Posted on 11/20/2001 10:34:38 PM PST by ouroboros
For the first time in living memory, Americans have to think about defense. Most of us (I include myself, until fairly recently) have assumed that our government was defending us. We equated military spending in staggering sums — sustaining heavily armed soldiers, sailors, and pilots around the world — with defense. And we thought that meant safety.
It didn’t. Now we know better. All that military spending was making us enemies all over the earth. As a result, we have to worry about people who were no threat to us a few years ago — cruel, cunning men who have found methods of by-passing traditional military forces.
After World War II the Department of War was renamed the Department of Defense to soften its image. Defense sounded nicer than war. Yet the United States military has been less and less oriented to what the Constitution calls “the common defense of the United States.” Its offensive power has become stupendous, and globally ubiquitous, but its actual defensive power turns out to have been seriously flawed. It was designed to deter attacks by rival states, but other kinds of attacks were hardly imagined. An enemy state can be destroyed with overwhelming force; a loose affiliation of guerrillas, saboteurs, or terrorists is another matter.
Nuclear weapons, which a few of our more hairy-chested pundits are recommending now, are useless when you have to defend — really defend — every post office, airport, and shopping mall. You can’t nuke anthrax.
The nuclear option is being urged out of sheer frustration at a shadowy, dispersed, elusive enemy. Some people feel that our ultimate weapons must prevail, if only we use enough of them. But in this case, enough would mean genocide. Virtually the entire populations of several countries would have to be annihilated in order to kill a few scattered terrorists. And that’s assuming that the terrorists would be close enough to the nuclear targets, rather than hiding in remote areas.
Speaking of targets, I’ve read several newspaper columns urging nuking, but none of them have specified a target. They can’t. The whole idea of nuclear weapons is strategic: to destroy major targets, especially big cities. But nobody knows where the relevant targets are, or why nuclear weapons would be any more effective than conventional explosives. In essence we are being told: “Don’t just stand there — nuke something!”
The old model of a centralized enemy state doesn’t apply here. The would-be nukers seem to forget that all the atrocities the enemy has committed so far have been the work of men who were and are already within U.S. borders. If Osama bin Laden, sitting in an Afghan cave, had a change of heart tomorrow, he might be unable to call off further strikes.
The notion that bin Laden exercises close central control of the terrorist forces may be an optimistic assumption. It allows our government to feel it can win by targeting him — or can at least justify its efforts to us. The politicians only have to make us feel they’re achieving something with their “defense” forces, even if they aren’t really getting an inch closer to victory or are actually doing more harm than good.
This can be seen as a war between the public and private sectors. As usual, the public sector — the U.S. Government, in this case — is outspending the private sector — the terrorists — by a huge margin. And as usual, the massively organized and centralized public sector is wasting a colossal amount of wealth, while the decentralized private sector is getting far more bang for its buck.
Conservatives and libertarians have long argued that the private sector is far more efficient than the public sector, but this isn’t exactly the kind of demonstration we had hoped for. We’d rather Bill Gates made the point than Osama bin Laden. Not that it will sink in with our government either way. The lesson will be lost on believers in the megastate, as the calls for nuking the terror network illustrate.
Talk about defense spending. This time it’s not just our government that’s paying; all of us are bearing the enormous cost of anticipating attacks on every conceivable target. And apart from the expense, there is the awful anxiety and fatigue. Welcome to the real world of defense.
Likewise, the notion that "our government was defending us" suggests a naive view of life. Governments never have and never will be able to provide complete security. Furthermore, we have been willing to trade security for whatever emotional reward we get for letting people into our country when they have no love for us or our way of life. Now we are paying the price for letting them have access to us. The government can try to fight some threats, but each of us must always be willing and able to defend ourselves.
Parts of this guy's commentary make him sound like an advocate of small government, but the overall foolishness of what he says is a discredit to the small-government movement. We have many threats to our liberties that we must address, but blaming our current situation on the existance or adequate financing of our military shows a frightening lack of understanding.
WFTR
Mostly afraid of your ignorance (of the 4th Amendment)
Bill
We made many missteps in the Twentieth Century. It appears that virtually none of our interventions overseas were wise ones -- by which I don't mean to criticize the moral basis for them, but rather to suggest that the unintended consequences of those interventions were far worse than the evils we leaped into the fray to oppose. Yet, having made those moves, we were left in a position of military and economic hegemony over half the world, with matching responsibilities. Even if we resolved to withdraw from all of them and return our attentions entirely to our own affairs, that's not the sort of thing a nation does in a heartbeat.
The world is slowly approaching a self-policing condition. (I know it's hard to see that at the moment, but capitalism and democratic forms of government really are making inroads, and as they spread, international tensions of all varieties will decline.) But for the next half-century at minimum, America will need her large military establishment. There are just too many folks out there who'd seize any chance to do us dirty, as Black Tuesday has made plain.
Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
Visit The Palace Of Reason:
http://palaceofreason.com
Well actually Joe there have been warnings about this kind of attack for many many years.
No, you are missing the point. We weren't attacked by poor Mexicans, we were attacked by 19 relatively well-off people supported by a rich guy.
I certainly won't count on the Fed for any kind of protection it would be insane given their monumental failure on 9-11.
Yet that is precisely what our leaders in Washington want us to do. Look at the quick federalization of airport security. Do they think that we believe they have done such a great job of protecting our borders that we can now trust them to handle our airports? They should spare us the Big Brother act and just give us back the Second Amendment.
So we use our military to save the lives of Muslims in Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and then this makes us public enemy number one in the world. Sobran needs a brain transplant. These people hate us because we are NOT muslims, not because we have been using our military to tick them off. And even if we were Muslims, they'd hate us because we were not the right kind of Muslims.
Frankly I think we do need to learn something from this. I think we need to let these Islamissts kill each other with abandon, then there will be less of them to kill us.
The fact is that if it were not for Jews and Christians and Bhuddists and Hindus and Athiests, these people would have nobody left to hate and kill besides each other.
As for Pearl Harbor, in both WWI and WWII America built up a military when required. Exactly as the Founding Fathers envisaged. Take a lesson from that.
I think Sobran would agree with that sentiment. I know I would. Stay out of their lives and let them work things out on their own.
We are not helping anyone by supporting one group of thugs in a war against another. Even the thugs don't appreciate it.
Bill,I agree with every word you wrote,except for the above. You missed the point,there. Government protects and defends government,NOT citizens. The fact that most citizens are also protected (way of life)by these actions are incidential.
A perfect example would be to compare gooberment to a cop. Cops do NOT carry guns with the primary goal being to protect citizens. They carry guns to protect THEMSELVES. If they happen to use their guns to kill a murderer/rapist in a shoot-out,they not only saved their own lives,but they have have saved the lives of untold citizens who may have become victims of the criminal they killed. Police are not even legally obligated to come to your house to help you when you call 911. The Supreme Court has ruled that the responsibility of the police is to protect society "as a whole",NOT individual citizens.
The federal gooberment is no different. They will do anything to protect the "system",and will sacrifice any number of citizens to insure this. This is not a bad thing,as the "system" in this case is supposed to be the US Constitution and our freedoms.
When Rumsfield got to the State Department he did not find one shread of a plan for Stratigic National Defense because there wasn't one. How about that?
What we laughingly call our congress brushed off report after report of experts telling them that it was not a matter of if the US were going to be attacked, but a matter of when. They had no intention of protecting our borders even with all the knowledge they had at their fingertips. The draw of cheap labor for the corporations busy stuffing money in their war chests, and illicit votes for them was just too big a draw for the lives of a few citizens, easy to replace with third worlders, to matter.
It is only because they almost received a 747 suppository up their own sorry rears that they are even making the most lame moves towards homeland defense or taking a passing glance at our borders right now. I can't help but feel that if the towers had been the only thing that had been hit and not the Pentagon, or if the attempt on the Capitol building, or White House had not been made we would be looking at an entirely different scenario now in D.C. The "time to move forward" scenario.
Don't even get me started on the sorry state of the F.B.I. the Justice Department, that let Clinton walk, the activist Federal Court System, the EPA, the NEA, the BATF, or any of the other sorry, worthless, expensive, non-functioning except for their destructive powers, alphabet agencies that compromise our morally bankrupt, corrupt, worthless, dangerous, sell our sovereignty out to the U.N., Nafta/Gatt promoting, unread treaty signing, property confiscating, no knock warrant door busting, self serving, gun grabbing, money grubbing, over bloated, federal government.
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