from defending 
the use of force." But the pundit's gyrations can't obscure a basic reality: 
You can pay your bills or you can be a global policeman, but you can't do 
both. Not in 2011.

According to ABC, the cost of Obama's kinetic spending reached $600 million 
in its first week. The Pentagon estimates that the total could reach $800 
million by the end of September, and the Pentagon just might be lowballing. 
Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary 
Assessments, has told The National Journal that the price tag could "easily 
pass the $1 billion mark on this operation, regardless of how well things 
go." And if things don't go well...

But let's stick, for the moment, with the costs of that initial week. That's 
already more than half the amount House Republicans have asked to cut from 
Americorps. It's more than twice the amount they've asked to cut from Amtrak. 
It's nearly four times the size of National Public Radio's entire operating 
budget for fiscal year 2011, including the parts that come from private 
sources. All this for just a week of a war that—unlike our invasions and 
occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan—doesn't even pretend to be an act of self-
defense. (When Kristol endorsed a spending freeze, he made an explicit 
exception for "national security." I realize that "national security" is 
usually a euphemism for "anything remotely related to foreign policy," but 
just for fun, let's take it literally. Does anyone out there seriously 
believe NATO's planes are in Libya's skies to keep Americans secure?)

And what about those troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the price tag 
isn't threatening to hit a billion but long ago topped a trillion? It goes 
without saying that Kristol and his cohort still support both wars even as 
they're eager to add a third. It also goes without saying that the Libyan 
operation will make it harder to make military cuts of any kind. (As a 
spokesman for Joe Lieberman put it to Politico, "Congress should be very 
careful and cautious about any reductions in defense spending, given the many 
profound responsibilities shouldered by our military at this time.") For a 
neocon, fiscal restraint stops at the water's edge.

There are several coherent ways to think about federal spending and foreign 
policy right now. You can address America's fiscal crisis by calling for 
serious cuts both at home and abroad. That's the libertarian path. You can 
deny that we're facing a serious fiscal crisis at all, and thus feel free to 
support new spending at home and overseas. That's what the pro-war, pro-
bailout liberal hawks have been doing. And you can deny we face a serious 
fiscal crisis but join in the libertarians' other arguments against the wars. 
That's the liberal doves' approach.

What you can't coherently claim is that we need to both (a) bring our 
financial house in order or face fiscal ruin and (b) embark on one expensive 
open-ended military adventure after another. Yet conservatives in the Kristol 
mold don't seem to see a contradiction here at all.

On Thursday, Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post led off a blog entry with 
fulsome praise for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and a letter he recently wrote 
endorsing American intervention in Libya. She contrasted Rubio and his red-
blooded hawkishness with President Obama, who she assured us "would still be 
dithering" if it weren't for pressure from "Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron, 
Hillary Clinton and a few others." She made it clear that she thinks the 
locales that demand our leadership are not limited to Libya. She was 
especially scornful of Obama's alleged belief that "we will meet our 
obligations" to the world only if "it doesn't cost too much."

And then, in the very same post, she complained that the president's budget 
is "devoid of serious measures to steer us back from the brink of fiscal 
doom." She's right about that. But she isn't one to talk.

Jesse Walker is managing editor of Reason magazine.

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