Wampum

A month ago I wrote to Peter Asen (Michael Brennan), Corey Haskell (Ethan Strimling), Lisa Prosienski (Chellie Pingree), Marc Malon (Mark Lawrence), Emily Boyle (Adam Cote), and Valerie Martin (Tom Allen), letting each know I'd posted Three Defense Questions, policy and politics, for the 1st CD Dem primary candidates, and Tom Allen, offering all of them a generous "gotcha-free" reading. There were responses from Peter Asen, Marc Malon, and Willy Ritch, substituting for Lisa Prosienski.

The Brennan Campaign on Three Defense Questions, policy and politics reflects an exchange of notes clarify Michael's position on a 10% cut, that the figure is in real (inflation-adjusted) dollars, and as a long-term policy, towards 2.7% of GDP.

Today I'm posting the response received from Willy Ritch, Chellie Pingree's communications director.

On the BRAC:

The way we allocate resources for our national security budget is fundamentally flawed because of the segregation of the various functions of our security efforts.

Think of the Pentagon as our offensive effort, the Department of Homeland Security as defensive and the State Department as preventative. Currently each of those departments has a separate budget, so money isn't always allocated in proportion to how effective it would be at keeping America safe. The Pentagon, for example, might want to fund a missile defense system that costs more than the entire Coast Guard budget---when many experts would argue that we are more likely to be attacked by a terrorist device smuggled in through a port than by a missile launched by a foreign government.

Rational choices such as you've asked about can only be made if we move toward a unified national security budget so Congress and the experts can compare the relative effectiveness of different programs and make spending decisions based on which are most effective. I am someone who believes that Congress, including the Democrats, have not asked enough hard questions and have not exercised enough oversight on this and other issues. A unified national security budget is step one in a real and informed process that allows for good decision-making based on our shared national security priorities.

On the questions of control and the economic priority of Iraqi refugees during a recession [combined answer]:

The conversation around national security and Iraq has been limited for far too long by discussions of military tactics, such as the surge, instead of the real conversation that American public and our public officials need to have. Where do we go from here? How do we bring our troops home quickly, and redirect the hundreds of billions that are being spent on the war to solving the many problems we face at home, without leaving chaos in our wake? How do we prevent the mistakes that led to this fiasco so it doesn't happen again?

We have a tremendous responsibility when it comes to Iraq but it's true that we are part of the problem and that our very presence there is an obstacle to developing a reasonable international strategy to move forward.

This winter I worked with Darcy Burner, a Congressional Candidate in Washington State, and several military and national security experts to create A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq. Since we presented the plan in March, nearly fifty US House and US Senate candidates have signed on, promising to support the proposals in the plan if elected.

The plan builds off the work of the Iraq Study Group and existing legislation in Congress and is intended to accomplish three objectives:

• End the military effort in Iraq and bring our troops home.
  
• Begin to repair the damage five years of war and occupation have caused, at home and abroad.
  
• Prevent a repeat of this sort of epic and costly foreign policy blunder in the future.

This plan presents a set of actions that Congress can take to remove all troops from Iraq while engaging in a diplomatic offensive in the region. It is designed to convert our current costly and unsuccessful military approach in Iraq into a more effective civilian one that addresses the root problems we face in Iraq. It moves us away from the use of military tools and enables more robust diplomatic and humanitarian work. It offers a path to rebuild the military, the State Department, and a commitment to take care of returning veterans. It also offers a deeper look at our decision-making problems, and fixes the breakdown in checks and balances by rolling back excessive executive authority, restoring civil liberties, and ending practices such as torture and the privatization of the military.

Ultimately we believe that restoring our Constitution is the only way to prevent a repeat of these mistakes and take us where we need to go to end this war responsibly. It also addresses the humanitarian problems created by the war and occupation of Iraq.

This is a substantive plan to end the war in Iraq responsibly, and it is a political document that citizens should use in guiding their political decision-making in 2008. We look forward to building both grassroots and grasstops support around the ideas contained in it. For too long we have been denied a public debate over what to do in Iraq, and it is time to break out of this limited conversation.

I asked a follow-up question whether the portion of the Department of Energy budget spent on nuclear weapons design and fabrication was intentionally left out of the proposed "unified national security budget". The response was to leave the original response unchanged.

These were good answers. Like anyone who isn't distracted by actually running a campaign, I could "improve" on each answer, but keeping in mind what it is like to have scores of reasonable, and unreasonable questions and "push messages" come in over the course of a campaign, these were as responsive as they needed to be, and actually quite good, so I opened up my checkbook and contributed $100 to Chellie Pingree via the campaign's Act Blue page, as I have to Michael Brennan. If you happen to click on the blue image below, you can reward the Pingree campaign, either for taking a Maine blog seriously, or for having wicked good answers to my best three questions for Mainiacs intending to represent Maine in the Congress -- the body charged by the Constitution with the awful responsibility under Article I, § 8, to declare War, to raise and support Armies, and to provide and maintain a Navy, and ultimately, under Article II, § 2, to make an end to the current Wars, and re-enter into Treaties.