Robert Dreyfuss | The Nation

Like President Obama’s announcement earlier this month, whuich drew angry denunciations from hawks, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s more detailed budget ideas for the Pentagon’s going forward ought be seen as an opening bid. Anyone concerned about the bloated budget at the Department of Defense will be disappointed, but there’s a great opportunity for anti-war activists in the next few years to build a coalition to effect real cuts in military spending.

Contrast Obama’s and Panetta’s tentative cuts to Mitt Romney’s comment that he’d pay for expanded military spending by eliminating “Obamacare,” and you get an idea of how easy it could be for Obama to argue in favor of a “peace dividend” to pay for expanded unemployment benefits and a stronger social safety net. In an election year, however, Obama is not likely to do that, more than rhetorically, sticking to his 2012–13 plan for very slight defense cuts. At least in an election year.

Thanks to the Project on Defense Alternatives, we have a pretty good idea of what the long-term trends look like. Base-budget spending skyrocketed 55 percent between 1998 and 2010, adjusted for inflation. (Unadjusted, Pentagon spending pretty much doubled in twelve years.) And “base budgets” don’t include the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on war in Iraq and Afghanistan. As PDA notes, Panetta’s new budget plan sets 2013 spending at $525 billion, which is 46 percent above the 1998 level.” Some cut!

Spending will drop just $6 billion in 2013 compared to 2012. On the bright side, that’s the first reduction in Pentagon spending since the 1990s. But as the Center for American Progress points out:

The Pentagon’s base budget request will be $525 billion for fiscal year 2013, down $6 billion from FY 2012. The problem is that this FY 2013 request will represent the only actual cut in the next decade. After FY 2013, the Pentagon’s budget will once again rise steadily, by between $9 billion and $14 billion annually over the subsequent years in nominal terms.

Panetta’s projections have been mischaracterized as representing a drastic ‘cut’ in military spending. In reality, these $487 billion in reductions over 10 years come from projected growth of military spending. As a result, even when adjusted for inflation, Panetta’s reductions halt the growth in the Pentagon’s budget, but they do not bring the budget down much from its current level.

The core of the cuts, as the New York Times points out, include slowing the growth of military pay, reducing the size of the Army and the Marines, and some reductions in expensive weapons systems:

[Panetta] said that the Army would be reduced over five years to 490,000 troops, down from a peak of 570,000, and that the Marines would be cut to 182,000, down from 202,000. (Ground forces would still be slightly larger than they were before 9/11.) The Pentagon initially will buy fewer F-35 Joint Strike Fighter stealth jets, which are not expected to be in service until at least 2017 and have the distinction of being one of the costliest weapons programs in history. In the Navy, 14 warships will be either retired early or built more slowly.

Pause for a moment to remember Haditha.

Back in 2006, when it was revealed—thanks to Time magazine—that US troops killed two dozen Iraqi men, women and children in a burst of frenzied violence, Representative John Murtha called it a massacre and added:

“There was no firefight, there was no IED that killed these innocent people. Our troops overreacted because of the pressure on them, and they killed innocent civilians in cold blood.”

Eight Marines were indicted in the case. Six years later, not one was punished to any degree. Charges against seven of them were dropped, the result of stonewalling by the military and an incredibly inept prosecution. This week, the remaining Marine indicted in the slaughter, Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, got off nearly scot-free. Wuterich, incidentally, had already sued Murtha for defamation, adding insult to grievous and tragic injury.

Predictably, Iraqis are outraged, though with Iraq’s steadily deteriorating political crisis they have other things to worry about. (About 400 Iraqis have been killed in the past month by bombings and assassinations, and Prime Minister Maliki and his secret security forces have arrested hundreds of political opponents on trumped-up charges. Meanwhile, Maliki is accusing his leading, mostly Sunni political rivals of being terrorists, Baathists and more.)

But the echoes of Haditha are likely to feed the resentment fast building among Iraqi Sunnis, in particular, since Haditha is deep in the heartland of Sunni Iraq. The Los Angeles Times quotes a teacher from Haditha, who witnessed the massacre:

“The Americans killed children who were hiding inside the cupboards or under the beds. Was this Marine charged with dereliction of duty because he didn’t kill more? Is Iraqi blood so cheap?”

Along with the Abu Ghraib scandal, the Haditha massacre is one of the turning points of the war in Iraq. It is a lasting monument to the folly and brutality of George W. Bush’s illegal and misguided war of aggression. Various military leaders, including the despicable Bing West, have leaped to the defense of the Haditha killers, claiming that what they did was attributable to the “fog of war.” Not so.

The war of words between the United States and Iran is escalating, with much of it, as always, for domestic consumption—President Barack Obama against his hawkish Republican rivals, and various Iranians in competition within Iran’s fractured politics. Still, the bluster and toughened sanctions are worrisome. There’s little to no chance, practically zero, that the United States will attack Iran in 2012. But what’s worrisome is that Iran, feeling backed into a corner and under assault—the United States is threatening its lifeline by moving to cut off its oil exports and sanction its Central Bank’s transaction with financial institutions worldwide, while yet another of its nuclear scientists was assassinated this month—might lash out militarily or via terrorism of its own. Or Israel might decide to take matters into its own hands. In either case, it’s likely to lead to a full-fledged US-Iran war.

Strangely enough, it’s all happening just as it appears that talks between Iran and the P5+1 world powers might be restarting and it appears that a delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency will visit Iran later this month.

Like the Bush administration before it, the Obama administration is more than well aware of Israel’s ability to bomb some of Iran’s nuclear research sites. (Bush administration officials repeatedly warned Israel not to do so, and Obama’s team has done the same since 2009.) According to the January 14 Wall Street Journal,

U.S. defense leaders are increasingly concerned that Israel is preparing to take military action against Iran, over U.S. objections, and have stepped up contingency planning to safeguard U.S. facilities in the region in case of a conflict. President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other top officials have delivered a string of private messages to Israeli leaders warning about the dire consequences of a strike.

The Journal article notes that in response to US pleadings, the Israelis have been “noncommittal.”

Outrageous as it might be that Israel, a supposed ally, would refuse to cooperate openly with the United States on a matter of such grave importance, it also appears that Israel is openly seeking to sabotage the possibility of US-Iran negotiations. The latest assassination of an Iranian scientist in north Tehran, via a bomb attached to his automobile by a motorcycle-riding terrorist, came one day after the arrival of a top State Department official, Bill Burns, in Turkey, part of an attempt by the Obama administration to restart the long-stalled negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 world powers. The timing of that act, which provoked great anger in Iran, was probably calculated to inflame opinion so that diplomacy, once again, fails.

The United States did deny responsibility for the assassination outright, but it failed to condemn it in strong terms. If that’s because the United States is trying to handle its seemingly uncontrollable ally with kid gloves, that’s an enormous mistake. Terrorism is terrorism, and killing Iranian scientists, inserting computer worms in its control systems, and the explosion that killed one of its leading rocket experts in 2011 are clearly acts of war. If Obama thinks that he can tolerate such behavior by Israel, or worse, abet it, and then talk Israel out of bombing Iran, then he’s wrong.

As Laura Rozen reported for Yahoo, a large-scale set of military maneuvers between the United States and Israel, set for later this year, has been postponed or canceled. Though both sides downplay the cancellation, hopefully it’s intended as a message to the Israelis that they need to behave themselves.

To no one’s surprise, the military-industrial complex and its allies are pushing back against the Obama administration’s plans to trim some fat at the Pentagon.

The big boys—namely, the Aerospace Industries Association, the National Defense Industrial Association and the Professional Services Council—co-wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta warning that even Panetta’s modest efforts to slow defense spending could lead to catastrophe. Panetta’s proposed $480 billion reduction might fatally undermine the defense industrial base, the letter warned, and it added that they expect further cuts in years to come.

Noting that the Congressional supercommittee’s failure to reach an accord might trigger another $600 billion in defense cuts, the three industry heavyweights said, “Even if the trillion-dollar ‘doomsday’ scenario is avoided, respondents were operating under the assumption that, based on past history, more cuts would be added on top of the $480 billion over the next decade.”

Hawks, including many cited in a Washington Times survey of reaction to the strategic review, are especially alarmed by the administration’s decision to reverse the current strategy that calls on the Defense Department to be capable of fighting two wars at once. In addition, President Obama and Panetta want to shrink the Army and the Marines, cut back on counterinsurgency capabilities and fall back on air and naval deployments, high-tech gizmos and intelligence, while shifting America’s priority from the Middle East to Asia and the Pacific.

It’s all about money, not strategy, though. General Carl E. Mundy, a retired Marine commander, told the Washington Times:

“The new strategy is one derived not from risk analysis, but by fiscal constraints. One has only to ask, ‘Would we have conceived this strategy had not we been driven financially to do so?’ I doubt anyone in the business of defense would answer yes.’”

True enough. Last week, in announcing the review, Panetta himself said, ”Fiscal crisis has forced us to face the strategic shift that’s taking place now.”

Writing in the Weekly Standard, two officials from the American Enterprise Institute, which co-founded the neoconservative Defending Defense coalition with the Heritage Foundation and Bill Kristol’s Foreign Policy Initiative, called the end of the two-war policy “a bright green light to our enemies and a flashing red one to our friends and allies.” They added:

With the end of the Cold War in sight, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell in the George H.W. Bush administration was asked how big the U.S. military should be. He replied, “We have to put a shingle outside our door saying, ‘Superpower Lives Here.’ ” Barack Obama has taken the shingle down.

All that is nonsense, of course. The cuts are modest, and as the military-industry group says, the real battle will be over future cuts to come, as it gradually dawns on the United States that it can no longer afford empire-sized armed forces.