I don’t normally take the time to point out that I find foreign policy statements at Commentary patently wrong, because, well, that’s just to be assumed by now. But this opening salvo from Max Boot demonstrates that a) it is possible to look at an agreed-upon set of facts and reach opposite conclusions, and b) that he and I do not hold reconcilable world-views:
The U.S. is currently engaged in three active wars (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya)—four if you count the war on terror, five if you count the war on piracy. We are increasingly hard-pressed to stave off the aggressive military designs of a resurgent China. We have to deter a nuclear North Korea and prevent Iran from going nuclear. We have to prepare for the possibility of an implosion in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed, highly unstable state. We have to maintain free movement across the global commons, meaning air and sea-lanes along with outer space and cyberspace. And at the same time we have to perform myriad humanitarian missions, such as the one currently being conducted by U.S. Pacific Command to assist Japan in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami.
Because of this set of facts/wars/military operations/instances of presidential prerogative/insert-euphemism-here, President Obama’s proposed cuts to defense spending will lead, inevitably, to American decline. I look at the list and see a series of things that could be cut from defense spending. But, I mean, this vision of America could be right, especially if you think that the ideal form of the American government is as an ineffective insurance company with the world’s largest military force. That it uses whenever it gets bored. Or needs a diversion. Or both.
Seriously, though: Boot lists three wars that we are currently fighting out of choice rather than necessity, one that is a made-up amalgam of the previous three plus pepper and spice and everything nice, and another that I didn’t even know was declared. (I thought Napster learned its lesson years ago!) China’s threat to American economic hegemony is now apparently a military threat; North Korea’s barely nuclear “nuclear” test and rockets that can barely make it off the peninsula are an existential threat; Pakistan — well, he’s got me here. Pakistan is unstable — or at least less stable than it was when ruled by the type of military dictator America now “has to” oppose — and has nuclear weapons. We should formulate a plan for this worst-case scenario, which, frankly, is more reason to reduce the thinness of our military by cutting down on the unnecessary wars in which we’re engaged.
But why do any of these require that we maintain military bases in Germany? Anyone? Bueller?
Well, I guess I’ll give Boot credit for where I do agree with him: Yes, it is hypocritical on Obama’s part to call for defense cuts within weeks of starting a third concurrent war in the Arab world. We just disagree on the question of whether the preparedness of the American military is undermined by using it as a police, rather than defense force.
He forgot the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War on Obesity, the War on Child Poverty, and the War on Childhood Obesity.
Did I miss any?Report
Perhaps we should have a War on the Ridiculous use of the word “War” for everything damn thing by Americans. Boot’s use of war to define our actions against pirates and terrorists is weak at best but that is the tenor of our times.Report
An “Intervention”.
Backed by the UN Security Council, with a host of other nations acting as our allies, and we are far from being the prime provider of forces, logistics, strategy, or tactics in said Intervention.Report
This. It amuses me to no end, watching Obama take the UN and our putative allies by the ears and whisper in their ears “Do your goddamn jobs, for once in your pusillanimous lives.”Report
Pity we’re still doing all of the heavy lifting.Report
Did I miss any?
All the applications running in Tomcat.Report
But if you deploy in JBoss, they can all make overlapping calls.Report
Max Boot is completely deluded. The US military has continuously locked horns with its enemies throughout history: to say we are now involved in three active wars is to forget our military’s almost completely forgotten involvement in Colombia.
We are not hard-pressed to stave off China’s aggressive designs: if anything, we are pressing the Chinese to become more involved in peacekeeping. China is not a particularly serious threat to American interests and we have extensive contacts within the Chinese military and intelligence services: the Chinese have their own problems with the Uighur Islamic insurgency, with many Uighur fighters currently present in the Taliban muster. The Uighurs moved into northern Pakistan in a big way, teaching technology and collective dry-land farming techniques to the tribes of Northern Pakistan, to the consternation of the goat-herding oldsters. China has a long border with Pakistan and a huge set of roads and tunnels are under construction near Gilgit.
Of course we’re going to cut defense spending. This morning I had breakfast with a newly married couple. I took their wedding pictures. He’s in the US Army, been there for six years, stop-lossed in his last Iraq tour. He’s making E5 pay: they’re looking for on-base housing for them and her child. He won’t get a promotion for years to come: the military is already downsizing from its Iraq War high. She’ll have to work: she manages a trailer park.
When I’m doing defense contract work, I make more than a two-star general and get better perks. There are tens of thousands just like me, parasites on the side of the military-industrial complex and the industry is booming. This soldier tells me civilian contractors moved the ordnance around, a job his unit should have been doing. When they actually deployed, the military barely knew how to do its own job. What’s wrong with this picture?
As for the M1 Abrams tank, we do not need another main battle tank. Every Abrams in the inventory has been stripped down, sandblasted, overhauled and retrofitted top to bottom to the most modern of standards. Max Boot again demonstrates his ignorance of military procurement: where the rubber and tank treads meet the road, the military properly drives the retrofits. There are weapons systems which ought to be shitcanned: our current crop of fighter jets has reached the limits of its airframe, skin and power plant.
Just cutting parasites like me out of the picture could reduce the DoD budget by a third. You could go on cutting for years before you’d get past the corporate fat and into anything which remotely resembled military muscle. That’s just a fact.Report
Max Boot is somebody who’s every writing should be replied to by the words ‘f*ck you, you lying POS’, following by cutting off another finger.
All neocons are scum, pure and simple, unrepentant liars and frauds.Report
All neocons are scum, pure and simple, unrepentant liars and frauds.
I will never be able to really parody stuff like this because when I write it down, it withers on the page. I can hear people saying “that’s a little over the top, don’t you think?”
And I backspace.Report
Actually, it’s the obligatory cutting off of a finger I would have said was way over the top.Report
No, I could see myself leaving something like that in.Report
If “pure and” is remover it reads much better.Report
Barry, dude, just because the League has its resident over the top rightist in the person of the gleefully unrepentant Bob Cheeks does not mean us leftists are pining for a mirror image one on the other wing to make us feel bad about ourselves. I’d note also they you really need to bring some interesting philosophy or theological know-how in order to fill that seat on the left as he does on the right.
I say this as a left winger and presumably an ally: dude, you’re making us look bad and you’re not adding anything to the conversation. But on the plus side the hyperbole was excellent, add some concrete complaints and objections to go with the invective and we may have a workable comment here! Good luck, we lefties are bright, I’m sure you can pull it off.Report
North, this is why I love ya man…you get it, and you’re a leftist who can take it and give it out. If everyone on the Left had your brains, compassion, and understanding my work would be finished.
BTW, the Mrs. sends along her greetings and best wishes for a holy and happy Easter.Report
Robert, I refuse to be baited as much out of spite as from good humor to be honest. I know how much amusement you get out of prodding some into a frenzy of indignation. I can be a petty man.
My best as always to the Mrs. I trust her days are filled with profound thoughts and charitable prayer during this commemoration of the death and resurrection of her savior.Report
North, the thing is that Max’s record is public knowledge; search his writings for the past decade. That’s what I harp on again and again: these guys have records, they’re very bad, very dishonest, very evil, with no repentance.Report
Dude. Did you just move from a “this one guy did such-and-such” to “everybody who falls into the broad category that this guy falls in is bad”?
Because, if you did, I think that that is funny.Report
Eh, most of the people like Boot who have been cheering every dead brown person since 9/12/01 and want to bomb the rest of the Middle East and the first available moment are pretty horrible people.
Here’s the thing. Libertarians I get, even social conservatives I can understand, hell, even people who want a much smaller welfare state but like all the goodies to the corporate world and high earners are all understandable people I think are incredibly wrong and/or misinformed.
On the other hand, the group of people like Boot and other members of the 101st Keyboard Legion, who see the Middle East as a giant bullseye, are people who I would be truly happy if they found themselves unable to have any place in public discourse tomorrow.Report
Would you describe their writings as ululating?Report
And dancing round the fire. And putting on war paint. Except they don’t go off with the raiding party.Report
Lord of the Flies?Report
Wait… A Heidegger post with exactly four words? Who are you really, and what have you done with our H-man?Report
Has Max Boot repented for his earlier writing?
How many neocons have?Report
If you answer my question, I’ll answer your questions.Report
Barry, I agree with your assessment of the quality of Max’s thoughts on this matter more than I disagree with them. I don’t know if I’d characterize them as evil as much as stupid. But I do believe that mockery and concrete counterargument is more effective against the speech and ideology of these clowns than righteous indignation. Max’s ilk are like mold; they flourish on the outraged spittle of the indignant.Report
Eh. “Neocons” is on my list of words we ought to retire because they no longer mean anything. Unfortunately, that also includes about 75% of words commonly used in political discourse.Report
Daniel Bell once said something like, “When they talk about the neoconservatives, I think they’re just talking about Irving”.Report
When I talk about neocons, I mean Norman and Richard and Paul.
When I talk about men who should have drowned their children at birth, I mean Irving.Report
Also, I should make clear that my inspiration was that I read the title of Boot’s post, the first several sentences, and started to wonder — “Wait. Wait. I’m reading Commentary, not The American Conservative, right?” And then, boom, the Max Boot we know and love came through and saved me from looking for more signs of the apocalypse.Report
Mentioning Max Boot only made the lefties go apespit. Gates is saying the same thing, and a cooler discussion—if possible—could have used Gates as the jumpoff.
Boot links:
Gates is right to warn that “further significant defense cuts cannot be accomplished without reducing force structure and military capability.”
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/04/13/us-usa-budget-pentagon-idUSTRE73C6XG20110413Report
Nice post, Mr. Wall. I concur.
And of course Mr. Gates is right that we would have to reduce force structure and military capability, but that does not equal American decline except in the minds of militarists. Many of us see reducing forces and capability as crucial to American revival–at least if America is actually something more meaningful than the world’s policeman.Report
I find foreign policy statements at Commentary patently wrong
In fact patentedly wrong. Part of John Podhoretz’s inheritance is the ten dollars he earns whenever any other pundit exhibits that kind and degree of wrongness. (Which is why you see Victor Davis Hanson hanging out on street corners asking for spare change.)Report
“North Korea’s barely nuclear “nuclear” test and rockets that can barely make it off the peninsula are an existential threat…”
Remember how, a few years ago, Everybody Knew that North Korea had no nuclear program at all, and it wouldn’t work even if they did, and they weren’t developing ballistic missiles either?Report
Nuclear bomb or no the little fruitcake had a bajillion tons of ordinance aimed at Seoul in armored bunkers on a hair trigger. That he now has a few crude nukes hasn’t changed the calculus much.
On the other hand the last time conservatives hallucinated that Saddam was hiding a bomb under his moustache we ended up in another ‘Nam quagmire and blew both our international credibility and a trillion dollars all at once.Report
Obviously they have the economic wherewithal to take it to the next level, too!Report
Hmm… what’s a few years ago? 1956? 1994?
I don’t recall a time when no one thought that North Korea had a nuclear program. The U.S. has known about that program, and publicly stated so, since the mid-90s (and before that, even, if you consider some of their other actions to be part of a nulear program), and actively tried to put an end to it through negotiation and the promise of aid. What’s more, no one doubted, and it was well publicized at the time, that when that aid didn’t come, the nuclear program was resumed.Report
Mr. Wall,
I read John P. Normanson’s site strictly for laughs. One can neither take Mr. Normanson nor his band of merry lackeys for Avigdor Lieberman with any seriousness. Not in message. Not in track record. Not in depth or analysis of matters of global politics, national defense, or mankind in general.
Why do you give any serious credence to the (ahem) efforts of Mr. Normanson’s gaggle?
When a polemicist’s world view comes straight through Judea, Samaria, and loyalty oaths, you see every military budget alteration as a nail.
Countdown to AS and SHJ was initiated when I hit the “Submit” button on your blog.Report