The Pentagon budget reversal is the sequence John Kiriakou cites as the demonstration case for the ideological circle — the point at which the anti-war right and the anti-war left briefly overlapped, and the point at which the overlap was abandoned.
The two announcements
“There were celebrations when the president announced a mere six or seven months ago that he wanted to cut the Pentagon budget by 50%. But then just a couple of months later, he said he wanted to increase the Pentagon budget by 50%.”[1]
Kiriakou did not treat the reversal as a change of mind so much as a category error. His verdict: “You can’t be both a neocon and a MAGA Republican at the same time.”[2]
The scale it sits against
Elsewhere in the same conversation Kiriakou set the Pentagon’s claim on public money against what is not being bought with it. “The American defense budget is bigger than the next eight largest countries combined,” he said — “And then we wonder why we have such hideous user unfriendly airports. Why are roads and highways are afflicted with potholes everywhere? Why are bridges are falling down into the rivers beneath them? Why are hospitals are understaffed, overcrowded and 20 years behind the times because we spend everything on the Pentagon budget?”[3][4]
His explanation for why the money buys so little was one word repeated: asked whether the expenditure was at least efficient, he answered “No, they’re not,” because “most of that’s waste and fraud and grift.”[4] The related complaint about what the research budget has failed to produce is at whatever DARPA is working on.
The self-justification he ascribes to it: “we’ve convinced ourselves that we have to be the policemen of the world, whether the world wants it or likes it or not.”[4]