Secretary Panetta’s announcement that the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan will end as early as mid-2013 is a positive development. But it is long overdue and still leaves too many questions unanswered. After more than ten years of war in Afghanistan, the administration should follow through on its commitment to end combat operations and withdraw all troops by 2014. Continuing to narrow our objectives will make this war winnable.

Politically, this makes perfect sense for the Obama administration. It is a shot across the bow of his political opponents and those wishing for an indefinite combat mission in Afghanistan. Secretary Panetta’s announcement allows the administration to get on the side of voters who want to draw-down in Afghanistan. By opposing any draw-down, his critics side with the much smaller segment of the American people who still support the nation-building mission.

President Obama is in a position similar to the debate over Iraq in his 2008 presidential campaign. He argued in 2008 that he would end a grinding war he inherited. The president can claim victory (and vindication) in Iraq and argue that if you liked the first act, you’ll love the second. He will end another grinding war he inherited—and conveniently gloss over the fact that he sent more troops to Afghanistan than President Bush ever did.

Of course, these developments are neither new nor are they a sure thing. Despite the media attention given to this announcement, it was somewhat predictable. Panetta acknowledged that this was always part of the plan behind the scenes. Buried in the coverage of Panetta’s statement are multiple qualifiers. He admitted that no decision has been made on the number of troops that will leave in 2013. The secretary offered no details on what this transition from combat operations would look like. Indeed, the line between an “advise and assist” mission and combat operations is a sketchy one. A spokesman clarified that U.S. forces could still be involved in combat operations in 2014. In the end, our policy has not changed. It is still unclear how many U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan at the end of 2013.

But to the extent that Panetta’s recent statement reaffirms the administration will adhere to the timeline of withdrawal, it is an encouraging sign. It signals to the Afghans that they must take responsibility for their own security, and it provides an incentive for them to continue to put themselves in harms way and take the initiative.

Let’s hope that this is indeed a confirmation of the administration’s commitment to a withdrawal. The United States should have scaled-down to a limited, targeted counterterrorism mission many years ago. A large-scale, nation-building mission has never been necessary to protect the vital interests of the United States and hunt down the few remaining terrorists in Afghanistan that aim to strike the homeland.

The strategic misconceptions that guide our current mission in the country are overwrought, lack evidence, and are based on worst-case scenarios. We should continue to transition to a counterterrorism mission that utilizes intelligence, special operations forces, and our considerable technological advantages, such as UAVs. And we must continue to encourage the Afghan people to take responsibility for their security and their nation.

Cross-posted from the Skeptics at the National Interest.

On Afghanistan, Panetta Leaves Questions Unanswered is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The GOP presidential candidates will participate in yet another debate tonight from South Carolina in anticipation of the primary there on Saturday. I hope that the moderator, CNN’s John King, will bring up some of the major national security issues at hand, namely military spending.

Out of all the GOP contenders, it is clear that Ron Paul is the only candidate still standing that offers an alternative to the entrenched Republican foreign policy views. Some have called his foreign policy positions naïve and outside the mainstream. Others point to the fact that Ron Paul is so popular precisely because he is outside the mainstream and presents a different perspective on the intertwined issues of national security and military spending. Of course, the “mainstream” views on foreign policy are relative: what is common thinking inside the Beltway is not usually representative of the country.

Tonight at 10 PM EST on Fox Business Network’s Stossel, a host of experts will discuss Ron Paul’s foreign policy views, war, and whether the federal government has gone too far in its Constitutional obligation to defend the homeland. I will be discussing military spending and argue that we can cut the Pentagon’s budget and be more secure for it.

Tonight on Stossel: Ron Paul, War, and Military Spending is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Here are two newspaper accounts about the conclusion of the Iraq war:

The New York Times:   “Almost nine years after the first American tanks began massing on the Iraq border, the Pentagon declared an official end to its mission here, closing a troubled conflict that helped reshape American politics and left a bitter legacy of anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world.”

The Washington Post:  “Nearly nine years after American troops stormed across the Iraq border in a blaze of shock and awe, U.S. officials quietly ended the bloody and bitterly divisive conflict here Thursday, but the debate over whether it was worth the cost in money and lives is yet unanswered.”

There is a problem with those accounts.  The United States has been at war in Iraq for twenty years, not nine!  George Orwell warned us not to confuse war with peace, but we are clearly falling into that trap.  More here.

The Iraq War: 20 Years, Not 9 is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The United States executed its original mission in Afghanistan in the critical first months after the invasion: cripple al Qaeda and remove the Taliban from power. Now that the United States has expanded its mission to a fragile-by-design strategy of nation-building, it’s well past time for U.S. forces to leave.

In a new video Austin Bragg and I produced, Cato Institute vice president for defense and foreign policy studies Christopher A. Preble, foreign policy analyst Malou Innocent, and legal policy analyst David Rittgers comment on this dubious milestone:

Ten Years in Afghanistan Is Enough is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The New York Times weighs in this morning with a timely and sensible editorial on military spending. The main focus is on the increasingly outdated pay and benefits system for the nation’s troops. Some choice excerpts:

Military pay, benefit and retirement costs rose by more than 50 percent over the…decade (accounting for inflation). Leaving aside Afghanistan and Iraq, those costs now account for nearly $1 out of every $3 the Pentagon spends.

Much of that is necessary to recruit and retain a high-quality, all-volunteer military….But current military pay, pension systems and retiree health care benefits are unsustainable and ripe for reform.

[...]

The retirement system is both unfair and increasingly expensive. Most veterans, including many who have served multiple combat tours, will never qualify for even a partial military pension or retiree health benefits. These are only available to those who have served at least 20 years. Those who do qualify can start collecting their pensions as soon as they leave service, even if they are still in their late 30s, making for huge long-term costs.

So far, so good. Two essential points bear repeating.

First, the rise in military spending over the past decade has not been driven solely by the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pentagon costs are growing, and the rate of growth is rising. Programmatic reform is needed to reign in those costs; avoiding stupid wars won’t solve the problem (although it won’t hurt).

Second, the current system disproportionately rewards individuals who stay in the service for 20-plus years, and undercompensates those men and women who serve several tours, but who do not qualify for military retirement. A better system would allow anyone who has served to retain some of what they paid (or what taxpayers paid for them) into a portable retirement account that they control. Private industry has been steadily moving away from a fixed-benefit, pension-style system for years. I have heard the arguments against such a move, but I don’t find them particularly convincing.

One point from the Times editorial, however, calls out for clarification. The editors claim on two separate occasions that current military spending patterns are “unsustainable.” They conclude:

The United States already has a comfortable margin of [military] dominance….The Pentagon’s ambitions expanded without limit over the Bush era, and Congress eagerly wrote the checks. The country cannot afford to continue this way, and national security doesn’t require it. (emphasis added)

The latter point, “national security doesn’t require it,” is crucial, correct, and should be repeated at every opportunity. The former assertion, “the country cannot afford” it, is false. Repeating that claim plays into the hands of the inveterate hawks who never saw a war, or a weapon system, that wasn’t deserving of more lives/money.

The hawks are correct to point out that the United States has in the past, and could in the future, choose to spend as much or more on our military. Current spending levels amount to about five percent of GDP (when including the costs of the wars), and military spending as a share of total government spending has been falling steadily for years. According to the hawks, it is other spending, or too little revenue, that is putting our children and grandchildren into debt.

I wish that the Times had spent more time hammering the point that such spending is unnecessary. Contrary to anecdote and the evening news, the international system is remarkably stable and peaceful. The United States need not spend more than we did at the height of the Cold War in order to be secure from most threats. And those few genuine threats to our security could be handled with a smaller, more efficient military—if we offloaded some responsibilities to other countries that have sheltered under the U.S. security umbrella for decades.

The Times doesn’t directly address that last point. By focusing most of their attention on programmatic reforms to pay and benefits, and a bit on costly procurement of unnecessary weapons, but not enough to the underlying flawed assumptions that drive military spending, the editors contribute to the misconception that the U.S. military should continue to be the world’s policeman, and find ways to do this on the cheap.

That is unfortunate. Spending more than we need to doesn’t make us stronger. Ignoring our favorable strategic circumstances is simply stupid. We spend too much on our military because we ask our troops to do too much. To spend less, we must do less. The good news is that we can. The bad news is that too few people understand that.

Strength vs. Stupidity is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Fifty years ago, Joseph Heller published Catch-22, giving us a new idiom and forging a new perspective on the business of war. While other novels—such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front—stripped warfare of its romance, Catch-22 exposed it as just another form of the fundamental absurdity of bureaucracy. Writes Walter Kirn in Slate:

Then, that fall, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 appeared, abruptly downgrading war’s special status as an existential crucible and also, unwittingly, beginning the process of rendering four-star male novelists irrelevant. The book treats war on a par with business or politics (to Heller they were very much the same), portraying it as a system for alienating people from their own interests and estranging them from their instincts. Protocol replaces principle, figures plucked from thin air supplant hard facts, and reason becomes rigamarole. Heller’s island airbase of freaked-out aviators oppressed by cuckoo officers is the ding-a-ling civilian world in microcosm, not an infernal, tragic realm apart. The men who can feel aren’t agonized, they’re addled. The ones who can’t feel (and therefore give the orders) are permanently, structurally annoyed. The naked and the dead are here but invisible to the beribboned and the daft.

In 1979, shortly after the release of Good as Gold, Charlie Reilly interviewed Heller for Inquiry magazine, then published by the Cato Institute. They discussed the new novel and its narrative structure, Heller’s humorist techniques, and how Heller deals in his writing with terrible, real-world events.

Q: Another thing that interested me was the effect that writing about the Vietnam War had upon you. It seemed apparent in Something Happened that you felt a sense of moral outrage over our role in the war, and in this one Gold seems to boil in rage at some aspect of it. Was it difficult to write about an issue that is so enraging and draining?

HELLER: No, and this is true of Catch-22 as well. When I’m writing, I am only interested in writing. Now when I’m not writing, I confess I can hear something that will make me boil over. A phrase that really gets to me, for instance, would be one of those neoconservative references to Vietnam as a national tragedy, but only because we lost. That thought fills me with ire. To begin with, the person who says it is typically untouched by tragedy; like me, he has not lost a son or a job. In addition, the implication is that if we had won, the war would have been somehow less tragic. People with that mentality, I have to admit, impress me as being the scum of the earth.

Read the whole thing here.

Joseph Heller in the Pages of Inquiry is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Sen. John McCain has exhibited personal courage, but his geopolitical judgment is uniformly awful.  Over the last 30 years there has been no war or potential war that he has opposed.  In 2008 he wanted to confront nuclear-armed Russia over its neighbor Georgia, which started their short and sharp conflict.  It would have been ironic had the Cold War ended peacefully, only to see Washington trigger a nuclear crisis in order to back Georgia as it attempted to prevent the territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from doing what Kosovo did with U.S. military aid:  achieve self-determination (by seceding from Georgia).

Now Senator McCain is banging the war drums in Libya.  But he seems to have trouble remembering who are the good guys and who are the bad guys.

Although now crusading against Moammar Qaddafi, two years ago he joined Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham in Tripoli to sup with the dear colonel.  There the three opponents of tyranny whispered sweet nothings in the dictator’s ear, offering the prospect of military aid.  After all, the former terrorist had become a good friend of America by battling terrorists.

Andrew McCarthy reported on the sordid tale from the WikiLeaks disclosures:

A government cable (leaked by Wikileaks) memorializes the excruciating details of meetings between the Senate delegation and Qaddafi, along with his son Mutassim, Libya’s “national security adviser.” We find McCain and Graham promising to use their influence to push along Libya’s requests for C-130 military aircraft, among other armaments, and civilian nuclear assistance. And there’s Lieberman gushing, “We never would have guessed ten years ago that we would be sitting in Tripoli, being welcomed by a son of Muammar al-Qadhafi.” That’s before he opined that Libya had become “an important ally in the war on terrorism,” and that “common enemies sometimes make better friends.”

Obviously, that was then and this is now.  Along the way Senator McCain and his fellow war enthusiasts realized that Qaddafi wasn’t a nice guy after all.  Who knew?  I mean, he had only jailed opponents, conducted terrorist operations against the United States, and initiated a nuclear weapons program.  So earlier this year they demanded that the United States back the rebels, the new heroes of democracy. 

Until now, anyway.

Anyone who has covered civil wars won’t be surprised to learn that the insurgents aren’t always playing by Marquess of Queensbeerry rules.  Indeed, the opposition is united only by its hatred of Qaddafi.  It includes defectors, including  Qaddafi’s former interior minister who was just assassinated under mysterious circumstances; jihadists and terrorists, some of whom fought against U.S. forces in Iraq; tribal opponents of Qaddafi; and genuine democracy advocates devoted to creating a liberal society.  Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that the good guys will win any power struggle certain to follow Qaddafi’s ouster.

The Obama administration claimed to enter the war to protect civilians.  Yet NATO has occasionally threatened to bomb the rebels if they harm civilians.  Reports of summary executions and looting by insurgent forces have emerged.  Now Senator McCain has written the opposition a letter—more polite than sending a drone, I suppose—demanding that the Transition National Council stop being mean to former Qaddafi supporters.

Reports the British Independent newspaper:

In his letter to the TNC, dated 20th July, Senator McCain, writing as “your friend and supporter,” pointed out “recent documentation of human rights abuses committed by opposition figures in the western Libyan towns of al-Awaniya, Rayayinah, Zawiyat al-Bagul, and al-Qawalish”. He continued: ” According to Human Rights Watch, a highly credible international non-governmental organisation, rebel fighters and supporters have damaged property, burned some homes, looted from hospitals, homes and shops, and beaten some individuals alleged to have supported government forces.

“I am confident you are aware of these allegations…. It is because the TNC holds itself to such high democratic standards that it is necessary for you and the Council to take decisive action to bring any human rights abuses to an immediate halt.”

Who would have imagined that a civil war could be nasty and that not everyone who opposes a dictator is a sweet, peace-loving liberal?  Certainly not John McCain.

The point is not that Qaddafi is a nice guy.  The world would be a better place if he “moves on,” so to speak.  But there’s no guarantee that a rebel victory will result in a liberal democracy dedicated to international peace and harmony.  And there’s nothing at stake that warrants involving the United States in yet another war in a Muslim nation—the fifth ongoing, if one counts the extensive drone campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, along with Iraq and Afghanistan.

When Senator McCain urges Washington to bomb or invade the sixth Islamic state, which is inevitable given his past behavior, it would be worth remembering how he has managed to be on every side of the Libya issue, supporting tyranny before he opposed it.  When it comes to war, the best policy is to do the opposite of what he advises.  Only then will America find itself finally at peace.

John McCain: Ever Confused, Always for War is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In the last three years, the United States has tripled the number of troops in Afghanistan, increased the number of drone strikes in neighboring Pakistan, and killed Osama bin Laden—the highest of high-value targets. President Obama has more than enough victories under his belt to stick to his timeline and substantially draw down the number of troops from Afghanistan.

Still, the pace of America’s withdrawal and the size of its residual combat presence, even after his decision Wednesday, will depend on two things: negotiations with the Taliban and political pressure to stay the course. These two factors will feature prominently in the months ahead, as the administration reconfigures the strategy and objectives for winding down the 10-year campaign.

First, although many Afghans endorse engagement with the Taliban, in Washington, even broaching the subject of talks is divisive. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton confirmed that efforts were under way to negotiate with the Taliban; meanwhile, outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said he believes the Taliban will not engage in serious talks until they are under extreme military pressure. In a way, both are right: a power-sharing arrangement would provide the best hope for sustainable peace, but no treaty, agreement, or contract is self-reinforcing and thus requires some leverage. Either way, constructive, face-to-face talks with senior Taliban leaders will be an intensive process, and one that diplomats and military officials must be prepared to defend publicly. America is not there yet.

The second force that will temper America’s eagerness to withdraw is the power of domestic political pressure. Defense Secretary Gates, Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers (R-AL), and a sizeable contingent of Afghanistan hawks in the media decry anything less than a troop-intensive campaign. They endorse slow-paced, graduated troop cuts subject to conditions on the ground, a policy focused on entities other than those that threaten the United States. Dismantling al Qaeda, an outfit already in disarray, calls for counterterrorism, not state-building. This can be done relatively cheaply and with far fewer troops. Moreover, as seen in Yemen and Somalia, the United States can collect actionable intelligence without a large-scale conventional force on the ground.

Whether it is talking with the Taliban on the one hand, or staying the course on the other, the president has political goals, for which there is no clear strategy, and security progress, for which there is no definitive “victory.” Looking back, however, Obama has achieved some of the goals he set out. “Blueprint for Change,” his 2008 presidential campaign literature, states (pdf):

Obama will fight terrorism and protect America with a comprehensive strategy that finishes the fight in Afghanistan, cracks down on the al Qaeda safe-haven in Pakistan, develops new capabilities and international partnerships, engages the world to dry up support for extremism, and reaffirms American values.

To a certain degree, even these goals are ambitious. Instead, he should focus not on what is politically desirable, but what is within America’s ability to accomplish. In this respect, Obama would do well to revisit his December 2009 speech on the war in Afghanistan, when he said:

We’ve failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy. In the wake of an economic crisis, too many of our neighbors and friends are out of work and struggle to pay the bills. Too many Americans are worried about the future facing our children. Meanwhile, competition within the global economy has grown more fierce. So we can’t simply afford to ignore the price of these wars.

He also said:

Indeed, some call for a more dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort—one that would commit us to a nation-building project of up to a decade. I reject this course because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost, and what we need to achieve to secure our interests…America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan.

As U.S. forces eventually take a back seat in Afghanistan, Obama should strongly resist any calls that he has not done enough. Arguably, he has gone above and beyond what would have been a more prudent strategy. Now, it is time to come home.

Cross-posted from The National Interest.

Afghanistan: Do We Stay or Do We Go Now? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

So for three months now, we’ve been at war in a country that the president’s own secretary of defense admits is “not a vital interest for the United States.” Turns out, it’s also a war that the president’s own attorney general believes to be illegal.

That’s what I get from Charlie Savage’s recent reporting on how the White House “forum-shopped” its way to its current position on the War Powers Resolution, to wit, you’re not engaged in “hostilities” if you’re hitting someone but they can’t hit you back.

As the WPR’s 60-day deadline approached, the Pentagon’s general counsel and, more importantly, the head of the president’s Office of Legal Counsel, Caroline D. Krass, advised Obama that bombing Tripoli—even if done remotely, with little risk of immediate retaliation—counted as engaging in “hostilities” under the WPR, which meant that the president would have to terminate U.S. involvement or radically scale it back after the 60-day limit. As Savage reports, “Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. supported Ms. Krass’s view, officials said”—in other words, that if the president continued bombing Libya, he’d be violating the WPR.

Ordinarily OLC’s opinion would have the greatest weight here, but President Obama went with the advice given by White House Counsel Robert Bauer and State Department Legal adviser Harold Koh—who told him what he wanted to hear.

My Washington Examiner column today focuses on Harold Koh as an object lesson in the corrupting potential of power:

Harvard’s Jack Goldsmith notes that “for a quarter century before heading up State-Legal, Koh was the leading and most vocal academic critic of presidential unilateralism in war.” On the strength of that reputation, Koh rose to the deanship of Yale Law School in 2004.

And Koh seemed to take the War Powers Resolution pretty seriously. In 1994, for example, he wrote to the Clinton Justice Department to protest the planned deployment to Haiti, which was carried out without a single shot being fired:

“Nothing in the War Powers Resolution authorizes the President to commit armed forces overseas into actual or imminent hostilities in a situation where he could have gotten advance authorization.”

Who could have predicted that his legacy at State would be reading the WPR practically out of existence?

On Thursday, Koh took point at a press conference selling the administration line. The next day, he went before the American Constitution Society, the progressive alternative to the Federalist Society, to give a strikingly self-congratulatory speech about maintaining one’s integrity in “public service.” The relevant part starts at around 33:00 in. Highlights: “I’ve lived the life I wanted to live; I’ve said the things I wanted to say”…”I still believe in my principles”…”I never say anything I don’t believe”…”if you hear me say something, you can be absolutely sure that I believe it [including "the administration’s position on war powers in Libya"]“…”if I say it, I believe it, and I intend to stand by it”…”For what is a man?/what has he got? If not himself/then he has not…” (OK, not the last bit).

As I note in the column:

John Dean, who served prison time for his role in the Watergate cover-up as a young White House counsel to Richard Nixon, once said that young people should be kept away from top executive posts.

They lacked the life experience and independence needed to resist falling under the spell of presidents who want them to bend or break the law.

Koh was in his mid-50s when he joined the administration, coming off a distinguished career built on opposition to the Imperial Presidency. Yet the lure of being “in the room” when the big decisions are made seems to have turned him into the Gollum of Foggy Bottom.

Oh, and by the way, Charlie Savage reports today that piloted strikes continued past the 60-day time limit, so even if Koh’s legal rationalization could pass the laugh test, it wouldn’t fit the facts we have.

Harold Koh and the Temptations of Power is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Jon Huntsman’s recent comments about the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and the need to reduce our military footprint have drawn a good amount of media coverage this week. Huntsman, who will announce his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination next week, is the latest among the field to call for rethinking our strategy in Afghanistan. Huntsman is advocating a reduced presence in the country, in the area of 10 to 15,000 troops, to fight a narrowly focused counterterrorism mission. Coincidentally, a just-released Cato paper makes a similar recommendation.

Today, ForeignPolicy.com examines Huntsman’s comments and the “Drawdown Debate” in a round table of opinion pieces. My contribution: “Huntsman’s Right: Bring ‘em Home:

Jon Huntsman is on the right track with his call for a much smaller U.S. military presence and a more focused mission in Afghanistan. His suggestion makes sense for at least three reasons. First, the current nation-building mission is far too costly relative to realistic alternatives, particularly at a time when Americans are looking for ways to shrink the size of government. Second, nation-building in Afghanistan is unnecessary. We can advance our national security interests without crafting a functioning nation-state in the Hindu Kush. And third, the current mission is deeply unconservative, succumbing to the same errors that trip up other ambitious government-run projects that conservatives routinely reject here at home.

…

Alas, although many rank and file Republicans agree with Huntsman, many GOP leaders do not. Perhaps that will change when they realize that, at least in this instance, good policy and good politics go hand in hand. We should bring most of our troops home, and focus the attention of the few thousand who remain on hunting al Qaeda. The United States does not need to transform a deeply divided, poverty-stricken, tribal-based society into a self-sufficient, cohesive, and stable electoral democracy, and we should stop pretending that we can.

Read the full piece here.

Huntsman Right to Rethink Afghanistan is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Better late than never.

The House of Representatives today debated two different resolutions purportedly aimed at forcing the Obama administration to comply with its statutory and constitutional obligations to secure formal authorization for the ongoing military campaign in Libya.

I say “purportedly” because it seems quite clear that the real intent of House Speaker John Boehner’s resolution was to lure away a sufficient number of Republicans who otherwise would have been inclined to vote for Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s (D-OH) measure. Whereas the Kucinich resolution would have compelled the Obama administration to withdraw from all military operations in Libya within the next 15 days, Boehner’s resolution bars the administration from deploying ground troops, but allows current operations to continue.  The resolution stipulates that the administration must explain what the U.S. military is actually doing, and calls on the president to justify his decision to launch the campaign without first obtaining congressional approval.  Massachusetts Democrat Jim McGovern suggested that a strongly worded press release would have the same effect. Others noted that similar language has already been written into the defense authorization passed late last week.

Boehner’s gambit worked, for now. His resolution carried, with overwhelming GOP support. The House failed to adopt the Kucinich measure, although more Republicans than Democrats voted for the bill.  The detailed vote totals for both measures signal a growing willingness on the part of even many Republicans to question the country’s many wars.

Indeed, many were prepared to go beyond merely voting for the measure; about a dozen House Republicans (including resolution co-sponsor Dan Burton of Indiana) spoke out in favor of the Kucinich resolution. Many of these House members seemed quite eager to reassert their authority and to defend the principle of legislative control over the war power, even if that meant allying with one of the most liberal members of Congress.

At one level, it shouldn’t surprise that a number of Republicans voted for the Kucinich resolution. The war is unpopular with the American people, and their elected representatives are reflecting that sentiment. A number of speakers this morning made this point explicitly. But leaving public opinion aside, and conceding that the constitutional question has been practically rendered moot by the parade of presidents and Congresses who have summarily ignored its clear intent, there are ample opportunities for questioning the Libya war on strategic grounds, and not many solid arguments that prove the war to be serving a vital national interest.

The least compelling argument in support of the Libya intervention, in my mind, is the one offered up by Defense Secretary Robert Gates earlier this week, and repeated several times  in the floor debate this morning: we need to stay in Libya, not because it is in our national interest to do so (it isn’t), and not because the Libyan civil war poses a clear and present danger to U.S. security (it doesn’t); rather, we are waging a war in Libya because our allies want us to. To leave them holding the bag, as Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) explained this morning, would betray a sacred trust. Boehner echoed those sentiments, warning against a vote for the Kucinich resolution because our NATO allies have stood by us in Afghanistan, and we owe it to them to do the same in Libya.

I discussed why this rationale is particularly flimsy over at TNI’s The Skeptics earlier today, and it is featured in a just-released Cato video. As the ever-quotable Ben Friedman explains, “we should have allies for war, not wars for allies.” Meanwhile, Justin Logan notes the absurdity of U.S. taxpayers borrowing money from China to buy precision-guided munitions for Europeans to drop on Libya. If that sounds like a Rube Goldberg foreign policy, it is.

Congress Debates the Libya War is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Pentagon will soon release a policy document explaining what cyberattacks it will consider acts of war meriting military response. Christoper Preble and I warn against this policy in an op-ed up at Reuters.com:

The policy threatens to repeat the overreaction and needless conflict that plagued American foreign policy in the past decade. It builds on national hysteria about threats to cybersecurity, the latest bogeyman to justify our bloated national security state. A wiser approach would put the threat in context to calm public fears and avoid threats that diminish future flexibility.

Reuters headlined our piece: “A military response to cyberattacks is preposterous.” Actually, our claim is not that we should never use military means to respond to cyberattacks. Our point instead is that the vast majority of events given that name have nothing to do with national security. Most “cyberattackers” are criminals: thieves looking to steal credit card numbers or corporate data, extortionists threatening denial of service attacks, or vandals altering websites to grind personal or political axes. These acts require police, not aircraft carriers.

Even the cyberattacks that have affected our national security do not justify war, we argue. There is little evidence that online spying has ever done grievous harm to national security, thinly sourced reports to the contrary notwithstanding. In any case, we do not threaten war in response to traditional espionage and should not do so merely because it occurs online.

Moreover, despite panicked reports claiming that hackers are poised to sabotage our “critical infrastructure” — downing planes, flooding dams, crippling Wall Street — hackers have accomplished nothing of the sort. We prevent these nightmares by decoupling the infrastructure management system from the public internet. But even these higher-end cyberattacks are only likely to damage commerce, not kill, so threatening to bomb in response to them seems belligerent.

The Stuxnet worm shows that cyberattacks may indeed do considerable harm, perhaps someday killing on a scale akin to small arms. Attacks like that might indeed merit military response. But they remain hypothetical here.

Vague terms like “cyberattack” and the alarmist rhetoric that surrounds them confuse common nuisance attacks with theoretical tragic ones. The danger is militarized responses to criminal acts, foolish regulation, wasteful spending, or even needless war.

To learn about the exaggeration of cyberthreats, read these two articles from the Mercatus Center. For a good discussion of the policy options for dealing with the various cyberharms, see this 2009 congressional testimony from Jim Harper.

Cyberphobia is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith, when Chancellor Palpatine transforms the republic into an empire, Senator Amidala remarks:

So this is how liberty dies . . . with thunderous applause.

But it can also happen in silent acquiescence. For decades now, successive Congresses have evaded their responsibility to make decisions about the deployment of U.S. armed forces abroad. I write about the latest instance of this, in Libya, in today’s Britannica column:

Presidents have an obligation to obey the Constitution and the law. But one of the ways that separation of powers works is that each branch of government is supposed to jealously guard its prerogatives from usurpation by the other branches. Too often Congress ducks that responsibility, preferring to let presidents make decisions, make law, and make war without the involvement of Congress. As Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., explained in his book The Imperial Presidency, the expansion of presidential war-making power has been “as much a matter of congressional abdication as of presidential usurpation.”

The president is derelict in his duty to obey the Constitution and the War Powers Resolution. And Congress is derelict in its duty to assert its constitutional authority. And I’m still wondering what’s happened to the antiwar movement, which ought to be loudly protesting not just the continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the newborn war in Libya.

As George Will said last week, “even if you think the War Powers Resolution is an unwise law—it is a law.” And a former law professor who is now the president of the United States should obey the law. Will expanded on that point in his Sunday column, titled “Obama’s Illegal War,” in the old-fashioned print edition of the Washington Post.

Full Britannica column here.

Presidents Should Obey the Law is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Six Republican senators are challenging President Obama’s authority to conduct an open-ended war in Libya without congressional authorization. The six conservative lawmakers (Rand Paul (R-KY), Jim DeMint (R-SC), Mike Lee (R-UT), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Tom Coburn (R-OK), and John Cornyn (R-TX)) sent a letter to the president on May 18th asking if he intends to comply with the War Powers Resolution. The full text of the letter can be found here.

The law stipulates that the president must terminate military operations within 60 days, unless Congress explicitly authorizes the action, or grants an extension. The clock on the Libya operation started ticking on March 21, 2011. Congress has neither formally approved of the mission, nor has it granted an extension. Therefore, the 60-day limit expires tomorrow, May 20th.

Last week at The Skeptics, I noted Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he suggested that the administration wanted to comply, but was consulting with Congress about how to do so. The New York Times presented some of the creative ideas that the administration was considering in order to adhere to circumvent the law. But the senators can read the Times, too. In their letter to the president, they write:

Last week some in your Administration indicated use of the United States Armed Forces will continue indefinitely, while others said you would act in a manner consistent with the War Powers Resolution. Therefore, we are writing to ask whether you intend to comply with the requirements of the War Powers Resolution. We await your response.

Let me be clear about one thing: I’m not a huge fan of the War Powers Resolution, per se. To me, it is silly, sort of like a law that affirmed the Congress’s authority to levy taxes, borrow and coin money, and establish Post Offices. In the same section where these powers are delegated, the Constitution clearly stipulates that Congress shall have the power to declare war. So why does there also need to be legislation?

Most presidents have complied with the spirit of the War Powers Resolution, but more out of deference to the notion that Congress has some role in whether the United States goes to war, not out of genuine conviction that Congress does/should have the most important role in deciding such things. By all appearances, President Obama is bypassing the charade.

I anxiously await his response to the senators’ letter, and am likewise curious to see if other senators raise questions about the administration’s intentions.

Will Obama Comply with the War Powers Resolution? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• Osama bin Laden’s death gives us a chance to end what might have become an era of permanent emergency and perpetual war.
• The Cold War ended–what are we doing in Korea?
• Two cheers for President Obama for ending eight (well, three) tax breaks to oil companies.
• Does Osama bin Laden’s death mean an end to U.S.-Pakistan relations?
• Please join us next Tuesday, May 10 at 4:00 p.m. Eastern for a Cato Book Forum on America’s Allies and War: Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq, by University of Mary Washington political scientist Jason W. Davidson. Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow and Georgetown University international relations professor Charles Kupchan will join Professor Davidson in a discussion of the book and its themes, particularly U.S. relations with NATO allies, moderated by Cato director of foreign policy studies Christopher A. Preble. Complimentary registration is required of all attendees by Monday, May 9 at noon Eastern. We hope you can join us in person, but we encourage you to watch online if you cannot attend personally.

Wednesday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Belgian painter René Magritte is famous in part for the painting pictured below.

What’s surprising is how much Magritte can tell us about our war in Libya. To recap where we are in Libya, our military objective is to “protect civilians” in that country. Except there’s this paragraph opening the recent New York Times article on the war:

WASHINGTON — NATO planners say the allies are stepping up attacks on palaces, headquarters, communications centers and other prominent institutions supporting the Libyan government, a shift of targets that is intended to weaken Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s grip on power and frustrate his forces in the field.

The Times also runs these quotes from officials in charge of the war:

“Now we are going after his rear echelon,” one NATO official said. “We are going after his ability to command and control his forces — his headquarters, his command posts, his communications — all those things that allow him to coordinate his attacks at the front.”

Military officials privately acknowledge that removing Colonel Qaddafi from power is the desired secondary effect of striking at state television and other symbols of his authoritarian rule. “His people may see the futility of continued resistance,” one Pentagon official said.

Somebody should probably loop in poor White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, who made the mistake just yesterday of saying the following:

“The goal of the mission is clear: protect the civilian population, enforce the no-fly zone, enforce the arms embargo. [It is] certainly not the policy of the coalition, of this administration, to decapitate, if you will, or to effect regime change in Libya by force.”

So let’s work this out. The United States currently has as a policy objective in Libya to remove Muammar Qaddafi from power. Washington is simultaneously using the military to attack “institutions supporting the Libyan government” in order to “weaken Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s grip on power,” but our official position is that doing so is unrelated to our policy objective of getting Qaddafi out of power. Does the administration really think we’re that stupid? Perhaps more importantly, is Congress that stupid?

Also, it may be time for a rundown of terms for which we no longer have adequate working definitions. I nominate:

• “war”
• “kinetic military action”
• “protect”
• “civilians”
• “protect civilians”
• “massacre”
• “regime change”
• “target”

Any other nominees?

René Magritte’s War is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The Weinberger-Powell Doctrine offers Congress and the President five key hurdles before military force should be employed. Chris Preble, in this new video, runs through the reasons why President Obama’s Libya incursion fails the Weinberger-Powell test.

You can subscribe to our YouTube channel, too.

Five Rules for Going to War is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings—yes, that Michael Hastings—has written another investigative article on U.S. operations in Afghanistan, centered again on a general in the theatre.  The revelations are perhaps more shocking than those that resulted in General Stanley McChrystal’s dismissal last summer.

His newest bombshell alleges that the U.S Army illegally engaged in “psychological operations” with the aim of manipulating various high-level U.S. government officials into believing that the war was progressing in order to gain their continued support.  The list of targets includes members of Congress, diplomats, think tank analysts, and even Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff.  Over at The Skeptics, I attempt to put this in context:

While American soldiers and Afghan civilians continue to kill and be killed in Afghanistan, the Pentagon seeks to provide the illusion of progress, systematically misrepresenting realities on the ground to bide more time, gain more troops, and acquire more funding. It’s bad enough that the American media uncritically relays statements from U.S. officials portraying “success” on the ground. Now the Pentagon is using its massive propaganda budget to blur the line between informing the public and spinning it to death. In fact, several years ago the Associated Press found that the Pentagon had spent $4.7 billion on public relations in 2009 alone, and employs 27,000 people for recruitment, advertising and public relations, nearly as many as the 30,000-person State Department. Essentially the Pentagon is trying to influence public policy and lobby civilian officials to shift policies toward their own ends while dispersing the costs onto the American taxpayer.

Luckily, it appears that Americans have come to learn that despite the media’s frequent adulation of their uniformed military, the Pentagon operates just like every other bureaucracy in the federal government. According to a poll released earlier this month by Gallup, 72 percent of Americans want Congress to speed up troop withdrawals from Afghanistan. Much like the McChrystal flap from last summer, there is a very fine line between military officials offering their honest opinion and threatening civilian control of the war.

Click here for the full post.

The Pentagon Propaganda Machine Rears Its Head is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

If you follow the news, you might never guess that we’re living in a remarkably peaceful era. But we are. The long-term trends say that war is on the decline—combat fatalities, too. If we value world peace, we shouldn’t be complaining. We should be figuring out why these things are happening—and asking how we can keep them going.

Peace, of course, doesn’t often make the news. There’s nothing dramatic to report. Peace doesn’t explode. It doesn’t kill people. It makes for lousy TV.

I’m hoping, however, that peace makes a good topic at Cato Unbound. This month’s lead essay is by Andrew Mack, director of the Human Security Report Project at Simon Fraser University. If we live in a more secure world, he asks, why is it?

Please join us throughout the month for an empirical discussion of peace and war, the demographics of each, and what it is that makes our era an unusually peaceful one.

Peace by the Numbers is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Shortly after unveiling a new uranium enrichment facility, North Korea has shelled a disputed island held by the Republic of Korea.  A score of South Koreans reportedly were killed or wounded.

These two steps underscore the North’s reputation for recklessness.  Unfortunately, there is no easy solution: serious military retaliation risks full-scale war, while intensified sanctions will have no impact without China’s support.

Instead, the U.S. should join with the ROK in an intensive diplomatic offensive in Beijing.  So far China has assumed that the Korean status quo is to its advantage.  However, Washington and Seoul should point out that Beijing has much to lose if things go badly in North Korea.

The North is about to embark on a potentially uncertain leadership transition.  North Koreans remain impoverished; indeed, malnutrition reportedly is spreading.  With the regime apparently determined to press ahead with its nuclear program while committing regular acts of war against the South, the entire peninsula could go up in flames.  China would be burned, along with the rest of North Korea’s neighbors.

The U.S. also should inform Beijing that Washington might choose not to remain in the middle if the North continues its nuclear program.  Given the choice of forever guaranteeing South Korean and Japanese security against an irresponsible North Korea, or allowing those nations to decide on their own defense, including possible acquisition of nuclear weapons, the U.S. would seriously consider the latter.  Then China would have to deal with the consequences.

Beijing’s best option would be to join with the U.S. and South Korea in offering a package deal for denuclearization, backed by effective sanctions, meaning the cut-off of Chinese food and energy assistance.  Otherwise, Beijing might find itself sharing in a future North Korean nightmare.

Beijing Key in Controlling North Korea’s Recklessness is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog