Retired Lt. Col. Conrad Crane, a military historian, recalled attending a conference at Dickinson College a few years ago. There an Afghanistan historian and author made an observation that stuck with Crane.

“The U.S. has the most successful example of federalized government ever devised,” Crane remembered the historian saying. “But when they go into Iraq or Afghanistan, they always want to create a centralized state. A federally decentralized government would have made more sense.”

Crane noted that a less centralized system would have short-changed the Sunnis in Afghanistan, who are oil-poor. Still, he said the historian’s observation had merit.

“It was an interesting spin — our own history and development contrasted with the system we were trying to create,” Crane said. “We seem reluctant to set up governments that look like ours. We go to a parliamentary system.”

Col. Robert Cassidy, a professor at the Naval War College, has served on several operational deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Most recently he served on a yearlong stint in Afghanistan that ended June 2011.

“There was a debate between centralized and decentralized,” Cassidy said of Afghanistan’s government. “Afghanistan wanted decentralized. But the western sponsors insisted that they go with centralized.”

The overly centralized Afghan government imposed its will on peripheral provinces. That catalyzed grievances on the periphery, which in turn contributed to the resurgence of the Taliban, Cassidy said.

“For Afghanistan, there was a perception that, because of years of warlords, they wanted centralized government,” Cassidy said. “If we could have rewound the clock, more balance between the center and periphery would have been better.”

Further rewinding would have shown that from 1880 to 1973 — years the country was largely at peace — Afghanistan’s central government took a more laissez faire approach.

Then, in 1973, King Zahir Shah was overthrown in a coup staged by Daoud Khan, who tried to impose changes that were too rapid for the Afghans, Cassidy said. It served as an impetus for years of tumult and conflict between warlord factions and the Taliban.

“Not a lot of people in the U.S. government knew much about Afghanistan before we went in,” Cassidy said.

U.S. defense policy in Iraq, however, is less excusable, Cassidy said.

“It was so poorly done and with such ignorance at the top in Iraq that I’m not sure what informed their approach, but certainly it was centralized,” said Cassidy, who was in Iraq during America’s first tour. “Nobody understood what they did.”

Crane, chief of historical services and support at the Army Heritage and Education Center, said installing parliamentary systems abroad is a tradition that started long before the turmoil in the Middle East.

“If you look at what we did in Germany and Japan, we set up parliamentary systems in both cases,” Crane said of U.S. foreign policy during World War II. “That came out OK. Korea is more modeled on our system.”

In all three of those examples, the democracies have remained solid, Crane said. But Crane noted that in all three cases, patience was key.

“It’s not one size fits all,” Crane said. “They worked because we had a long-term commitment to make them work. We didn’t just stay for 10 years and leave. It takes a long time for these systems to develop. That just seems to be the reality of these things.”

Cassidy added that patience allows for parliamentary governments to evolve over time.

“It takes a patient and prudent head of state of Afghanistan to give power to provinces and districts,” Cassidy said. “That’s the hope for the future.”

But the assessment turns out not to be accurate or fair when spending figures are shown in proper historical and budgetary context, according to a conservative researcher.

“It creates this caricature that conservatives are war mongers,” said James Carafano, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank. “That’s just kind of a head-scratcher. We’ve had wars under Democrats and progressives, like Woodrow Wilson. We’ve had liberals start wars like Johnson and Truman, and conservatives bring them to conclusion, like Nixon.”

More Democrats than Republicans have held office during the following conflicts: World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the War on Terror.

Government spending is often viewed as a zero-sum game, directed either toward defense or public assistance, Carafano said.

“It is guns versus butter. You can’t afford to defend yourself and give everybody everything,” Carafano said. “We’re now in a situation where the government can’t afford everything it wants to spend money on. We’ll just cut wasteful defense spending. We can’t fund a welfare state and defend ourselves.”

But funding to public-assistance programs was a greater percentage of total spending under Bush than President Barack Obama. And Obama spends more on defense than Bush did.

“Just as many Democrats voted for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan as Republicans,” Carafano added. “If you read the Constitution, one of the primary functions is providing for the common defense.”

Bush launched the War on Terror in late 2001 by sending the CIA, and then troops, to Afghanistan. The U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003.

Less than two years later, Social Security and Medicare accounted for 25 percent of the U.S. fiscal 2005 budget, or 8.5 percent of GDP. Defense and international spending represented just 14 percent of all spending, or 4.7 percent of GDP, according to the U.S. Government Printing Office.

Under President Barack Obama in fiscal 2012, Social Security and Medicare spending dropped to 22 percent of the budget, or 6.9 percent of GDP. Defense and international expenses remained at 14 percent of all spending, or 4.3 percent of GDP.

The government spent an inflation-adjusted $1.01 trillion on Social Security and Medicare in 2005 and a raw $1.32 trillion in 2012. Defense and international spending went from an inflation-adjusted $625.3 billion in 2005 to a raw $725 billion in 2012.

“It’s only exorbitant because we take it out of context,” Carafano said of defense spending. “It’s a manufactured product of pop culture in the last decade.”

A February 2006 article in online Marxist publication Political Affairs highlights the tension between defense and domestic spending.

“For almost half a century, Americans looked forward to the day when the country would be at peace and federal spending could be redirected away from the military buildup and toward health care, housing, education and other programs that raise the quality of life for working people and their families,” the article said.

“That day finally came during the last year of the Clinton administration in 2000, when domestic spending finally outpaced military spending as a percentage of GDP for the first time since 1940, before the U.S. entered World War II,” the article said.

Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg wrote in a June 2011 article that spending in Afghanistan increased to “$6.2 billion per month in April from $4.3 billion in the first two months of fiscal 2011 that began Oct. 1. Afghanistan spending in fiscal 2009, as Barack Obama became president, averaged $3.9 billion per month.”

Carafano said it’s not fair to blame a liberal bias among the media for America’s view of Bush and conservatives as prodigal “war mongers.”

“Media tends to follow public opinion rather than lead it,” he said.