Political courage and popular will to reduce America’s bloated defense budget have been gaining momentum recently, particularly as debate over the debt ceiling heats up. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) floated a proposal that includes an $800 billion reduction in military spending, nearly double what President Obama proposed just last April. Even Republicans are embracing the need to drastically reduce the Pentagon’s budget. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) said on Sunday that trimming $1 trillion off DOD’s budget over the next ten years is “not super hard.”

However, there are some hold-outs. House Armed Services Committee chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) isn’t happy with Conrad’s plan (McKeon previously called DOD cuts “dangerous” but never said why). And the war hawks at right-wing think tanks the American Enterprise Institute, the Foreign Policy Initiative and the Heritage Foundation got together and released a report criticizing Pentagon budget cuts. “Warning: Hollow Force Ahead!” the title reads. The report contains a series of random “myths” and “facts” that argue for more spending, more military, and more troops, and it even seems to suggest that it all might be needed for war with Iran:

Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan would represent only a part of U.S. posture in the greater Middle East — a historically unstable region now in the throes of a further transition and facing the prospect of an accelerated regional nuclear arms race sparked by Iran. … The long-term geopolitical trends reflect protracted and persistent irregular wars in the Middle East.

But without any sense of irony whatsoever, the report concludes with the following:

While no comprehensive analysis for long-term readiness has been undertaken, the rough overall pattern is apparent: the future of American national security is being mortgaged to fight today’s wars and reduce the deficit by an insignificant amount. As a result, America’s armed forces, which have been stretched thin for nearly a decade, will likely be asked in the years ahead to do the same or more with even less if defense spending is cut once again.

Yes, that’s right, the folks who brought you the Iraq war, and thus the protracted predicament that the United States now finds itself in in Afghanistan, are now complaining that those wars have stretched the military thin and are selling out future American national security. As one national security analyst told ThinkProgress responding to the report, “Having killed their parents, the neocons are now complaining about being orphans.”

Retired CIA officer Robert Baer was at the center of a controversy last week when he hypothesized that Israel may launch a unilateral attack against Iran in the fall and that such a move would drag the U.S. into another major war in the Middle East. His remarks, delivered while on a Los Angeles radio talk-show, were widely repeated both in the U.S. and across the Middle East. The uproar over Baer’s comments hit a crescendo with former State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley tweeting on Monday, “the Arab Spring has sufficiently complicated Israel’s strategic calculus that it is more likely to show restraint in the immediate term,” and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was pressed to respond to Baer’s assertions in an interview with Al-Arabiya today. Netanyahu responded:

I don’t even confirm it because there’s nothing to deny and nothing to confirm. It’s not a real issue.

Baer, writing for Time.com, now says his remarks were an off-the-cuff response to a hypothetical question about when Israel might choose to attack Iran, assuming it had already made the decision to act unilaterally. He writes:

And when [the talk-show host] asked me when I thought this hypothetical attack might hypothetically occur, I blithely suggested September. I was only adding two plus two: a September attack would allow Netanyahu to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities and wreck plans for a U.N. vote on Palestinian statehood, which is slated for September.

But Baer acknowledges that his comments were made with no inside knowledge of Israeli planning and that media attention afforded to his comments was totally out of line with the degree of seriousness to which his stature as a retired CIA officer should be afforded:

I wondered why Crowley and everyone else didn’t notice I hadn’t drawn a government check in more than 12 years, and therefore wasn’t bringing any inside knowledge to the subject. And I’d certainly never claimed a back-door access to Netanyahu’s inner circle that would give me any privileged knowledge about a planned attack.

Baer, who if anything seems guilty of naivete, reflects that his remarks may have “accidentally kicked a hornets’ nest.” Indeed this is probably an understatement. Netanyahu’s government is in a growing split with Israel’s security elite over attacking Iran, and many analysts, including Baer, have described a potentially disastrous scenario if Israel chooses to exercise “the military option.” So it’s no great surprise that Baer’s comments, albeit eagerly repeated by a hungry media, evoked a strong reaction.

In only the latest episode of a long line Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin‘s uncritical stenography of her ideological comrades — even when they’re obviously wrong — comes today’s comment from Brookings Institution pundit Robert Kagan that there is no domestic constituency for defense spending. In a post attacking the “Gang of Six” debt plan, Rubin quotes an e-mail from Kagan:

[The proposed cuts are] utterly irresponsible and dangerous to national security. Also cowardly, since defense has no domestic constituency, while entitlements — the real source of our fiscal crisis — do.

Leaving aside the fear-mongering bit about how cutting the U.S.’ massive defense budget might suddenly bring the caliphate flooding into America, the notion that defense spending has no domestic constituency seems fantastical at even a moment’s glance. Writing for the security blog InkSpots, pseudonymous defense analyst Gulliver dashes out five of such constituencies: “1. The U.S. and global defense industry;” “2. Communities dependent on defense dollars;” “3. Members of Congress;” “4. the Defense Department and the military services;” “5. commentators, advocates, and pseudo-scholars.”

Those broad and obvious categories are what makes Kagan’s assertion so baffling. The defense industry alone pours tons of money into politics. In the last presidential election cycle, individuals and PACs associated with defense gave about $24 million and, for each of the past three years, the defense industry has spent about $150 million a year on lobbying efforts.

Naturally, members of Congress from both sides of the aisle react well to this cash and get behind pet defense projects for their districts exactly because that money brings jobs and therefore, the idea goes, more votes. So not only is the constituency there, but they’re well represented on the Hill, too.

Defense’s domestic constituency is so painfully obvious that one wonders what Kagan was thinking when he typed out the e-mail. And he’s often thought of as the “smart neocon.”

As CAP’s Sarah Margon notes, nearly 10.7 million people are in desperate need of food assistance in the Horn of Africa; almost one in 10 children is at risk of death by starvation in some parts of Somalia.

Yesterday, U.N. General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon issued an urgent appeal for aid from the world community. He requested $300 million in aid over the next two months, noting that Somalis are starving to death every day:

Meanwhile, as the U.N. is scrambling to get this aid money, the U.S. continues to spend nearly $300 million a month in the war in Afghanistan, as this Associated Press story from February notes:

The withdrawal of American troops from Iraq will allow for a reduced US defense budget in 2012 but the war in Afghanistan still costs the United States close to 300 million dollars a day. Under the Pentagon’s proposed budget, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will drop to $117.8 billion for fiscal year 2012, a reduction of 41.5 billion from the previous year.

While the U.S. is already a major aid donor to Somalia, the stark contrast between how much it is spending every day in Afghanistan as compared what Somalia needs to prevent mass starvation is alarming.

Yesterday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee engaged in a marathon mark-up of the State Department budget authorization bill. One of the most stunning votes was a party-line 22-20 victory for an amendment that defunded the Organization for American States (OAS), the multilateral group of Western hemisphere democracies formed under U.S. leadership in 1948.

The funding, which accounts for about half of OAS’ budget, doesn’t amount to much — just $48 million. So why did House Republicans, led by right-wing Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), vote for Rep. Connie Mack’s (R-FL) amendment eliminating it? Because, Mack said, the OAS was supporting U.S. foes. The Associated Press reported on the mark-up:

Mack insisted that the measure did not represent isolationism but rather was targeted at an organization that backs Venezuela and its U.S. foe, President Hugo Chavez.

“Let’s engage our allies and friends, but let’s not continue to support an organization that’s perpetuating some countries’ ability” to destroy democracies, Mack said.

Likewise, Rep. David Rivera (R-FL) criticized Cuba’s human rights record as the amendment was being debated.

But the OAS’ close allegiance with Cuba and Chavez’s Venezuela are both highly suspect — as in: not actually true.

Cuba is not even a member of the OAS, as Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) pointed out. At Foreign Policy, Josh Rogin adds that in 2009 the OAS lifted its ban on Cuban membership, but the democratic threshold for membership remains in place — and so Cuba, for now, is out.

And the OAS has actually strongly criticized Chavez and Venezuela twice in the past two years. In early 2010, the OAS issued a blistering report about Venezuela’s human rights record and slipping democratic credentials. In January of this year, OAS Secretary General Jose Miguel Insulza criticized a Venezuelan law passed in December as being “completely contrary” to the Inter-American Democratic Charter passed by the OAS in 2001. Insulza added that the issue would likely come before the OAS.

As Daniel Larison points out at the American Conservative, the OAS might not do a whole lot, but its work is “fairly innocuous or even constructive when it comes to election monitoring and development aid.” At such a small cost — 0.02 percent of what the U.S. will spend in Iraq and Afghanistan this year — it hardly seems worth cutting and running from OAS by the logic of completely flawed and hollow reasoning.