Perpetual war, perpetual power

CNN’s Fareed Zakaria is one of the few remaining good things about this flailing, failing news network. He is intelligent, thoughtful, knowledgeable, and in every way professional. His commentary on this morning’s “GPS” was notable for its explanation of just how big our paranoid Department of Homeland Security has grown — even as the U.S. is drawing down its efforts in Afghanistan. DHS, like every other government agency, has in its genetic makeup a “self-perpetuation” reflex. If it doesn’t have a legitimate reason for its continued existence and expansion, it will make one up. It will continue to fight “terrorism” here at home even if the only terrorists it can lay its hands on are innocent Americans going about their daily lives. Governments don’t willingly give up power once they have it. Besides, there are jobs to protect …

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The transcript:

Whatever you thought of President Obama’s speech on Afghanistan this week, it is now increasingly clear that the United States is winding down its massive military commitments to the two wars of the last decade.

We are out of Iraq and we will soon be largely out of Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden is dead, and al Qaeda is a shadow of its former self. Threats remain but these are being handled using special forces and intelligence. So, finally, after a decade, we seem to be right-sizing the threat from terrorist groups.

Or are we?

While we will leave the battlefields of the greater Middle East, we are firmly committed to the war on terror at home. What do I mean by that? Well, look at the expansion of federal bureaucracies to tackle this war.

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet – the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

The rise of this national security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touch every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. Some 30,000 people, for example, are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States.

In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is, of course, a war without end.

So we continue to stand in absurd airport lines. We continue to turn down the visa applications of hundreds of thousands of tourists, businessmen, artists and performers who simply want to visit America and spend money here, and become ambassadors of good will for this country. We continue to treat even those visitors who arrive with visas as hostile aliens – checking, searching and deporting people at will. We continue to place new procedures and rules to monitor everything that comes in and out of the country, making doing business in America less attractive and more burdensome than in most Western countries.

We don’t look like people who have won a war. We look like scared, fearful, losers.

— Fareed Zakaria, CNN

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Also on Pied Type:

• I will not live in fear