Our guest bloggers are Sarah Margon, associate director for Sustainable Security at the Center for American Progress and Alex Rothman, special assistant with the national security team at CAP.

In recent weeks, the security situation in Libya has become increasingly precarious, with Ian Martin, the U.N. special envoy to Libya, warning the Security Council earlier this week that the continued presence of armed “revolutionary brigades” and loose weapons presents a significant threat. But as the situation on the ground takes a turn for the worse, the Security Council remains divided and distracted by political infighting about civilian casualties from the NATO bombing campaign.

Critics of the intervention, most significantly South Africa and Russia, have prominently called for an investigation into civilian harm caused by the NATO airstrikes. But a closer analysis suggests that this posturing may be more motivated by a desire for political gain than concern for the rights of noncombatants.

In March, the Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 1973, authorizing the creation of a no-fly zone over Libya as well as “all necessary measures…to protect civilians.” At the time, neither South Africa nor Russia outright opposed the intervention. In fact, South Africa voted in favor while Russia abstained. As the intervention in Libya progressed, however, both countries became more explicitly critical of NATO’s extensive involvement, arguing that the NATO airstrikes overstepped their mandate. In the words of South African U.N. Ambassador Baso Sangqu, Resolution 1973 approved a no-fly zone but not “regime change or anything else.”

While the numbers of civilians inadvertently killed or wounded by NATO is likely on the lower end, a NATO investigation would nonetheless be beneficial for two reasons. First, while NATO maintains it took care to minimize the effects of its air campaign on civilians, an examination of instances in which these precautions failed would provide lessons as to how the alliance can take more effective protection measures in the future. For example, the NATO tactic of “double tapping” targets (in which two sequential air strikes were carried out on the same target) appears to have unnecessarily imperiled those who rushed to aid victims of the first attack. Second, investigating civilian victims of the bombing campaign would present a first step towards allowing NATO and/or the Libyan National Transition Council to make amends.

Such steps are tremendously important as political reform in Libya continues. Early efforts to build a government that is accountable to and responsible for its citizens can help build trust in national institutions — something that has been absent in Libya for more than four decades.

But while a NATO inquiry may be warranted, it is disingenuous for countries like Russia and South Africa to use the issue of civilian deaths to score points at the U.N. Security Council. As the victims advocacy organization CIVIC points out in a recent press release and op-ed, “Libyan civilians are not pawns to be used in a political game between those who did and did not support the NATO operation.”

Instead, Russia and South Africa should support the work of the U.N.’s International Commission of Inquiry for Libya, which is undertaking an independent review of civilian harm in the Libyan conflict, and focus their efforts at the Security Council on addressing the threats that continue to harm civilians in Libya.

Republicans and their allies on the right reacted yesterday with expected indignation to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s announcement of a 2013 Pentagon budget and five-year plan that flattens previously proposed spending levels. In a statement, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said:

I am deeply concerned that the size and scope of these cuts would repeat the mistakes of history and leave our forces too small to respond effectively to events that may unfold over the next few years.

House Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) released a statement saying:

This move ignores a critical lesson in recent history: that while high technology and elite forces give America an edge, they cannot substitute for overwhelming ground forces when we are faced with unforeseen battlefields.

And Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s defense policy adviser Max Boot writes in the neoconservative magazine Commentary:

The fault in that line of thinking was displayed in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we quickly found out there was no substitute for a humble rifleman to impose our will on the enemy at bayonet point. Now the Obama administration is fooling itself into thinking we will never have to fight another major ground war again.

The notion that the Obama administration’s cuts to previously proposed budget numbers — which on average over the next two years actually increase the budget but, accounting for inflation, amounts to holding spending steady — are setting up a U.S. inability to fight a ground war or prepare for the next conflict doesn’t hold water. Even if the full amount of nearly $950 billion in reductions are enacted — if sequestered cuts are added to the ones outlined yesterday — the military budget would still be at 2007 levels, when the U.S. was fighting two ground wars.

Furthermore, McClatchy newspapers today notes that “planned reduction in ground forces by 2017 would still leave a larger military than before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” And Center for a New American Security fellow Andrew Exum points out that hardware is much harder to scale up than troop levels should a war arise: “[I]n the event of a major war, you can recruit and train new infantry battalions quicker than you can design and build ships.”

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney went on the offense at last night’s Republican Presidential Debate, attacking the White House’s treatment of Israel and charging that the Obama administration has “time and time again shown distance from Israel.” That distance, said Romney, has resulted in a “greater sense of aggression” from the Palestinians.

But Romney’s attacks are based on wholesale fabrications of President Barack Obama’s track record as a close ally of Israel for the past three years. Romney charged:

This president went before the United Nations and castigated Israel for building settlements. He said nothing about thousands of rockets being rained in on Israel from the Gaza Strip.

The smear may have garnered applause from the debate audience but a National Jewish Democratic Council fact check found that Obama’s September 21, 2011 U.N. speech had explicitly addressed the issue of rockets fired into Israel. Obama said:

Let us be honest with ourselves: Israel is surrounded by neighbors that have waged repeated wars against it. Israel’s citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide bombs on their buses.

Romney went on to charge the White House with “[throwing] Israel under the bus” by “defining ’67 borders as a starting point for negotiations” — a position also held by the George W. Bush and Clinton administrations — and accused Obama of “[disrespecting] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — Bibi Netanyahu.”

Watch it:

Following Obama’s U.N. speech in September, Netanyahu said to President Obama:

I think that standing your ground, taking this position of principle… I think this is a badge of honor and I want to thank you for wearing that badge of honor.

And last May, Netanyahu praised Obama’s commitment to Israel’s security, telling the audience at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference that Obama had made an “ironclad commitment to Israel’s security” and “[has] backed those words with deeds.”

Israel and discussion of U.S Middle East policy is one of the few foreign policy topics to emerge as a wedge issue for the GOP presidential candidates. Indeed, in the previous GOP debate three days ago, Newt Gingrich also made false claims about Obama’s policy toward Israel. But Obama’s track record of close cooperation with Israel requires critics like Romney and Gingrich to resort to outright fabrications to smear Obama as a weak ally to the Jewish state.

Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said the cuts to past projections for military spending were “tough” and “real,” and said they “obviously will cause some pain.” The cuts, as Center for American Progress analysts Lawrence Korb, Max Hoffman and Alex Rothman wrote today, constitute a “positive first step and a major achievement. It will be the first real reduction in baseline defense spending in more than a decade.” But more needs to be done: “[T]here is a long way to go to reach sustainable levels of defense spending and bring the Pentagon budget back in line with historical norms.”

First the hard numbers: The reductions to projected spending resulted from what Panetta called “mandated savings” in his Pentagon presser, imposed by Congress in the Budget Control Act.

The upcoming year’s Pentagon baseline budget will indeed be smaller than this year’s — by $6 billion, representing about a 1.1 percent reduction from 2012′s $531 budget. But, as the L.A. Times notes:

[O]ver the next four years, the Pentagon budget would rise each year, reaching $567 billion by 2017. In inflated adjusted dollars, spending is essentially flat, Pentagon projections show.

The Pentagon budget will actually be rising in nominal terms. In 2017, the Pentagon will be spending $36 billion more than this year. That’s an average 2 percent increase over five years. However, the New York Times adds that “adjusted for inflation, the increases are small enough that they will amount to a slight cut of 1.6 percent of the Pentagon’s base budget over the next five years.” (The numbers exclude spending on the Afghanistan war, which is appropriated separately and expected to drop from $115 billion this year to $88 billion next year.)

Making good on Panetta’s commitment “not to hollow out the force,” McClatchy notes that the Pentagon’s “planned reduction in ground forces by 2017 would still leave a larger military than before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The Center for American Progress analysts also took into account the end of the Iraq war and, coming within three years, the end of the Afghanistan war:

Unfortunately, we have done nothing to roll back more than a decade of continuous growth in military spending, despite the end of the war in Iraq and the beginning of our drawdown in Afghanistan.

They wrote that the cuts to proposed spending “represent a small step toward a more reasonable, sustainable strategic stance,” but merely kick the can down the road on other “hard choices the Pentagon must face over the coming years.”