Our guest blogger is Sarah Jacobs, an intern with the National Security team at the Center for American Progress.

The Obama administration released its request for the FY 2011 defense budget last month. The requested $708.3 billion represents a more than tripling in spending from 1997, bringing our defense budget to an historic high, surpassing the Reagan era buildup, Vietnam, and higher than even the peak during the Korean War, a peak which we’ve been over for the past seven years.

This dangerous trend of building off the base of the previous year’s budget is unsustainable and not, as many think, inevitable. While national security must be the number one priority for the United States, a point that Obama has made repeatedly, defense dollars are unrestrained and lend further to the fears of an exploding deficit and a far too limited United States.

Never has there been a more important time to emphasize fiscal discipline. There is no legal reason that the defense budget should be exempt from the discretionary freeze. Congress should examine the defense budget and find where things can realistically and safely be reduced. Our troops deserve every dollar they need to remain safe and to accomplish our mission; but there are places that the budget can be slimmed down to better reflect our current threats of the 21st century. We must ensure that defense dollars are effective and focused and held accountable like all other parts of the budget.

Defense spending has been unconstrained for a decade, reaching higher than ever amounts. These increases have not been rebalanced or traded off. The Obama administration needs to seek clarity and reexamine what is being spent where. And while certainly no compromises are being struck to balance spending, the spending is raised disparately and with little explanation why.

We need to see where we can realistically cut back. For example, we do not need to grow military force when we are planning on drawing down numbers from our current conflicts. There is currently no arraying the budget by mission. The Department of Defense has no specific data on their spending. There needs to be better military and DOD priority setting like the successful drawdown from 1989-1995. Read more

It looks as if the final hurdle to a new START deal rests on largely symbolic and inconsequential language relating to missile defense. Yet this language is becoming a major obstacle for a new START treaty and prompted a phone call between President Obama and Russian President Medvedev. However, the call wasn’t enough to finalize a deal and negotiators adjourned talks. McClatchy reports that:

Negotiations to complete a new U.S.-Russia nuclear arms treaty have stalled over a Russian demand for the option to withdraw unilaterally if Moscow determines that U.S. missile defenses would threaten its intercontinental nuclear missile force, a senior U.S. official said Monday. Similar “unilateral statements” have been included in previous arms control treaties, and the Bush administration used one in 2002 to abrogate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the former Soviet Union. The Obama administration, however, has rejected the Russian demand, fearing that it could make it harder to win the Republican votes needed for Senate ratification of the new nuclear arms pact.

Why is the Obama administration going to the mat over an inconsequential issue? Last week, Jon Kyl (R-AZ), John McCain (R-AZ), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) wrote a letter (pdf) to Obama protesting this possible treaty clause, arguing that it was “troubling” because it would “put pressure on the United States to limit” its missile defense systems. But this is a ridiculous argument since if the Russians feel that strongly about the threat of US missile defense they could still withdraw from the next START treaty whether that language is in the treaty or not. In other words, the additional language changes nothing. Therefore, the letter from Kyl seems more like an effort to disguise his opposition behind the more politically palatable issue of missile defense, rather than have to argue that he is crazily against decreasing the number of nuclear weapons pointed at the United States.

Now Kyl – who is the most important Republican in this area – has not said he would oppose a new treaty and he did seemingly signal that to support the treaty he may no longer be demanding the building of new nuclear weapons. This is a good sign and getting Kyl to support the treaty would guarantee ratification.

But getting Kyl’s support is also a huge gamble since almost every sign points to Kyl doing everything he can to obstruct a treaty. As the McClatchy story indicates, trying to meet Jon Kyl’s demands has a real cost, as it is stalling the entire treaty and putting ratification this year in doubt, as well as creating unnecessary turmoil in the US-Russian relationship. Should the Administration succeed in stripping out the language, the Administration would still be gambling on the sincerity of Kyl to not backtrack on any deal to support the final treaty.

With the House and Senate having recently passed bills containing sanctions against Iran’s imports of refined petroleum, George Washington University’s Hossein Askari offers an analysis of the potential impact of these sanctions. Noting that “an effective gasoline embargo can only be implemented through a naval blockade of Iran,” Askari then asks “Even assuming that a gasoline embargo were effective in cutting off Iran’s imports, what would happen?“:

Consumption of gasoline would decline by 30 percent. If the government allowed the reduced supply of gasoline, namely, domestically refined gasoline, to be sold at a price that would equate demand to supply, the price would increase to a level that would eliminate the subsidy, meaning no subsidy for imported gasoline and no subsidy for domestically refined gasoline. There would be no incentive to smuggle gasoline to neighboring countries. The government would have higher revenues to spend on other priorities and projects. Lo and behold, the sanctions would have done what Tehran has wanted to do for years, and the government would not be held responsible.

Askari concludes the following:

1. An airtight gasoline embargo is difficult to implement, as Iran’s borders are long and porous.
2. China is unlikely to sign on at the United Nations without extracting too high a price from the United States.
3. Even if China does acquiesce, UN negotiations are likely to be long and painful.
4. Iran clearly is expanding its refining capacity, increasing its storage of gasoline (and diesel), preparing to reconfigure its refineries to produce a little more gasoline, preparing the ground to reduce gasoline smuggling, and in the event of an embargo would allow prices to increase, at least somewhat. All of these measures would blunt the impact of a gasoline embargo.
5. An embargo would be blamed on the United States, while shoring up government finances.

Askari also asks why there is “so much talk of a gasoline sanction and other unnamed crippling sanctions when financial sanctions, which could deal a mortal blow to the Iranian regime itself, are soft peddled?” It’s a great question. Over the past few years, Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey has assembled a package of financial sanctions against key Iranian Revolutionary Guard-controlled firms, and traveled the globe to obtain cooperation from various partners in enforcing them. (Newsweek recently reported that, according to a European diplomat, Levey is feared and hated in Tehran, where “all the officials know how to pronounce his name right.”)

Testifying to the Senate Banking Committee in October, Levey said his goal was “to make sure that we maximize the chance of getting international support for these things because… if we do not have international support, there’ll be diversions, there’ll be work-arounds, and the efficacy of the sanctions will not nearly be as effective.” The laborious and contentious process of lining up international support for and enforcement of gas sanctions could very well undermine actually-effective financial sanctions, which raises the question of whether those pushing for gas sanctions actually believe they’ll be effective, or are just interested in escalating up another notch toward military action against Iran. Once gas sanctions fail (as virtually every actual Iran analyst believes they will) to produce the intended change in Iranian behavior, we’ll really have no other choice, will we?

For the past several months, much to the delight of the right wing, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has been leading an aggressive effort to impugn the motives of Obama appointees in the Department of Justice, whom he alleges are embroiled in a “conflict of interest” because they at one point advocated that Guantanamo detainees be tried according to the rule of law. Grassley has been on a vengeful witch-hunt to identify the names of DoJ lawyers who have “either represented Guantanamo detainees or worked for groups who advocated for them,” with the likely intention of purging them.

Last month, the Justice Department acknowledged to Grassley that at least nine appointees in the agency had previously advocated for the rule of law with respect to detainee treatment in Guantanamo, but Attorney General Eric Holder refused to disclose the names of these lawyers. Grassley dismissed the DoJ response as “bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo” and demanded to know the identities of those appointees.

Employing “McCarthyite tactics,” the crack investigative squad at the Washington Times has undertaken the task of identifying each of the lawyers. Liz Cheney’s neoconservative outfit Keep America Safe has released an ad today ominously warning of the anonymous “al Qaeda seven” in the Justice Department:

In a coordinated assault, a plethora of other right wing voices are issuing similarly irresponsible charges:

– The American Spectator escalates the number of potential terrorist “abettors” in the Department of Justice from 9 to “as many as 13 to 16.”

– David Davenport, a researcher at the conservative Hoover Institution, wrote in an editorial for the San Francisco Chronicle, “The Department of Justice is supposed to be prosecuting terrorists, not coddling them.”

– The Investor’s Business Daily headlines its editorial: “DOJ: Department of Jihad?” “Just whose side are they on?” IBD asks.

– “It’s like they’re bringing al Qaeda lawyers inside the Department of Justice,” said Debra Burlingame, who lost her brother on 9/11 and a board member of Liz Cheney’s group Keep America Safe.

Many on the right have conveniently neglected to mention that the United States Supreme Court sided with the Obama attorneys. One of the targeted attorneys is Principal Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, the lawyer who won Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the case that struck down the Bush administration’s military commissions system. Another target, Justice Department lawyer Jennifer Daskal, had signed her name to an amicus brief in the Boumediene v. Bush case arguing that Gitmo detainees be accorded habeas corpus rights to challenge their convictions. The Supreme Court sided with Daskal’s position.

So the bottom line is that, having been on the losing side of these Supreme Court decisions, the right wing has decided to continue its vindictive fight by smearing the lawyers who prevailed in their advocacy for the rule of law.

Yesterday, Media Matters posted a clip from radio shock jock Michael Savage’s February 26th show in which he railed on Middle Eastern and Muslim immigrants. During his tirade, Savage accused former President Bill Clinton of “flooding” the nation with hateful Muslims who came to the U.S. to either leach off the system or bring the country back a couple centuries:

SAVAGE: The reason you see more of them now is because Bill Clinton flooded America with Middle Easterners, mostly of the throwback variety. Not the modern Muslim, not the Muslim who wants to come here and advance society. But the Muslim who wants to come here and either live off the society or take us backwards two hundred years. That’s part of their diversity training. They don’t want the country to be too advanced, you get it?

CALLER: Right, and they come into our country and say, you bow down to me. You accept me, I don’t have to accept you.

SAVAGE: I see the eyes behind those slits. I see hate and murder in most of their eyes, should I level with you?

CALLER: They’re not nice, they’re not cordial.

SAVAGE: Whatever happened to when in Rome, do as the Romans do? I guess it didn’t make it Saudi Arabia.

Listen:

Savage is well-known for his crude, anti-Muslim rhetoric. In the past, he’s advocated for the deportation of all Muslims, stating that they should “take your religion and shove it up your behind.” Savage’s views might be explained by his fundamental belief that refugees can’t assimilate and that all Muslims are inherently radical. However, in some places, it’s Savage himself who is perceived as a violent threat. Last year, the United Kingdom added Savage to the list of Muslim extremists and Russian gang members who are barred from entering the country due to their reputations for fostering extremism and hatred.

Meanwhile, during his presidency, Clinton pointed out that extremism certainly doesn’t define Islam and that Muslim immigrants have made significant contributions to the nation:

We welcome Islam in America. It enriches our country with Islam’s teachings of self-discipline, compassion, and commitment to family. It deepens America’s respect for Muslims here at home and around the world. Today, Muslim Americans are a cornerstone of our American community. They enrich our political and cultural life; they provide leadership in every field of human endeavor, from business to medicine, to scholarship.

The 9/11 attacks did not diminish these contributions nor did they stop President Obama from reiterating that “the contribution of Muslims to the United States are too long to catalog because Muslims are so interwoven into the fabric of our communities and our country.”