Should we be scared?

Do you ever get the feeling that we, the American People aren't in charge of this train anymore? That we are just along for the ride? Well, for those prone to such feelings the recent Washington Post investigative piece on the size of the secret intelligence bureaucracy that has grown up in the wake of 9/11 just cements the idea that certain aspects of the American experiment are on automatic pilot, and that we couldn't retake control of the wheel even if that was something we desperately wanted to do.

The Post story is not surprising to anyone who has kept up-to-date on the post 9/11 changes in the U.S. Intelligence community. James Bamford's disconcerting book “The Shadow Factory” lifted the veil off much of this story a few years ago. Nevertheless, the added information the Post was able to uncover sheds a stark light on what we have become: a nation out of control.

Who could dismantle this apparatus if that's what Americans wanted? The Post makes it clear that even elements currently operating within this structure can't get full control over what is going on. They themselves don't know how much it costs, how big it is or where one agency's jurisdiction ends and another's begins. If that's the case, what chance do we, the people who nominally run this government have? We are simply along for the ride.

Now, many Americans might consider this attitude to be nothing more than fear-mongering. A quick examination of comments by readers at some very conservative websites seems to show an anger over the story, but not at the scope of the problem highlighted by the Post's investigation, but at the investigation itself. The word “traitor” and “treasonous” in reference to the Post's article were thrown around with disconcerting frequency. Many of the very people worried about the Obama Administration and what they see as its nefarious agenda, see no problem with such a secret growth of a hidden government, because this apparatus is part of efforts to “protect us”. Orwell would, no doubt, understand this human proclivity all too well.

Welcome to the long awaited, much predicted National Security State. A place where things like the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution really ARE written on something that is “just a piece of paper” and not the sacred law of the land. A country where protecting scared people in what was always called “The Home of the Brave” is more important than being “eternally vigilant” about the power of government over our lives. What is really the saddest part is that it didn't have to be this way. The need for all this security can be directly tied to our need to be involved in every region of the globe as a superpower that takes for granted that we are the “indispensable nation”, and that we have a right, nay, an obligation to secure and protect the entire world (at least as the American government interprets that mission). It is Kipling's “White Man's Burden” updated for our times.

Let's play a “what if?” game for a minute (or as historian Niall Ferguson would more scientifically dub it, a “Counter-factual Exercise”). What if we never sent troops into the Middle East to kick Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait in 1990? What if U.S. Ambassador April Gillespiehad told Hussein in no uncertain terms that the USA would care if he invaded the tiny oil-rich Gulf nation? The involvement that started with that fateful decision on our part, a time when British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher so famously told President George Herbert Walker Bush not to “go all wobbly”, created the blow-back that led to attacks in the U.S. in 1993, on the USS Cole in 2000 and of course, to 9/11. This is not the popular reading of this period of history, but once you jettison the simplistic idea that we were attacked because the terrorists “hate our freedom” it seems pretty clear that what they really reacted to was our forces stationed in their holy places and the killing of fellow Muslims by an outside, non-Muslim power. As upsetting as this is for some people to hear, that's both the Occam's Razor explanation,and is what the people doing the attacks cite as their motivation. It is also how most peoples could be expected to react if put in the same situation (how would the U.S. react if the shoe were on the other foot? Would we just allow a foreign power to station massive numbers of troops and bases near us while killing people we felt an affinity for nearby?) and yet to say that is to incur the wrath of those who would suggest that the person who uttered such heresy was suggesting that we “deserved” what befall our civilians on that terrible, tragic day.

This is nonsense. The only way the civilians could have possibly been legitimately blamed for U.S. forces being stationed in the Middle East would be if we actually had any control over the decision to station them there (or to go to war in the first place). Yet, in the realm of foreign policy Americans have never in our history been more shut out of the decision-making process. At least before the Cold War we elected members of Congress who had to declare war before we got into major conflicts with boots on the ground. Even that is a quaint relic of a bygone era. Even that fig-leaf of constitutional legitimacy has been outgrown by a nation that hardly cares or notices what the loss of perhaps the most important check offered by the framers of the Constitution can lead to. In this case, it has led to a virtual secret government on top of the one we all see operating in the open. To allow the President to have virtually unlimited wartime constitutional powers and to allow that same office to be the one to determine when they want to give themselves that power (by going to war) is the cardinal sin of the post-Second World War era. That more Americans do not notice this fundamental alteration of our power relationships between the branches of government or care about what it naturally leads to is why we will, as Adlai Stevenson once observed, get the kind of government we deserve. Unfortunately for us all, it looks little like the sort that was designed in 1787 by the great Enlightenment-era minds of people who distrusted too much government authority.

Now, truly, their constitution has become little more than a piece of paper.