Antiwar Attacks on U.S. Military Spending

Robert Scheer has an essay up today, at the Los Angeles Times, criticizing trends in military spending throughout the post-9/11 period. As many readers may recognize, Scheer is a former new-left '60s radical who has been a vocal critic of American foreign policy throughout the Bush era.

Scheer's piece is a classic guns-versus-butter attack on the defense sector, drawing on long-discredited theories of power-elite systems and the iron-triangle relationships of the military industrial complex.

Scheer rails away at increases in gross defense spending, and throws in figures from other federal bureaucratic agencies to inflate his urgency ("... other federal budget expenditures for homeland security, nuclear weapons and so-called black budget -- or covert -- operations).

"Black budget"? It's always some conspiracy for those on the hard left - and this is certainly par for Scheer, who remains a central member of the contemporary radical establishment in academe and journalism.

But check out FrontPageMag's analysis of Scheer's background, from an earlier episode of attacks on the war, when war opponents were more likely smear the Bush administration for alleged "fascist imperialism":

Scheer began his career with a 1961 book defending Fidel Castro and was the Cuban dictator’s chosen publisher of Ché Guevara’s diaries. Scheer’s history of support for Communist revolutionaries (not nationalists or pragmatists) stretches back 40 years and began with his Cuban romance. Cuba, of course, is the exemplar of Communism’s imperial ambitions – the very ambitions that Scheer pretends don’t exist. In 1963, Castro sent 22 tanks and more than 100 Cuban troops to the Algerian National Liberation Front led by Ahmed ben Bella, ultimately giving two billion francs to the Arab Marxists. Ché Guevara famously called for radicals to “create two, three…many Vietnams” – the title also of a book by Ché wannabe Tom Hayden – and died trying to launch one in Bolivia. This martyrdom inspired Ho Chi Minh's followers to host Raul Castro shortly after the Fall of Saigon.

Castro reached his imperial apex when he sent 50,000 troops to aid the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola in its efforts to foist Leninism in the former colonial nation. Cuban troops fought in the Congo well into the Reagan administration and Fidel sent aid to the brutal “Red Rule” of Ethiopia’s Communists, architects of one of the worst politically devised famines in world history. Castro’s efforts to build an airport for Soviet bombers in Grenada provoked Ronald Reagan to take defensive military action. The Sandinista dictators were his personal protégés, trained in Havana to spread Marxist police states throughout Central America. The trainers of Nicaragua’s secret police were Cubans loaned by Castro for that very purpose.

So Scheer is well aware that Communism was a messianic creed and an imperialist enterprise and one that the North Vietnamese Communists shared. But acknowledging this would prevent him from writing yet another column (he has written them before) on how it would be good thing for America to lose its wars with totalitarian enemies. But this is the very column that Scheer has been writing for the last three years about America’s war against the Islamic totalitarians in Iraq – another nation in which French self-interest left the United States to take care of a murderous autocrat they kept in power. Plus ça change....

As Captain Ed has argued regarding the left's relentless denialism on the war:

The defeatists have been exposed. They cannot run, but they can keep spinning. Even their colleagues in the media have begun to notice the good news, however, and the facade of defeat has begun its inevitable collapse.

Because war opponents no longer have any credible attack on the Iraq deployment in either the military or political dimensions, they've shifted to the economic and human costs of the mission (including making U.S. troops out as victims of the Bush administration's "war machine").

But as Larry Kudlow notes in his essay, "What Price Freedom?":

Surprise, surprise. Having failed to puncture General Petraeus’s story about great improvements on the ground in Iraq, liberals are now saying the cost of the Iraq war has somehow undermined the economy — even caused the current slowdown. What complete nonsense....

What is the cost of freedom? While the Left refuses to acknowledge it, the U.S. homeland has not been attacked since September 11. Right there is a big economic plus. Since President Bush went on the offensive and took the battle to Iraq, al Qaeda and other extremist terrorist groups have been utterly routed by U.S. forces. But in tying the jihadists down on their home turf, and keeping them from mounting another coordinated attack on the U.S., our economy has benefited incalculably.

Then again, the anti-war forces might want to recall John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, in which he called on Americans to “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to ensure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Do these folks actually think 1 percent of GDP is too large a price, too heavy a burden? I sure hope not.

Well, yes, 1 percent of GDP is too much for war opponents, but the argument's not compelling - indeed, it's mostly a rehash of old Marxist talking points from earlier eras in the history of anti-American radicalism.