Brain Trust - James Jay Carafano

Dr. James Carafano is the director of Heritage Foundation's Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies. He came on The Matt Friedeman Show as the Brain Trust of the day. Here are the "CliffsNotes" of his segment.

Tell us about the upcoming debate.

I'm pretty jazzed. This is the first presidential debate hosted by think tanks, so the candidates are going to be challenged by difficult questions.

They're going to have to lay out what their role will be as president in foreign policy.

When you have a 90 minute debate on one subject, no candidate can use the excuse that voters don't know their positions.

Everything you want to know about the debate, you can find on the Heritage website.

 What kind of questions are going to be asked?

This is an open-book test. Nobody has an excuse to say they weren't prepared, or they didn't know what would be asked.

These questions are going to be straightforward questions. How are you going to lead this country?

I think if you cherry-pick throughout all the debates, probably most of the questions have come up at some time.

These are questions these guys have heard before. But candidates answer the question they want to answer, not necessarily the question that is asked.

These men and women have ninety minutes to state their positions on how they're going to keep America safe and free.

The day after the debate is the report of the super-committee. What's going to happen there?

I think this is the untold story: regardless of what happens with the super committee, President Obama has already made enough defense cuts that we are going to have a smaller and less prepared military than we had when he went into office.

The savings that they're spending, they're not reinvesting. They're going to have a real readiness problem. 

Brain Trust - Dr. James Jay Carafano

Dr. James Carafano is one of the nation's leading experts in defense and homeland security. He is the director of Heritage Foundation's Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies. He came on The Matt Friedeman Show as the Brain Trust of the day. Here are the "CliffsNotes" of his segment.

Did we handle the Libya situation right?

Certainly we didn't do it right, and whether it comes out right or not remains to be seen.

I think right now the most troubling concern would be a sustained guerrilla movement that would continue to harass the government.

This is far from over.

Where will this situation go from here?

I think we could go in any one of a number of directions.

You've got disparate people in the government who want different things.

They're really more concerned with their interests than they are with the interests of the Libyan people.

Now we're going to find out where they really stand.

I have just as many question marks today as I did on day one.

What is the Obama Administration's plan for continuing to handle this?

They've been very close-lipped in terms of sharing information with the Congress.

This is very ironic, since all they said about being the most transparent administration.

With 9/11 coming up, how more secure are we than we were 10 years ago?

We're very secure right now. At least forty terrorist plots have been exposed.

The real question is how secure are we as we're going forward.

Heritage just last week put out two reports, A Counterterrorism Strategy for the "Next Wave" and Homeland Security 4.0.

I think if we go where Obama wants to go, we could actually be moving backwards.

Brain Trust: James Carafano, Heritage Foundation

Did Mubarak's announcement that he won't step down surprise you?

No.

And I may be the only out here who can say that, since the director of the CIA said that he would step down.

Here's the problem. They're so fixated on trying to pretend they're on top of events, they've kind of lost the ability to see.

Adjectives fail to describe the White House's response to the crisis in Egypt, but "inept" would be a good start.

What should the White House have done?

Primarily what the people of Egypt really want is economic freedom.

Egypt is a large population, a very young population...what they really want is jobs, fair prices, and food on the table.

If you look at Egypt, they're ranked as a country that's mostly unfree.

What I really fault the administration for is to myopically focus on what the media is focusing on.

This has now become largely a situation that will be determined by the military.

They don't want to have to crack down on violence, because that would hurt their credibility.

The other thing you have to worry about is if factions of the military start to go in different directions.

This isn't going to be over in a New York minute. We're not even at the end of the beginning. It's just not something that will be over by the six o'clock news.

They've spent all their time playing patty cake with Iran.

They've squandered two years of leadership.

And the president wants to focus solely on domestic issues.

Do you get scared about people want to cut military?

I do and it's very disappointing.

Defense is not a burden on this society.

Defense spending is at a near historic post-WW2 low.

If you took defense spending to zero, it wouldn't solve the long-term federal deficit of this country.

So yeah, we've got real fiscal problems in this country..but you don't solve them by cutting defense.

Someone's going to come at us. If you're not ready, you're going to pay the butcher's bill.

The Constitution says more about the requirement of the federal government to defend us than any other thing.

This is the first and arguably the only requirement for government to defend us and provide security.

There are people who say we should just stay home and do nothing. We did that, and the results are (Pearl Harbor) and (9/11).

America going down the ladder in Index of Economic Freedom - tell us anything?

America is no longer the land of the free. In terms of the economy, we're the land of the mostly free.

We're losing our economic freedoms, not gaining them. That's a prescription for disaster.

Great civilizations didn't collapse from without. It wasn't invaders...they collapsed from within because they got fat, lazy, lost their virtue, and allow their economies to stagnate.

You look around the world at the countries that are doing well and they're climbing the ladder of economic freedom..