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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Possible presidential candidate Gary Hart delivered a speech Tuesday lambasting the current Bush administration's homeland security policy -- or lack thereof.
Jan 25, 2003 | Once and future Democratic presidential hopeful Gary Hart lambasted the Bush administration's homeland security policy in a speech delivered Tuesday to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "We are on the brink of invading Iraq without adequate preparation ... for what experts believe will be inevitable retaliatory attacks on the U.S. from radical fundamentalist groups," he said. In his view, building a domestic Pentagon is a dangerous mistake. Instead, bring out the National Guard.
Following is the full text of his speech, titled "In Search of National Security in the 21st Century":
We're sailing into the new world of the 21st century without a compass. Despite the elapse of more than a decade, the vacuum created by the end of the Cold War -- and the overnight irrelevance of our central organizing principle, containment of communism -- has not been filled by any coherent and compelling new vision. Meanwhile, the interests-versus-values debate grows stale and irrelevant. Along with disgust over corporate corruption and the legalized corruption of politics by money, public apathy today is traceable to a failure of visionary leadership -- leadership driven by an understanding of the radically new world we now confront. America is adrift because it has not related its power to its principles. And it will remain adrift until our principles become the foundation of a new grand strategy.
Great powers throughout history have succeeded only when they possessed the genius to imagine, and the will to pursue, a systematic plan to dedicate the means they possessed to the achievement of large national purposes. At the genesis of a new century and a new age, America lacks a grand strategy that has the consensus support of the American people. Instead, too many peoples of the world now see the United States as a great power without purpose -- and as a giant that pronounces rather than listens -- and thus as a great danger.
Because we have failed to define our larger purposes, where we want to go, and how we intend to apply our resources to get there, we cannot now define our own national security in this new age. Security is the product of intelligent response to strategic realities. A nation that cannot articulate its strategy is bound to become a victim of confusion in constructing its security. And a state that cannot guarantee its citizens' security soon loses its legitimacy.
Neither strategy nor security can be understood outside our current context. Too few of our policymakers seem fully to appreciate the revolutionary whirlwinds that now shape our destiny. Indeed, we are swept up in at least four historic revolutions. They are: first, globalization, or the internationalization of commerce, finance, and markets; second, the information revolution, now creating a "digital divide" between computer literates and computer illiterates; third, the erosion of the sovereignty or authority of the nation-state; and fourth, a fundamental change in the nature of conflict. Without understanding the impact of these four simultaneous revolutions, a search for national security is futile. To respond to the first two revolutions requires foreign policy initiatives in the Middle East and elsewhere as bold as the Marshall Plan and as encompassing as energy security. To create a national security strategy requires an understanding of the changing nature of conflict in particular, and that requires an understanding of the erosion of the sovereignty of nation-states.
For 350 years, wars have been fought between the uniformed armies of nations with fixed borders, meeting in the field, to achieve a political result. Rules evolved for these wars: Geneva conventions spell out the norms for humane treatment of prisoners, the rights of non-combatants, and so forth. But 21st century warfare already looks dramatically different. Nations disintegrate; and when a nation disintegrates, as in the former Yugoslavia, borders disappear. Indeed, part of the process of creating peace among ethnic combatants in a disintegrating nation involves drawing new boundaries and building new nations. And now we have violence being perpetrated by combatants in civilian clothes, representing no nation, attacking civilian targets, with no political agenda, and only a fanatical commitment to destruction. Meanwhile, despite belatedly accepting the recommendation of the U.S. Commission on National Security to create a National Homeland Security Agency, the current administration seems to be preoccupied with national missile defense -- which is at best premature, and has one new doctrine: preemption -- a beautiful theory murdered by a gang of ugly North Korean facts.
When the nature of conflict changes, the means of achieving security must also change. The new violence resembles war, but it is not. It resembles crime, but it is not. What is it and how should we deal with it? For the moment, and largely for convenience, we call it terrorism, and labeling every bad actor a terrorist leads us to embrace wretched allies on the always dubious theory that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. On this same theory, we supported undemocratic and repressive authoritarian oligarchies during the Cold War simply because they were opposed to communism. We set about assassinating foreign leaders we did not like. The bills we accrue from despicable allies and unprincipled policies that undermine the very virtues we claim to defend always come due.
In the past ten years, we've seen a dozen or more low-intensity conflicts between tribes, clans and gangs. We participated in some, including Somalia, where we experienced the painful consequences of brawling, however well intentioned, in another man's alley -- as memorialized in "Black Hawk Down." We passively observed similar bloody conflicts, in Rwanda and elsewhere, where the weapon of choice, a machete, dated to the Bronze Age. We successfully formed ad hoc coalitions of the willing in Bosnia and Kosovo. We earned a quick victory in Kuwait largely due to intensive bombing and maneuver warfare. But, with that exception, post-Cold War conflict has been characterized by "non-arrayed" enemies -- those not presented in traditional battle formation -- representing "asymmetrical" threats -- using ingenuity, not strength, to bypass our military might. Because they did not follow historical conventions, late 20th century wars have seemed to us unfair and somehow more barbaric than conflict has been throughout history.
