this idea that every issue (e.g. the financial crisis) is a security issue is truly an artifact of our moment. it displays the continuing mutation of the u.s. into a security or police state, in which the model of response to anything, the basic form of understanding, is a domestic application of a military-style command structure. of course it entails that the response must be a state response, since the security of the nation (i.e. "homeland," a term that obama likes as much as bush did) is a state matter. it is also, of course, just an attempt to render the terrain a complete mind-numbing confusion, and to emphasize in every context government responsibility for the safety of citizens, to inject the tinge of physical fear into every matter. for gore, global warming is our greatest security challenge. for tom friedman or whomever, it's education. you might raise the terrorist threat level to red on the basis of a warm autumn, or because citibank is having problems, or because the sheiks in dubai lost their seventieth billion, or because sat's have leveled off, or...well, just because. to my way of thinking the greatest national security threat we face is horseshit. 

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair told Congress yesterday that instability in countries around the world caused by the current global economic crisis, rather than terrorism, is the primary near-term security threat to the United States.

Comments

[Andrew Dobbs]

I'm reading Hayek's The Road to Serfdom right now (can't believe it has taken this long) and he compares the liberal societies of England and the US to the totalitarian ones of Germany, Italy and Russia (in 1944) by calling the former "commercial" organizations and the latter "military" ones. This phenomenon you are talking about and the emergence of a new half-assed socialism in this country (Cf. this week's Newsweek cover) makes me worry we are moving into the kind of organization Hayek was so worried about.

This move is a slow one, and it isn't a conscious effort on anyone's part. But the parts are coming together slowly but surely, disconnected and just waiting for someone (Rudy Giuliani? Sarah Palin? Hilary Clinton?) to swoop in and do the last bit of assembly until we have a superstate that controls the totality of our lives. Another "crisis" or two should do the trick...

[drip]

There's a reason they call it social security. I'll agree that there is too much national security; we'd be better off if we concentrated on the social type instead.