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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by John Yoo, former Department of Justice official under President George W. Bush to discuss how enhanced interrogation techniques lead to Osama bin Laden’s death, how Bush administration policies have helped the war on terror, and what missteps lie ahead for Obama.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Robert Gates on America’s Role in the World
Robert Gates: ‘If America Declines to Lead in the World, Others Will Not’
John Yoo: Tough interrogations worked
From Guantanamo to Abbottabad
Libya and the War Powers Abdication
John Yoo’s Book – Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush
John Yoo at AEI

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Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Pejman Yousefzadeh and Elizabeth Blackney to debate whether or not Obama should have intervened in Libya, what the real reasons for our involvement are, and who’s to blame when the operation goes awry.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Remember That Timely Debate About Libya Policy That We Never Had?
Between Sudan and Libya, Critics See U.S. Inconsistency
How the Arab Spring remade Obama’s foreign policy

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From The Wall Street Journal:

Our budget, which we call The Path to Prosperity, is very different. For starters, it cuts $6.2 trillion in spending from the president’s budget over the next 10 years, reduces the debt as a percentage of the economy, and puts the nation on a path to actually pay off our national debt. Our proposal brings federal spending to below 20% of gross domestic product (GDP), consistent with the postwar average, and reduces deficits by $4.4 trillion.

A study just released by the Heritage Center for Data Analysis projects that The Path to Prosperity will help create nearly one million new private-sector jobs next year, bring the unemployment rate down to 4% by 2015, and result in 2.5 million additional private-sector jobs in the last year of the decade. It spurs economic growth, with $1.5 trillion in additional real GDP over the decade. According to Heritage’s analysis, it would result in $1.1 trillion in higher wages and an average of $1,000 in additional family income each year.

Here are its major components:

• Reducing spending: This budget proposes to bring spending on domestic government agencies to below 2008 levels, and it freezes this category of spending for five years. The savings proposals are numerous, and include reforming agricultural subsidies, shrinking the federal work force through a sensible attrition policy, and accepting Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s plan to target inefficiencies at the Pentagon.

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Inside the Obama administration, a debate is raging. In the face of the uprisings in the Middle East, Barack Obama has opted to sit on his hands. He has a talent for that. Robert Gates, who is extremely wary – one might even say, excessively wary – of commitments abroad, is happy about the President’s passivity; Hillary Clinton, who had hoped that we would act to tip the balance in Libya, is not. It would not be hard to imagine her resigning from the cabinet over this issue. The tensions are starting to mount.

In his comedy routine last week at the Gridiron Club, the President reportedly delivered remarks that had a certain edge. “I’ve dispatched Hillary to the Middle East to talk about how these countries can transition to new leaders – though, I’ve got to be honest, she’s gotten a little passionate about the subject,” he is said to have remarked. “These past few weeks it’s been tough falling asleep with Hillary out there on Pennsylvania Avenue shouting, throwing rocks at the window.” And in an interview yesterday with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, when Mrs. Clinton was asked four times whether she would agree to serve in any post under Barack Obama if he were re-elected in 2012, she responded on each occasion in the negative and refused further comment.

Here is what The Daily Caller reports: “Obviously, she’s not happy with dealing with a president who can’t decide if today is Tuesday or Wednesday, who can’t make his mind up,” a Clinton insider told The Daily. “She’s exhausted, tired.”

He went on, “If you take a look at what’s on her plate as compared with what’s on the plates of previous Secretary of States — there’s more going on now at this particular moment, and it’s like playing sports with a bunch of amateurs. And she doesn’t have any power. She’s trying to do what she can to keep things from imploding.”

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We were given fair warning on Tuesday when Robert Gates arrived in China. I doubt, however, that we will heed it. Liberal, commercial polities have a tendency to be caught flat-footed at the beginning of an armed conflict, and what is true for them is even more egregiously true for the modern democracies so aptly described as welfare states. War, defeat, and a profound loss of prestige are, I fear, the catastrophes that we are now courting – as the Chinese military ostentatiously indicated by brazenly test-flying their first stealth fighter, one larger than any in our larder, just a few hours before our Secretary of Defense sat down for discussions with Chinese President Hu Jintao.

The blunders that we are now making are by no means unprecedented. The first example that comes to mind is England under William III, which was arguably the first fully modern, fully commercial polity in human history. As Winston Churchill points out in his Marlborough: His Life and Times, England’s Dutch king fought vigorously to maintain in England in the wake of  the War of the League of Augsburg (1689-97) a standing army as a deterrent, but he was thwarted by a Parliament weary of war, unfriendly to taxation, and intent on harvesting a peace dividend. In the absence of an England capable of deploying on the continent of Europe an expeditionary force at a moment’s notice, when the last Hapsburg monarch of Spain died without issue, Louis ignored the terms of his marriage with a Spanish Infanta and connived in installing on the Spanish throne his grandson Philip, who was in line to inherit the French throne as well. Given their immense wealth and their holdings in the New World, the unity of France and Spain would have had as its practical consequence the establishment of a universal monarchy dominant over Europe. This was the very eventuality that the War of the League of Augsburg had been fought to prevent, and in response the English, the Dutch, and the Hapsburgs in central Europe launched the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13), which the first two of these states were initially – thanks to the natural propensity of liberal, commercial polities – ill-equipped to fight.

Churchill – who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in part as a recognition of his remarkable accomplishment in Marlborough: His Life and Times – composed this magisterial study in the 1930s, and one cannot read it without realizing that writing this work was a central part of his intellectual preparation for becoming a wartime Prime Minister. Britain was caught in the toils of the Great Depression at the time, and he watched in horror and raised his voice in protest as Germany under Hitler rearmed and as Britain and France succumbed to wishful thinking and repeatedly chose butter over guns. The Second World War – and the casualties accompanying it – were the price that was paid for the improvident stewardship of the political leaders of Britain and France.

I mention these disgraceful examples because I suspect that we are following in their wake.

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Something ominous is happening within the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama will soon have to start paying attention. For weeks now, James Carville has been railing against the Obama administration’s handling of the oil spill in the Gulf. On Tuesday, Ed Rendell, Governor of Pennsylvania, added further fuel to the flames by issuing a warning. If Obama did not start pulling troops out of Afghanistan in July, 2011 as promised, he predicted that there would be a political insurrection within the party and that the President might face a primary challenge. It is in no way surprising that the Republicans have revived Hillary Clinton’s famous “3 a.m.” political advertisement and have given it a new spin, for they smell blood in the water. “Hillary was right,” they say. After the oil spill, the proverbial telephone rang and rang and rang, and the President . . . golfed, partied with celebrities, and went on vacation again and again.

Carville and Rendell have this in common. They are Democrats; they are fiercely partisan; and they were strong supporters of Hillary Clinton during the primaries back in 2008. Their maneuvers should perhaps be read in light of an op-ed piece that Leslie Gelb published in The Wall Street Journal back in the middle of June, suggesting that, when Robert Gates retires, Hillary be made the first female Secretary of Defense; that, in 2012, she be put on the ticket in place of Joe Biden; and that Biden be awarded the booby prize and be named Secretary of State.

I have no idea whether Gelb ran his piece past the Clintons before publishing it. But I would not be surprised. He, too, is a restless, frustrated, critical Democrat on the outs, and the scenario that he paints is by no means ridiculous. Joe Biden is not an asset, and Barack Obama views him with obvious disdain. Bill Clinton is a talented campaigner and a master in the art of staging comebacks, and in 2012 Hillary might be able to turn out a host of white women to vote for Obama who would otherwise sit on their hands.

As it happens, on Saturday, President Obama will have a priceless opportunity that he would be ill-advised to pass up. On that fateful day, in Rhinebeck, New York, on the estate of John Jacob Astor IV, if the rumors are borne out, Chelsea Clinton will marry Marc Mezvinsky in the presence of 400 of their parents’ best friends. And, although Bill Clinton is not a Sicilian, he would certainly be hard-pressed on so auspicious a day to deny anyone who asked of him a favor – least of all a sitting President of the United States who came to him, saying, May their first child be a masculine child!

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With corruption and abuse running rampant in Washington, D.C. coupled with a historic debt and massive deficit that some believe has the United States following in the footsteps of Greece, one would think the appropriators in Congress would concerns themselves with unnecessary and excessive spending, yet they are doing just the opposite.

The acquisition process related to the defense industry is a place where both Members of Congress and industry lobbyists have made a pretty good living by sending pork home and enriching the underbelly of the nation’s capital in the process.

Exhibit A: C-17

The facts are that the C-5 transport plane is being modernized to supplant the C-17 transport plane at a reduced cost.  The Air Force has repeatedly stated that it does not want any more C-17s, yet Congress continues to fund new ones adding $1.5 billion to this year’s budget for five more, after it added $2.5 billion to last year’s budget for 10 more.

But what’s $4 billion among friends when your country has a long-term deficit over 10 trillion dollars?

Secretary Gates has openly campaigned against any new C-17s, stating emphatically that he will recommend a Presidential veto of any appropriations bill that includes new ones.  Gates has said, “The leadership of the Air Force is clear: they do not need and cannot afford more C-17s.”  Any questions?

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Saturday’s New York Times reported the leak of a secret January memo from Defense Secretary Gates to “top White House officials” warning that “the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability…”

The article quoted an unnamed senior official who called the memo “…a wake-up call.”  But the day after the initial report, Gates told the Times, “The memo was not intended as a ‘wake-up call’ or received as such by the president’s national security team.” He added, “Rather, it presented a number of questions and proposals intended to contribute to an orderly and timely decision-making process.”

Was it that, or something else? All evidence leads to the latter.

This is an example of one Washington game played by “senior administration officials” from time beyond memory.  The clues to who and why are not well-hidden.

Who leaked Gates’s memo?

The first Times article differentiates the anonymous “senior official” who described the memo from White House officials who “disputed” his view.  That means the most probable leaker was Gates himself or someone on Gates’s staff acting with his knowledge.

Obama’s National Security Advisor, Gen. James Jones, chafed at the Gates memo.  The first NYT article quoted him as saying, “On Iran, we are doing what we said we were going to do. The fact that we don’t announce publicly our entire strategy for the world to see doesn’t’ mean we don’t have a strategy that anticipates the full range of contingencies – we do.”

But that’s no answer.  Gates said Obama’s policy was inadequate, not that he didn’t have one.  But the fact that Gates so quickly downplayed the meaning of the memo indicates two things. First, that he doesn’t view the Iran policy disagreement to be a serious dispute with Obama, at least yet.  Second, that he stands by the memo in a clear vote of no confidence in Obama’s closest advisors.

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Once again we see how clueless Democrats like Illinois Governor Pat Quinn and Senator Dick Durbin are on matters of national security. With Barack Obama’s decision to treat the terrorists at Guantanamo Bay as if they are common American criminals, as the president bestows constitutional rights upon them, and with his decision to spread these monsters out across the U.S.A, we see Quinn and Durbin idiotically asserting that terrorists equal “good paying jobs.”

These jobs might come from the sale to the federal government of the Thomson correctional facility in west central Illinois where Obama could send some 100 detainees in preparation of closing down the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba facilities. Obama is struggling to figure out what to do with these detainees after his hastily made, ill-informed decision last January to close down the terrorist detainment facility.

After the idea was announced both Quinn and Durbin found themselves all excited to welcome these monsters into their state and both imagined that the occasion means that Illinois gets jobs. Durbin is quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying that this is a dramatic opportunity.

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