History shows an underlying distrust and aversion to the military, and even though the same people who constantly push to legislate our personal behavior (ex: adult seatbelt laws) they seem to fear some nebulous loss of constitutional rights in protecting ourselves from terrorist infiltrators.
There was no such concern when German agents were rafting in on our beaches from submarines surfacing off the Manhattan shore, but what is the difference?
The historical distrust, resulting in a love/hate relationship with the military, is part of our national personality. We see all too often how a strong military can derail any democratic flow (Musharraf’s Pakistani takeover, multiple military coups in South and Central America and Africa,) and so we are relatively assured through constant back-pressure that we will not be the victim of such a national hijacking.
This is, despite periodic irritations, a good thing. However, there are other dangers which have been applauded by the same people. Witness this snippet from a July 2nd speech made by Sen Obama in Colorado Springs,
“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to
have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”
Our national distrust of such an organization, unbound as it would be by the Posse Commitatus Act, loosed upon our domestic landscape should be extreme. It should actually be an aversion.
The lack of a significant terrorist attack on our soil post-9/11 is evidence of several factors, one of which is the relative efficacy of our domestic law enforcement operations. Here, on our soil, terrorists are criminals who are largely being dealt with via our law-enforcement arm with the assistance of intelligence-gathering capabilies at the national level. We are consistenly applying pressure on the decentralized terrorist network globally to place them in the same position elsewhere. Our task should be to do this more effectively.
