March 29, 2011
Carrie Budoff Brown argues, persuasively, that the limited humanitarian intervention in Libya with kinetic elements will severely hamper the previously emerging consensus that the defense budget needed some trimming. She quotes Doug Holtz-Eakin engaging in a bit of self-fulfilling prophesy:
“It is just plain vanilla that it will make it harder to cut defense in the near term,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist with close ties to congressional Republicans. “We’re going to have to fund more of this than you realize.”Basically DHE is saying here that thanks to Obama’s decision to go to war, the previous tensions that had been building up inside the conservative coalition on this point are now easing and the whole right-of-center establishment will get behind the idea that the Pentagon shouldn’t be cut.
This is one reason why I think left-of-center hawks have been way to blithe about dismissing the fiscal concerns surrounding this mission. It’s true that nothing about claiming that you’re going to establish a no-fly zone in Libya and then instead offering tactical air support to rebel groups forces you to slash spending on global public health. But the mission in Libya is a shot in the arm for the politics of wasteful defense spending, and unduly high equilibrium levels of defense spending encourage further cost-ineffective “humanitarian” military adventures.
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