Who Are We at War With? That’s Classified
My favorite analogy for US security policy during the past two decades is a huge allergic reaction. It seems quite likely that allergies are caused by the immune system lacking antagonists and instead latching onto factors that are not real threats [1]. Similarly, the early '90s saw serious reductions in objective threats that US security was organized to deal with, internal (a sustained decline in crime [2]) and external (the disappearance of a second superpower). The resulting reaction is... what else if not allergic? Police is more militarized than ever and drives tanks into the living rooms of nonviolent offenders. The military's budget is unprecedentedly large and it hunts down shepherds in the Afghan hills at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per kill. Any claim that such threats are comparable with those that were adequately met in the '80s (crack epidemic, nuclear-tipped ICBMs etc.) is nothing short of risible. Yet the response is, if anything, even more aggressive than it was back then.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis</a><p>[2] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crime_over_time" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crim...</a>