These two short books supplement each other and are best considered together. Mr. Chomsky is an assiduous collector of facts, many of them highly embarrassing to the U.S. government. Archbishop Williams,
The dust jacket of Mr. Kaplan's book made me suspicious. Henry Kissinger, that vest-pocket Bismarck, calls the book “one of the most thought-provoking and profound ... that I have ever read.”
Free trade is premised on the idea that human relationships should be voluntary and based on mutual consent. It is grounded on the understanding that the material, cultural, and spiritual improvements in the circumstances and conditions of man are best served when the members of the global community of mankind specialize their activities in a world-encompassing social system of division of labor.
Robert Kaplan's newest book seems to be, bottom line, a briefing book to justify the switches and turns, contradictions, and conflicting rationales for American foreign policy and the domestic political control to which it is tightly bound, while freeing the government to to do anything it wants, anywhere in the world it wants.
John Walker Lindh has pleaded not guilty to the charge that he conspired to kill Americans. It does seem like this religious pilgrim was caught at the wrong place, on the wrong side, at the wrong time. He was drawn to Islamic fundamentalism. For him it was the radical alternative to what he came to regard as the corrupt materialism of the West. He was there when the U.S. troops came, and now he faces life in prison.
September 11 was far from the first time that the United States has been targeted by terrorists. In a 1997 report on the scourge of terrorism, the Pentagon's Defense Science Board observed: "Historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States." Recognizing that fact is crucial to understanding why both terror and the response to terror have become such grave threats to freedom and prosperity.
Americans are discussing whether the president can just take on the powers of a Caesar, claiming more and more power because of the demands of war. But for those advocates of an imperial presidency, there are the words of Justice Davis: "No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government."
Shortly after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush created an Office of Homeland Security. How many of us have stopped to ponder the meaning of that action? For more than fifty years, the United States has maintained an active—some might say hyperactive—Department of Defense. If it does not defend our homeland, what does it defend?
To cascade onto George W. Bush the title of "great one" is merely a way of linking greatness with the ability to wage conflict and perpetuate the growth of the State. And nowhere is liberty infringed upon more than in times of war--a president's most useful crisis for manipulating power to the advantage of his office and its administrators. From this cause, advancing statism determines who we are expected to deify as our redeemer.
In uncertain times such as today, it is too easy to look the other way when the federal government expands its power and curtails our freedoms. In a fit of rhetorical frenzy, the attorney general himself told a Senate panel that those who scare "peace-loving people" with "phantoms of lost liberty" are themselves aiding terrorists.
