An affirmative answer has been assumed without challenge at least since World War II. But too much is at stake in American lives and liberties to ignore the advice of Bertrand Russell: "In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."
Daily news stories speak volumes about the United States conviction that its national security interests require a muscular military profile everywhere in the planet. The United States is evicted from Manas air base in Kryghyzstan in a cat-and-mouse game with Russia. The United States spars with Russia over a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic to defend Europe from Iran. The United States provides covert assistance to Uganda to defeat the Lord’s Resistance Army. The United States dispatches Middle East envoy George Mitchell to the Gaza Strip to fashion an elusive resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict and, special envoy Richard Holbrooke to Pakistan and Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda and to encourage democratic trappings there. The United States is fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of preventing a caliph in Washington, D.C.
The United States sports military personnel in a staggering 135 countries, and, approximately 1,000 foreign military installations. To borrow from the Bible, no sparrow falls that escapes the national security eye of the United States.
February 16, 2009
Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer with Bruce Fein & Associates Inc. and author of Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for our Constitution and Democracy.
