Are all those "fiscal conservatives" descending on Washington prepared to take a hard look at what we get for our "national security" spending?

Except that the numbers have no doubt gotten a lot bigger, and there's a new president shoveling greenbacks into the maw of the military beast, couldn't this 2004 Monte Wolverton cartoon have been drawn today?

"What's almost revolutionary is the notion that if we're ever to get this nation back on sound economic footing, we have to cut what Dwight Eisenhower called the 'military-industrial complex' down to size."

-- Eugene Robinson, in his Washington Post column today,

"Trimming a bloated defense budget"

by Ken

Let's say you saw the following listings in a washingtonpost.com e-newsletter of the day's WaPo opinion pieces. Imagine that it's preceded and followed by links to the latest deep thinking of, say, Richard Cohen, Anne Applebaum, Dana Milbank, and (shudder) Marc Thiessen. Would your suspicions be aroused?

Michael Gerson
Trimming a bloated defense budget
Why are we spending so much, while our allies are spending so little?

Michael Gerson
Oklahoma's faith-baiting initiative
America will lose Muslim allies if it treats Islam as the enemy.

I have to imagine that the compiler of the e-newsletter was so disoriented by the real Michael Gerson column being on the whole quite sensible that he or she jumped the tracks and started seeing Michael Gerson columns everywhere. The real MG column is the one on "Oklahoma's faith-baiting initiative," in which he characterizes the Oklahoma constitutional amendment that bars use of Islamic law, sharia, in deliberations by state courts as "a novel use of American law -- not to actually address a public problem but to taunt a religious minority." He argues that "it does little good to assume that the most radical position in the debate on sharia is the most authentic, then single it out for criticism. What strategy could be more favorable to radicalism, which thrives by feeding a conflict of civilizations?" Worth a read.

By process of elimination, then, it becomes even more unlikely that Michael G is making a case for serious cuts in defense spending. It turns out that this Michael Gerson is actually our friend Gene Robinson. And what he's endorsing is one of the recommendations made in the draft proposal offered by the co-chairs of the president's deficit-reduction commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson: to slash defense spending along with everything else. The co-chairs, he notes --

identify $100 billion in defense cuts that could be made in 2015. That would be too little and too late, but what's almost revolutionary is the notion that if we're ever to get this nation back on sound economic footing, we have to cut what Dwight Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" down to size.

The United States accounts for 46.5 percent of the world's total defense spending, according to a widely accepted recent estimate. The next-biggest spender is China, which has undertaken an immense buildup to become a military as well as economic superpower - yet accounts for just 6.6 percent of the world's total.

And while the debt-ridden U.S. government shells out for nearly half of all global defense expenditures, our most loyal, stalwart, shoulder-to-shoulder allies - Britain and France - pitch in just 3.8 percent and 4.2 percent, respectively, of the world total. Somebody's getting a free ride, and we're getting stuck with the bill.

Bowles and Simpson properly classify defense spending as discretionary, meaning we are able to make choices. This should be axiomatic. But it has been Republican Party orthodoxy to inveigh against "big government" and its out-of-control spending while blithely ignoring the nearly $700 billion we're lavishing annually on the Pentagon, as if every penny were somehow preordained and inviolate.

Now it's hard to imagine a pair of hard-core Village imperialists like Bowles and Simpson actually getting even this right, and while I don't claim any expertise in defense budget matters, my suspicion that they will be looking mostly in the wrong places fits with this from Gene Robinson:

The debt panel chairmen's proposed defense cuts, meant to be "illustrative," include civilian and noncombat pay freezes, a 15 percent cut in procurement, shrinking or eliminating some foreign bases, and $28 billion in "overhead" savings that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has already pledged. But Bowles and Simpson don't state the obvious, which is that a much more effective way to cut defense costs would be to bring our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan.

The newly ascendant budget hawks were strangely silent while Chimpy the Prez was dumping those hundreds of billions of dollars down the ratholes of Afghanistan and Iraq without even putting them in the budget. (It would probably be ungracious to suggest that those budget hawks and their cronies were among the rats fattening up on that cascading loot.) At least Obama the socialist has insisted on some kind of official accounting for that plunder.

Given the certain wrath to be expected from right-wing demagogues at any challenge to the ruinously expensive spending that can have the label of "national security" slapped on it, it remains to be seen whether there is any will among our pols to act on the reality that a significant portion of the many trillions of dollars thus spent doesn't make us any more secure, and indeed in the case of much of what's gone on in Iraq (Robinson notes that " the cost of George W. Bush's epic misadventure has fallen to 'only' an estimated $51 billion in 2011") and is still going on in Afghanistan ("by contrast, the price tag for Obama's expanded war in Afghanistan has nearly doubled since Bush's last year in office") makes us less secure by mobilizing opposition to our presence.

Given the kind of money at stake here, we would be foolish to underestimate the opposition to be expected to any attempt to make a serious dent in our defense spending. Maybe all those uncompromising fiscal conservatives coming to Washington in the wake of 11/2 will demand to know what we're getting for all that money spent. I wouldn't hold my breath, but you never know.

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