IT'S NOT AMERICA FIRST, JUST ME FIRST:

Useful Idiots and their "Conservative" Allies (William R. Hawkins, 3/03/08, FrontPageMagazine.com)

One of the most important initiatives in the FY 2009 defense budget is to increase U.S. ground combat forces; the “boots on the ground” needed to secure any victory. The goal is to add approximately 74,000 soldiers by 2010, split between Active, Guard, and Reserve. Active duty forces would reach 547,000 in 48 brigades, with another 358,000 in the National Guard and 206,000 in the Reserve. The Marine Corps will also be expanding its strength, with a goal of 202,000 by 2011. Marine strength will return to where it was at the end of the Cold War, but the Army will still be significantly below its 1989 strength of 769,700 Active duty soldiers.

The Army and Marines will also have to be “reset” to recover from equipment loss and damage, an effort that will also include the procurement of a new generation of weapons. This effort to reconstitute American ground combat capabilities is part of a FY 2009 Pentagon budget of $515.4 billion. This seems like a large amount, but it is less than 17 percent of the total $3.1 trillion budget. When expected supplemental requests are added for combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the total will still only reach about four percent of GDP. As Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has pointed out, during the Korean War, 14 percent of GDP was going to defense, and during the Vietnam War, it was about 9 percent. The defense/GDP ratio refutes the notion that the United States has fallen into some sort of “imperial overstretch” that would make national decline inevitable.

Some of the most vehement criticism of this defense plan is coming from those who often claim they are from the “Old Right” and represent a mythical period of American isolationism when the country was free of any cares about the world. These false-flag “conservatives” are actually libertarians who share the Left’s philosophy on foreign policy, a desire to see the United States fail on the international stage. Their opposition to America using its wealth and strength to shape global events and hold the balance of power is not confined to the current wars in the Middle East but extended to the Cold War and even World War II.

Robert Higgs, Senior Fellow in Political Economy at the Independent Institute and editor of that organization’s journal, The Independent Review, attacked the new defense program in a column posted on LewRockwell.com. Higgs built his reputation on his 1987 book Crisis and Leviathan, a book which posited that a “leviathan” federal government arose during the nation’s mobilization for World War II, then carried into the Cold War.

The website of Lew Rockwell, who also runs the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, has become a haven for the antiwar movement. Commenting on the death of William F. Buckley Jr., Rockwell wrote, “I don't entirely buy into the idea that Buckley was a CIA Agent, as proposed by Murray Rothbard. But...the conservative movement he gave birth to (united by rabid anti-Communism interventionism abroad) has turned into a monster.”

They aren't wrong that a build-up of conventional forces is a waste of money, but are wrong about our using the force on hand for global liberation. It's what we do.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 3, 2008 10:51 AM