Priorities and War
Posted in Politics by George
The United States, as a country, does not have its priorities straight. We’re not only getting our overall priorities wrong by throwing so much money into fighting the “War on Terror,” but we’re prioritizing our fight against terror incorrectly. Allow me to quote an article I recently read:
“In a test last year, the small amounts of cesium-137, which is used in industrial gauges, triggered radiation alarms in Texas and Washington state. The material was enough to make two small “dirty bombs,” officials said, yet U.S. customs agents permitted the investigators to enter the United States because they were tricked with counterfeit documents.”
- Article located Here
In essence, this means that the US is not ready to protect itself from allowing dirty bombs to enter the country. In other words, we’ve spent a TON of money fighting the “War on Terror” but we haven’t even secured our own borders. Is this how things should be?
The way I see it, national security should have the following priorities in the following order:
1. Protect our home soil
2. Protect areas that enemies could use to threaten our home soil
3. Protect our allies
4. Protect the innocent outside of our country
We are far from following this policy. Now, I’m not the greatest military strategist in the world, nor do I know anything technical about protecting the country. However, I have common sense and protecting our home soil first seems to be more important than pre-emptive strikes and the like. What good is securing Iraq if we can’t stop someone from waltzing into Washington, DC and detonating a bomb?
We’re pouring tons of money into fighting terrorism. Shouldn’t that money be primarily going towards protecting us, rather than attacking others? Just a thought…
March 28th, 2006 at 1:18 pm
George, there are a couple of problems with spending money on protection.
First, we can never be 100% safe, no matter how much money we spend. For example, the media and the administration put a big emphasis on port security after 9-11. However, as it stands right now, we spend tons of money to protect our ports but a really small percentage of cargo actually gets checked.
Second, protection isn’t always news worthy material. Seriously, citizens of the US expect to be protected, already. Aggressive policies get votes, money, and news.
Take, for example, in the NJ governor’s race, Corzine promised large property tax rebates (at the cost of sales tax increases, a debate for another time). This, in turn, forced his opponent to either make a feeble statement about keeping taxes the same, or to promise even larger cuts (to combat Corzine’s plan).
Voters want to see proactive, progressive plans, not necessarily reactive, responsive plans.
Third, say a terrorist attack occurs every 4 years. You increase spending by 25% and perhaps you decrease the rate of an attack to once every 5 years. Is this acceptable? Are you looking for a cure, or just a way to decrease the probabilities? Who’s going to decided how many deaths are acceptable?
These are some of the problems with a defensive approach.
March 28th, 2006 at 9:21 pm
Responses:
1) Sure, but we can’t identify some simple forged documents? And furthermore, even after not being able to identify the documents, Bush says he’ll fix the problem “within 45 days.” This sounds like: “hey y’all, we’re vunerable to attack right now, just in case you were wondering… just get some counterfeit documents.”
2) I think we should debate this outside of this article.
3) I know that we can’t solve the problem completely, but if we’re going to spend so much money on fighting the war on terror, shouldn’t we be able to identify some simple counterfeit documents?
I don’t think we should look at this as a defensive vs. offensive approach. I think we should look at it and call it National Security, and realize that securing our borders as best we can is something we should do before we lash out at others. Do you think we have secured them to the best of our ability?
March 29th, 2006 at 2:51 pm
Responses to your comments.
1) What’s to say that the documents were simple? You are making quite an assumption. Smart people with money can come up with pretty sophisticated means of forging documents. Why do you think the national mints keep changing the 20 dollar bills?
2) My second point was merely an illustration that political policies can be popularity and publicity motivated. This is a result of the political and media environments. People want bigger, better, and flashier action from their elected officials.
3) There are problems with concentrating on our borders. This makes us an isolationist state (consider our attempts to stay out of WWI and WWII). Also, for every security based initiative, we will have to consider civil rights implications (think the Patriot Act).
Let me draw an analogy of home security. By your argument, we should first lock our doors, windows, and turn on our burglar alarm first. Fine. But when the pizza man comes, we’ll have to strip search him and he’ll have to have 3 forms of ID. I think he’d be a little pissed.
Wouldn’t it be easier to just track down the burglar and arrest him, than to live in totally paranoia and fear for the rest of your life? This what our government was trying to do with the “war on terror.”
March 29th, 2006 at 5:19 pm
1) Regardless of whether they were simple or not, we should have a mechanism in place to create documents that are extremely difficult to forge. Perhaps maybe with unique IDs that are pre-approved and checked against multiple databases… just something. If we’re using documents that can be forged as easily as money, then we’ve got problems.
2) I agree but I think this is outside the scope of this article.
3) I’m not saying to become isolationist. I am saying that we need to prioritize our own borders over spending money to fight overseas. We are spending tons more money fighting than we our protecting our own borders, and I think that money can be reallocated.
The analogy is nice if that’s the way things actually are, but I don’t think our national security situation is quite that simple. If we “catch the burgler” then four more will take his place. It isn’t like there is a feasible thing we can attack. I don’t believe we can ever “end terrorism,” because there are too many whackos out there and we can’t just exterminate the middle east. What we can do is minimize our own losses by securing our borders, and spending some money to protect or attack key foreign locations that could pose a threat.
April 12th, 2006 at 5:03 pm
I think it’s relatively instructive that most people don’t walk around all day with a facemask as they go about doing their business. They don’t pad themselves up to go down to Wal*Mart. Mostly because we sort of mind our own business, don’t smite anyone for the sheer “because we can” of it, and treat our neighbors civilly because we can’t get away with killing them for small transgressions. We’d like to make that concept of killing as a way of settling neighborhood disputes totally unacceptable for very selfish reasons.
I really don’t expect my neighbor to go out of his way and come over and wail on my face with a bat. I’d be genuinely surprised if he did, but seeing that it hasn’t happened in a long string of days, I’d put the probability at “low”. Still I’m keeping an eye on him, but it’s a friendly eye.
So I guess I feel safe in my 3 foot bubble because I watch where I drive, and treat people like I want to be treated.
On the other hand, I’m watching the Mussaoui trial and I’m hearing things about people holding hands while jumping from the trade towers or people “not being ready to die” on flight 93. Makes me mad, but I wonder about the sub-human races (mostly brown people of the world) out there that we smite and kill routinely and wonder if their relatives get all worked up over the way we blow them to smithereens. Occasionally we get some kid walking by, or some family of six failing to be timely in their checkpoint ettiquette, but that’s all collateral damage and we do it for the right reasons, don’t we? Doan’t we have God on our side? Besides, I’m hearing that the “War on Terror” can be won through attrition right?
I’m not an attrition kinda person. I need to get to Sam’s Club to buy something and don’t want to worry about attrition every time I stop at a traffic light or change the CD.
we can’t just exterminate the middle east.
Not to mention the leftwing whackos down in central and south America that threaten our capitalist way of life with their dangerous ideas…Oy, vey, danger is everywhere we make it out to be.