The Government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. - Mark Twain

Wednesday, September 14, 2005

I’m just catching up with a little early morning news and blog reading (it’s 8am Thursday here) and I came across this post over at Sullivan’s.  When I wrote my big post on Katrina, a number of you were critical of me for thinking if disaster relief as a national security issue, and have also taken me to task for saying that I no longer trust Bush on national security issues.

Read Sully’s post.  I agree with every single word of what he wrote there, and the Hizbollah stuff is perfect vindication for what I wrote at the end of my lengthy Katrina post.

Osama bin Laden is sitting in a cave somewhere watching CNN and laughing his evil ass off.  Because, as Newt Gingrich said, if this is the best the United States can do when we had over a week to prepare, just how well are we going to react when something unexpected happens?

Our inept response to Katrina has showed every one of our enemies just how easy it is to attack us and sow remarkable levels of chaos.  This is why it’s all about national security.

Okay, I’m off to eat toast and Vegemite.

Update: Okay, allow me to elaborate on this one more time.  There are two aspects to being powerful, having the abilities and the projection of power.  In terms of a threat from a traditional army, the United States is virtually invincible.  We have the skills, we have the equipment, and we know how to project military power.  For this reason we face absolutely no threat of invasion from a foreign army.  Mitigating the threat of foreign armies is a battle that we won a long time ago.

However, what we face today is not a traditional army.  The goal of our enemies is to terrify our population, to paralyze us with the fear that they can and will strike at any moment.  We are taking steps to mitigate the threat that these terrorist elements face by going after them where they breed, and we’re making some progress in those areas.  But it is inevitable that, no matter how much we do overseas, we should prepare for the inevitability that terrorists will strike our shores again.

There is a reason that FEMA has been made part of the DHS.  Why?  Because we need to project to our enemies that we have the ability to immediately mitigate and respond to anything that they may be planning.  I don’t give a fuck what FEMA has done in the past, or what some document says about FEMA’s role.  The fact is that we have just shown every terrorist in the world that if you hit America, America’s response will be pathetic, and you will be able to terrorize the public. 

Think I’m exaggerating?  As I’ve quoted numerous times before, one of the main things that inspired Osama bin Laden to attack America was because every time we were attacked we turned and ran.  The latest poll I’ve seen was something like 60% of Americans hold Bush and the federal government primarily responsible.  The message to terrorists:  if there is an American president in office who is fighting you, the best way to get rid of him is to attack his country, because this will sow dissatisfaction in the people, who will elect his political opposite in the next election. 

This is what our enemies view as one of the fundamental weaknesses of democracy, that if they have one president they don’t like they just have to hang on a few years until a different one comes along.  Our weakness in the face of a disaster that we knew was coming has greatly increased the likelihood that we will be attacked.

We haven’t projected power, we’ve projected weakness.  And THAT is a national security issue.