Condoleezza Rice continued her book tour this week talking with Foreign Policy’s Josh Rogin. Rogin pushed Rice to share her reflections on the Obama administration’s foreign policy, and surprisingly, the former Secretary of State chose to distance herself from the right-wing talking point that the end of year troop withdrawal from Iraq will dangerously strengthen Iran’s regional influence.

The go-to criticism leveled by GOP hawks doesn’t hold much water with Rice. She told Rogin:

The Iraqis are good armed forces; they’re buying a lot of our equipment. I think they’ll be able to defend themselves. They continue to need help on the counterterrorism side, and it would have been a good message to Iran. Although I think it’s easy to overstate the degree to which the Iraqis have any attraction to Iran — that’s a pretty lousy relationship, really.

Neocons and various Republicans harshly criticized President Obama for announcing that all U.S. troops would leave Iraq by the end of the year. Fred and Kimberly Kagan wrote that “it will unquestionably benefit Iran.” Newt Gingrich told an audience, “Don’t kid yourself, it is defeat. Iran is stronger.” Rick Santorum claimed “Iranians now have more sway over the Iraqi government.” And the Bill Kristol “letterhead organization,” the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) wrote, in anticipation of a withdrawal, that the U.S. must maintain a strong presence in Iraq to “help ensure Iraq remains oriented away from Iran and a long-term ally of the United States.”

While neoconservatives and GOP presidential hopefuls are eager to suggest that the Obama administration’s withdrawal from Iraq — in conformity with the Status Of Forces Agreement negotiated and signed by Bush — is a major win for Iran, the former Secretary of State is clearly not buying it.

With a Democratic president in office, a group of Washington neoconservative pundits, with little policy recourse other than whipping up public opinion, get together under the aegis of Bill Kristol and write open letters to the administration pushing hawkish policies on Iraq. That’s what happened in the 1990s when Kristol founded the Project For The New American Century (PNAC), a so-called “letterhead organization” that pushed for the U.S. to remove Saddam Hussein from power by force. Neoconservatives, of course, then dotted the halls of power when George W. Bush took the presidency. Within three years, the U.S. military moved into Iraq.

Now, with another Democrat — President Obama — in the oval office, Kristol et al are undertaking a similar venture. Only this time, it’s not about invading Iraq, but about staying there for an indefinite period. That’s what happened when Kristol’s new “letterhead organization” — the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) — released a letter yesterday about the Obama administration’s reported plan to drop troop levels in Iraq to a mere several thousand.

After lauding U.S. efforts in Iraq so far, the FPI letter, signed by 40 mostly-neoconservative analysts, said:

We are thus gravely concerned about recent news reports suggesting that the White House is considering leaving only a residual force of 4,000 or fewer U.S. troops in Iraq after the end of this year. This number is significantly smaller than what U.S. military commanders on the ground have reportedly recommended and would limit our ability to ensure that Iraq remains stable and free from significant foreign influence in the years to come.

From the get-go, the letter seems premature. At Inter Press Service, Jim Lobe points out that the letter presumes two significant factors that have yet to come about:

The letter was released despite the fact that the administration has not publicly announced how many troops it would like to leave behind in Iraq, presuming that the Nouri al-Maliki government, which itself is reportedly deeply divided on the issue, agrees to permit an extension.

Like with the invasion itself, what Iraqis think — other than small cohort of self-serving exiles close to the Bush administration who fed it faulty intelligence to justify the U.S. attack — is irrelevant. The current Status Of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between Iraq and the U.S. — which FPI curiously acknowledges as a “so-called ‘security agreement’” in its website intro — says that all U.S. troops must be out of Iraq by the end of the year unless Iraqis agree to an extension. When Bush signed the SOFA in 2008, critics complained that it would tie the next president’s hands. FPI holds up the new “democratic Iraq,” but doesn’t seem to care what it thinks.

But there are other problems with the FPI letter. Surely the “foreign influence” FPI decries at the top of the letter is not the United States and, sure enough, further down it gets into the meat and potatoes of the argument:

In recent months, Iran has increased its attempts to expand its influence in Iraq, including through the killing of American forces and support to Iraqi political parties. Maintaining a robust American presence in-country would blunt these efforts, and help ensure Iraq remains oriented away from Iran and a long-term ally of the United States.

But Leif Babin, a decorated former Navy SEAL officer who did three tours in Iraq and now thinks the U.S. should pull all its troops out, acknowledged in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week what many Iraq observers already know: Iran, a fellow Shia Mulsim country that shares a long border with Iraq, has been an influence on Iraq’s government since the now-ruling parties were in exile in Iran before Hussein’s fall:

The fact is that the U.S. footprint in Iraq emboldens Iran. [...]

Many fear that Iran will gain significant influence in Iraq after a complete U.S. withdrawal. But Iran already has significant influence there. From 1980 to 2003, Iraq’s ruling Dawa Party was based partly in Iran (and partly in Syria), and it maintains strong ties with the Iranian regime.

Hope of limiting Iranian influence in Iraq grew following the narrow victory of Ayad Allawi’s secular party in the Iraqi national elections of March 2010. Yet the U.S. presence in Iraq remains a catalyst empowering Iranian influence through Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shiite cleric who drums up popular support based on opposition to the U.S. “occupation.” Thus the U.S. presence subtracts credibility from the government of Iraq and empowers anti-American, pro-Iranian forces.

FPI’s letter also relies on what has become a classic conservative trope: That Obama should blindly follow the advice of “U.S. military commanders on the ground.” Leaving aside that this elides the chain-of-command that ensures civilian control of the military — something the generals themselves seem keenly aware of — in the case of Iraq it’s also a false talking point. This week, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen said he was “pleased” with the current drawdown schedule that has all U.S. troops out of Iraq by the end of this year. And the former top U.S. commander in Iraq and now Army Chief of Staff Ray Odierno said earlier this month that the U.S. has “to be careful about leaving too many people in Iraq.”

The letter was signed by, among others, Kristol, Gary Bauer, John Podhoretz, Fred and Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Cliff May, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Paul Woflowitz and Randy Scheunemann. Some of the signatories served in key positions during the Bush administration and many were PNAC letter signatories. The lessons of the push for war with Iraq, it seems, are completely lost on those who effectuated it.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is bringing out a full court press to prevent further Defense Department cuts beyond the $350 billion in reductions that are part of the debt ceiling deal. Panetta, with help from various hawkish pundits and op-ed writers, is doing all he can to present the U.S. defense budget as a completely justifiable expenditure to ensure American security and balance various strategic rivals.

Panetta and others have said Congress should not take from the Pentagon’s coffers because of threats from Iran, North Korea, and China. Indeed all of these countries have shown a commitment to military spending and U.S. forces are often seen as balancing Chinese and North Korean regional ambitions.

But absolute defense spending for the U.S., China, Iran, and North Korea reveals that U.S. expenditures are dramatically more than any of its rivals combined. See the chart below:

U.S. defense expenditures are six times the combined defense expenditures of Washington’s major strategic rivals. While Panetta is attempting to preserve his department’s budget — and it’s safe to assume that most government agencies are eager to protect their budgets from major cuts — his warning that defense cuts might hamper America’s ability to “make sure that rising powers understand that the United States still has a strong defense,” comes off as a fabricated scare tactic.

Numerous examples of defense spending cuts ranging from $400 billion over the next four years to $1 trillion over the next decade have been proposed by politicians and experts from across the ideological spectrum. There is an emerging consensus that the U.S. has a significant military advantage over its nearest rivals and defense spending can be reduced without hurting U.S. national security.

As budget negotiations creep closer to the Aug. 2 debt ceiling deadline, foreign policy hawks are scrambling to protect the defense budget from major cuts. Downplaying the growing size of U.S. defense spending requires creative math and a penchant for statistical gymnastics. One of the go-to talking points for pro-military industrial complex pundits is to frame U.S. defense spending in context of the Department of Defense’s budget as a percentage of the over all federal budget and of the nation’s GDP.

Robert Zarate, a policy adviser at the neoconservative Foreign Policy Initiative, blogs at the Weekly Standard:

[T]he Defense Department’s baseline spending, when viewed as a percentage of total federal spending, has generally declined since 2003. And when viewed as a percentage of gross domestic product, the Pentagon’s baseline budget has stayed relatively constant at levels between 3 percent and 4 percent.

And Foreign Policy Initiative Director Jamie Fly wrote on National Review Online:

The percentage of federal spending devoted to the core defense budget…has actually declined over the last ten years from 15.6 percent to 14.6 percent.Baseline defense spending as a percentage of GDP in recent years has been at a level lower than any time since 1940 except for the Clinton administration’s “procurement holiday,” which extended through the Bush administration’s pre-9/11 budget.

However, measuring the Pentagon’s budget as a percentage of the total federal budget is meaningless in this context. The reason defense spending has decreased as a percentage of the budget is not because the U.S. is spending less on defense, it’s because national priorities have shifted over time.

Moreover, pegging military spending to GDP might be useful for private industry seeking a market share of the U.S. economy , but it’s virtually unheard of to link national security to the percentage of GDP expended on defense. Portraying the defense budget in these contexts sidesteps the reality that defense spending has ballooned over the past 10 years. Between 2001 and 2011 the Department of Defense’s base budget, which excludes war and nuclear weapons funding, grew from $390 billion to $540 billion, an increase of 38 percent:

While neoconservatives, particularly those connected to the Foreign Policy Initiative, have made every effort to suggest that defense spending has stayed the same — or, as Robert Kagan tried to argue, that DoD “has no domestic constituency” — the FPI and its affiliates are making every effort to shield the defense budget from the dramatic budget cuts under discussion in Washington.

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.”

Republicans and neocons who had either previously called on the Obama administration to recall U.S. ambassador to Syria Robert Ford or tried to block his confirmation as ambassador have been fairly quiet since Ford’s bold move to join protesters in the Syrian city of Hama to demonstrate against the Assad regime. Ford’s move won wide praise from analysts here in the U.S., and even from the Syrian pro-democracy activists themselves.

Not only has Ford seemed to embolden the anti-Assad movement in Syria, but Ford himself and senior Obama administration officials have said his presence there gleans valuable information, as Foreign Policy’s Marc Lynch reported:

Ford’s conversations were one of their most important sources of information in assessing the Syrian scene. This is one key reason why they considered his presence essential even before his electrifying visit to Hama persuaded most of their critics of his value.

Yet the neocons at the Bill Kristol-led Foreign Policy Initiative (formerly Iraq war cheerleading outfit the Project for a New American Century) aren’t satisfied with Ford’s work. In fact, they still want him recalled. In a “Fact Sheet” released yesterday on “Five Steps to Hasten Assad’s Exit,” FPI acknowledged Ford’s “praiseworthy” trip to Hama, but still called on Obama to withdraw him anyway:

President Obama should recall the U.S. Ambassador to Syria — unless the administration is willing to use him as a proactive and public advocate for the Syrian people in their struggle against Assad. Notwithstanding Ambassador Robert Ford’s praiseworthy visit to Hama on July 8, 2011, the continued presence of a U.S. envoy in Damascus lends legitimacy to the Assad regime.

While FPI doesn’t specify what “a proactive and public advocate for the Syrian people” means outside of what Ford has already been doing, later in the “Fact Sheet,” the organization seems to set some fairly high expectations for engaging Syria:

Despite the Obama administration’s strategy of engagement with Syria, Assad has not renounced his support of terrorism, and his regime’s barbaric campaign against peaceful protesters demonstrates that its sole interest is to maintain power.

Perhaps FPI doesn’t understand how diplomacy and engagement work because Ford’s role as ambassador to Syria, particularly during the uprising, isn’t to bring down Assad. As Ford told Lynch, “This is not about Americans,” he said, adding, “It’s not an American decision [to make political demands]. What we will not do is to claim to speak for them. They are capable of speaking for themselves.”