Newsflash: Victor Davis Hanson, American Idiot

VDH on Jimmy Carter:

Carter’s Waterloo, of course was the Iranian hostage crisis. It was not just that his gutting of the military helped to explain the rescue disaster. Far more importantly, we can chart the rise of radical political Islam with the storming of the American embassy in Teheran and the impotent response of Jimmy Carter.

VDH is half right; Desert One really was the Waterloo of the Carter presidency and, had it succeeded, Carter would probably have won the 1980 election and we’d have a different America. At least part of the blame for the failure of the operation must be laid at Carter’s feet, although a more sensible commentator than Hanson would probably have noted that infighting and poor planning within the uniformed services also contributed to the disaster. VDH also has the chutzpah to call Carter “historically ignorant”, a fascinating charge coming from a man whose grasp even on his specialty is tenuous, and the bulk of whose professional career has been an (often successful) effort to make Americans MORE ignorant of the history of military affairs.

The big lie here, though, is “gutting of the military.” The idea that Jimmy Carter gutted the military strength of the United States lives only in the fantasies of the most ignorant of wingnuts; US military spending bottomed out in fiscal years 1976 and 1977, both of which were on the watch of Gerald Ford. Under Carter, military spending went up in FY 1979, 1980, and 1981. It’s worse than that, even, because the high budgets of the early 1970s had a lot to do with the end in Vietnam and the cycling down of military effort in Southeast Asia. As people who take the time to learn about United States military policy know, the military build-up of the Reagan years began in the second half of Jimmy Carter’s term. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the numbers. If you still don’t believe me, listen to Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan:

Today, [1996- ed] defense spending is less than 20 percent of the total federal budget. In 1962, before the Vietnam War, defense spending ran at almost 50 percent of the overall budget. In 1978, before the Carter-Reagan defense buildup, it was about 23 percent. Increases of the size required to pursue a neo-Reaganite foreign policy today would require returning to about that level of defense spending — still less than one-quarter of the federal budget.

Via Instapundit, who of course doesn’t bother to evaluate Hanson’s claims. I swear to you, the first person to write “but Reynolds just linked; he didn’t say that he approved of Hanson” in comments gets permanently banned.