Glimmerings of a roadmap to increased security

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, national security

"Almost persuaded now to believe"...at the very least, I have to say that Gary Hart knows how to make a case. A lot has happened to Senator Hart since 1988. Now holding an endowed professorship in Colorado, he has become an active author in the national security arena. His latest book is The Shield & the Cloak: the Security of the Commons.

The Shield of which he writes is the familiar military establishment intended to destroy enemies or keep them at bay. The Cloak is an array of social measures, domestic and otherwise, that offer added protections no army can secure. The author was co-chair of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century (the Hart-Rudman Commission), and this book largely expounds on its recommendations .

He first lays out the 21st Century environment as he sees it: "...the early twenty-first century is an age of (1) global change, (2) tidal waves of information, (3) failed and failing states, and (4) wars involving tribes, clans, and gangs." [p11; numbering supplied] He focuses on the third and fourth points, and posits that they add a "third dimension" to warfare, one that makes traditional military strategy obsolete. In this he is certainly correct.

He is also partly correct to add that "The best that can be said for the Iraqi occupation is that it may, at a very heavy cost, provide valuable lessons for U.S. military forces concerning twenty-first-century fourth-generation warfare." [p71] This is not the best that can be said of it—I'd say that's reserved for liberating 25 million people—, but it is an important factor.

Throughout the book he explains the Commissions's social recommendations. A significant instance: "Several steps were proposed to implement this effort to draw the highest-quality citizens back into all avenues of national service." In short: (1) expand educational assistance, (2) lower self-defeating barriers and provide realistic job descriptions, (3) overhaul the foreign service system, (4) reform the civil service system, (5) create a National Security Service Corps, (6) expand the G.I. Bill. [p92]

Item (2) is partly from his personal experience; I've heard it said that if Jack Kennedy had been subjected to the scrutiny that became common after 1974, he couldn't have been elected to a school board. For that matter, neither could Lincoln or FDR. Item (5) sounds like an expanded VISTA or domestic Peace Corps. Items (1) and (6) are two sides of one coin, and he is right that it will probably take another Sputnik scare to produce any such thing.

By the way, Gary, most folks forgave you over the monkey business on the Monkey Business long ago, even me, and I'm a Republican. Your mistake was not so much grabbing (!) the gusto, but in being dumb enough to let the press embarrass you over it. Learn from Jack Kennedy and Jesse Jackson (and a host of others since): never apologize, never explain.

Once he gets to concrete proposals, he and I begin to part ways. He proposes: perhaps to create "a Persian Gulf Treaty Alliance (PGTA), patterned after...NATO..." [p145] Man, I can't think of anything more calculated to make any remaining favorable Arabs hate us! Mealy-mouthed expressions of "membership by both producer and consumer states" go nowhere toward alleviating the clear impression that the "producer states" would become vassals...and no, they aren't vassals yet, or there'd be no OPEC. Our mistake is not buying their oil, it is trying to play nicey-nicey with them, when in reality, we do have the resources to shift our resourcing enough to pinch their purses as needed.

A bit later, "In dozens if not hundreds of instances, the ability of nations to solve common problems will depend on their willingness to cede a degree of their sovereignty to new international organizations in an effort to establish political coherence on the global commons. The issue of sovereignty is at the heart of the future of a new commonwealth of security." [p155] He has been using the term "the commons" a lot throughout the book and here it comes into its own. This is Socialism, unalloyed. Once you've ceded a few hundred pieces of national sovereignty, you run out. The "new international organizations" are not detailed.

He throws a sop to those disgusted with the UN, but the above paragraph shows he'd rather the (possibly slightly reformed) UN ran the US than the other way around. It reminds me of the current trend in business: outsource everything, so that the ideal US corporation becomes a CEO with a bag of money, who just buys services as needed. It is a vision of a world with no citizens, just contractors for required services, and a big social safety net to keep those least skilled from raising a ruckus. Oh, yeah, gotta take care of the poor (and I agree we do, but not in a Socialist manner).

In a personal note regarding two "camps" with differing views of poverty, fatalists ("predestinarians") who see little point in trying to alleviate poverty, and incurable optimists who insist on making every effort to improve the lot of the poor: "It has never been clear to me why many people seem born into one camp or the other and few change sides during their lives." [p156]

There is a third way, which President Bush tried to energize by seeking to empower "faith-based initiatives." He'd have done better to leave well enough alone. The churches in the U.S. do more than the government does for those really in need. It is well known that most "welfare" is wasted on the able-bodied lazy. However, it keeps hordes of them out of the way while people of faith take care of those whom even the "welfare system" can't aid. Some church programs are misdirected no doubt, but most that I know of are based on raising a person's self-respect while keeping body and soul together, temporarily, as needed. "Welfare" annihilates self-respect.

However, the main elements of the Cloak that Gary Hart would add to our military Shield are valuable, and need to be carried out. Knowing human nature, and that necessity is truly the mother, and the midwife, of invention, we'll do what is needed, once a sufficient proportion of the population (at least 15%, historically) is shocked into recognition that these things MUST be done. I just pray we won't do them in a way that sovietizes the West.