by Jesse Walker

When Bill Kristol endorsed America’s intervention in Libya, the Weekly Standard editor was being completely consistent with everything else he has said about American foreign policy. He just wasn’t being consistent with his pose as a proponent of fiscal restraint.

It’s bracing to watch Kristol twirl so easily from denouncing “the Democrats’ orgy of spending” and complaining about Republicans who “don’t have a credible plan to deal with the debt or the deficit” to jubilating that the president “didn’t shrink from defending the use of force.”

But the pundit’s gyrations can’t obscure a basic reality: You can pay your bills or you can be a global policeman, but you can’t do both. Not in 2011.

According to ABC, the cost of Obama’s Libya spending reached $600 million in its first week. The Pentagon estimates that the total could reach $800 million by the end of September, and the Pentagon just might be low-balling. Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has told the National Journal that the price tag could “easily pass the $1 billion mark on this operation, regardless of how well things go.” And if things don’t go well . . .

But let’s stick, for the moment, with the costs of that initial week. That’s already more than half the amount House Republicans have asked to cut from Americorps. It’s more than twice the amount they’ve asked to cut from Amtrak. It’s nearly four times the size of National Public Radio’s entire operating budget for fiscal year 2011, including the parts that come from private sources.

All this for just a week of a war that — unlike our invasions and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan — doesn’t even pretend to be an act of self-defense.

And what about those troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the price tag long ago topped a trillion? It goes without saying that Kristol and his cohort still support both wars even as they’re eager to add a third.

It also goes without saying that the Libyan operation will make it harder to make military cuts of any kind.

For a neocon, fiscal restraint stops at the water’s edge.

There are several coherent ways to think about federal spending and foreign policy right now. You can address America’s fiscal crisis by calling for serious cuts both at home and abroad. That’s the libertarian path. You can deny that we’re facing a serious fiscal crisis at all. That’s what the pro-war, pro-bailout liberal hawks have been doing. And you can deny we face a serious fiscal crisis but join in the libertarians’ other arguments against the wars. That’s the liberal doves’ approach.

What you can’t coherently claim is that we need to both (a) bring our financial house in order or face fiscal ruin and (b) embark on one expensive open-ended military adventure after another.

Yet conservatives in the Kristol mold don’t seem to see a contradiction here at all.

Source: Reason Magazine

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