Sun Tzu correctly noted that no state ever benefited from prolonged warfare.
Unfortunately, modern technological states have a military-industrial complex which, like a parasite, does benefit from prolonged warfare - at the expense of the finances and the liberties of the actual nation.
That is exactly what President General Eisenhower warned us about in 1961.
When this organism gains inordinate political influence, the tail can wag the dog. Instead of a government’s war machine existing to protect the people and their rights, it can become twisted so that the nation and its people exist only to keep the war machine growing. At that point, instead of protecting the rights and property of the people, the security apparatus becomes the biggestthreat to them.
During the Cold War, it was obvious why we needed the War Machine. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the War Machine floundered for a bit, searching for a threat it could hype enough to justify its continued growth. 9/11 changed that.
Contrary to the sloganeering, 9/11 did not “change everything.” It did not change the Constitution. It did not change the rights with which all men have been “endowed by their Creator,” despite the tyrannical demands of the state.
And it did not change the military-industrial complex. If Eisenhower warned us that they needed watching before 9/11, lest they threaten our liberties, then they still needed to be watched afterwards.
The elites understand how badly they have misruled us. The political class is sucking the nation dry, and sooner or later they realize that the illusion will shatter and the common people will figure it out.
The security state they are currently erecting with break-neck speed is not to protect us from Islamic terrorists - it’s to protectthem from the American people once it becomes clear howthey have robbed us blind.
Consider the facts.
How many Islamic terrorists have there been, both actual and would be, on American soil each year since 9/11? The average is only 16 per year. In the vast majority of these cases, government informants were not just providing information, they were essential to the execution of the act of terrorism. The government asset would, for example, be the source of the weapons to be used in the attack. In many of these cases it is very likely that no terrorist attack would have ever gone down without the involvement of the government asset. The police state is producing would-be terrorists to provide ongoing justification for its increasingly intrusive war on terror.
This is not to say that there are no terrorists out there, or that some precautions are not in order. But let’s be rational here. Let’s be proportional. It makes no sense to reshape a free society of 310 million people into a police state in order to stop 16 wanna-be terrorists a year.
For 16 men a year, manymentally ill like one of the two captured in the recent Seattle scare, it makes no sense to allow the government to search without a warrant and without probable cause, all your credit card records, your bank records, your emails and your phone records. It makes no sense to restrict your travel, set up road blocks, and grope your wives and daughters at airports. The feds are watching all of us more closely while at the same time letting hordes of new Muslims into the country. None of that makes any sense. That is, it makes no sense if the real goal is to stop Islamic terrorism. If the real goal is to keep profits flowing to the war/security industry and subjugate the American people to a police state, then these actions make perfect sense.
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Editor’s note: Mark Moore is the lead writer for an Internet blog on matters pertaining to Arkansas culture and government, Arkansas Watch, and on Tuesday nights is the host of an Internet-based radio program, Patriots on Watch. He can be reached through The Times at [email protected].
Opinion, Pages 4 on 06/29/2011