Bill Kristol doesn't understand how to fight the war he loves so much

Bill Kristol is good at finding new ways to be contemptible. It's bad that Marines in Afghanistan urinated on dead Taliban, he says, but you know what really makes him mad? The Obama Administration apologizing for it. 

So perhaps, as Rep. Allen West, once a battalion commander in Iraq, put it last week, all the sanctimonious Obama administration bigwigs “need to chill.” Did Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta really need to speak up at all? Couldn’t comment have been left to some junior public affairs officer at Camp Lejeune? And once he decided to weigh in, did Panetta need to condemn the Marines’ action as not just deplorable but “utterly deplorable”? Perhaps he felt a need to match Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who expressed not just dismay but “total dismay.”

Maybe, our current civilian leaders should spend a little less time posturing and a little more time supporting the troops who’ve been sent abroad to fight at the direction of their administration.

Kristol is congenitally unable to praise Democrats, and the overall piece veers dangerously close to being an apologia for corpse desecration. (Patton pissed in the Rhine, after all!) But what he seems not to understand is that the Obama Administration very vocally deplored the urination video because it's otherwise it's a huge victory for the Taliban.

Even Kristol's fellow warmonger Max Boot understands this:

The Marines are fighting not a total war but a counterinsurgency in which their goal is not only to militarily defeat the enemy but to win over the population. This could potentially make that job harder. 

The Marines often speak of the “strategic corporal”–the notion being that decisions made even by a lowly corporal can have high-level repercussions. This is a perfect example; indeed, one of the urinating Marines was a corporal.

The reason top-level administration figures weighed in was because the acts of a few stupid Marines was potentially devastating to the war's strategic aims, one of which is winning over the population. (Afghan President Hamid Karzai is also pretty good at loudly condemning U.S. errors in order to shore up his own position.) Contrition from senior, recognizable figures was required to minimize the damage.

Kristol, though, turns this incident into one of Obama not loving the troops enough. "He and his administration have a responsibility to err on the side of supporting our troops, rather than competing to chastise them sanctimoniously," Kristol writes. But if those troops commit an act that actively aids the enemy, what the hell else is there to do? Bill Kristol wants his war in Afghanistan. But maybe he just mostly wants to use it as a cudgel against Democrats. Because this column makes clear that he has no clue about—and maybe less interest in—achieving victory.

Kristol, Fuelner and Brooks' Somewhat Misleading Op-Ed On Defense Spending

Arthur Brooks, Edwin Fuelner and Bill Kristol have an op-ed in today's WSJ, warning fiscal conservatives not to rein in Pentagon spending because, well, defense spending isn't really the reason America is in its current debt-laden state. They make some of the usual arguments -- that defense spending as a share of GDP is actually lower now than it was during the Cold War -- that are fine as far as they go.

The problem is that in making the case that domestic entitlements are the real cause of the deficit, the trio pulls a bit of apples-and-oranges sleight of hand. Here's the offending bit:

Defense spending has increased at a much lower rate than domestic spending in recent years and is not the cause of soaring deficits. Even as the United States has fought two wars, the core defense budget has increased by approximately $220 billion since 2001, about a tenth as much as the government devotes each year to "mandatory" spending: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, lesser entitlements such as food stamps and cash assistance, and interest payments on the debt. These expenditures continue automatically, year after year, without congressional debate.

The comparison here is confusing to the point of misleading. The Trio (as I'll refer to the collective) has to make it seem as though the defense budget is somehow relatively anemic so they compare just the increases in defense spending to the total yearly budgets of the entitlement programs. That's a comparison that makes no sense.*

*And without footnotes, it's hard to be sure what comparison they're making, but it's worth noting that the "core defense budget" has generally not included Afghanistan and Iraq war expenses, which have largely been appropriated through supplemental bills.

It's not easy to track down easy-for-a-layman-such-as-myself-to-understand budget information over time; the best I can find is this Congressional Budget Office table (PDF). What it shows:

* Defense spending more than doubled between 2001 and 2009 -- from $306 billion to $655 billion. (Best I can interpret the CBO data, this includes war-fighting expenses.)The defense budget as a share of GDP rose from 3 percent to 4.6 percent.

* "Mandatory" spending -- including entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, etc. -- also doubled during this time, from $1.007 trillion to $2.093 trillion. As a collective group, the percentage of the GDP rose from 9.9 percent of GDP to 14.7 percent. That sounds much bigger, but when you break it down by program, you see the increases are generally in line with the Pentagon's: Social Security's share of GDP rose by just 0.6 percent; Medicare rose by 1.2 percent of the GDP; Medicaid rose by 0.5 percent of GDP.

Now you can argue that the costs of those entitlements is still going to prove a drag, and I won't try to counter-argue in this post. But it's clear that -- despite the picture painted by The Trio -- Pentagon spending has been growing, along with the rest of government over the last decade, in robust fashion. It might not be the source of America's deficit issues, but it is certainly a source.

Plus, there's always this chart:

The United States spends 46.5 percent of the world's total military spending. The next closest competitor, China, spends 6.6 percent.

Now, depending on your vision of America's role in the world, maybe that's entirely appropriate. (I'm ... dubious.) Our military bestrides the world; China, at this point, seems to want to dominate the Pacific. What that chart suggests, however, is that the American defense establishment is hardly underresourced. Let's figure out the proper balance of America's defense needs and America's resources and go from there.

The Weekly Standard, the 'Ground Zero mosque' and selective McCarthyism

The Weekly Standard, July 26:

Many who object to construction of an Islamic facility so close to the site of the World Trade Center feel that a large, if not dominating Muslim presence there would be at best insensitive and at worst a symbol of the very Islamist supremacy that is the goal of al Qaeda and other jihadist killers. Such sentiments are hardly the last word in a question of public policy. But the background support and financing for this ambitious undertaking are matters that deserve to be addressed. 

The Weekly Standard, Aug. 18:

Nancy Pelosi yesterday: "There is no question there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded."

Follow-up: Speaker Pelosi announces that she is reviving the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), abolished in 1975. Hearings on the Opposition to the Mosque, featuring inquiries, under oath, as to whether witnesses are now or have ever been members of the American Anti-Mosque Party, will begin when the House reconvenes in September.

 What Nancy Pelosi said was stupid. Full stop. But The Weekly Standard seems to be fine calling for investigations when minority Americans exercise their First Amendment rights. So it's hard to take Bill Kristol seriously when he takes umbrage just because he's on the receiving end of the same treatment.