IASPS - News Behind the News

September 24, 2001

Homeland Security

This page 1, column 1 story in the Wall Street Journal concerns the US response to September 11,2001. President Bush has appointed Governor Thomas Ridge (R. PA) to head a "new White House Office of Homeland Security." (The Journal also editorializes on this general topic, hitting the right note. Almost.)

What is really at stake in Homeland Security as IASPS Strategic Division Director Codevilla has just explained in an upcoming issue of Insight Magazine is the end of America as we know it. Of course America needs security at home.  But in turning to security as part of a supposed "war" on terrorism where what is at stake is said to be the need to "balance" it against "democracy" and "freedom" (WSJ), the US is committing a fatal error.

First, Codevilla, comparing the US security approach with Israel's, points out the lesson of the peace process there. The lesson is this: Israel has the best security in the world with the result that terrorism is everywhere and unstoppable; the terrorists have effectively won; the politicians use terrorism as a political weapon against the Israelis!  It is the agenda of the outsiders, the Arab terrorists and their millions of supporters in Arab states and elsewhere, that run the lives of Israeli citizens. They are not only in "jail;" they have lost what every human being requires to live a normal life: a large human body, a nation or anciently a city. This is not a small matter. The terrorist assault upon the US September 11, 2001 cannot be righted by security.

This is because there is a second, actually prior point about the emphasis on security; on Homeland Security.

What's wrong with the stress upon security is that there can be no balance -on security, or even on freedom -where terrorism is concerned. The reason, obvious to Western men from early times to the early years of the last century, is that nations, states, cities or what ever the large human body upon which people rely for safety is called, is the common good.

The common good. The first purpose of every large human body or the body upon which people rely for protection from harm by outsiders vanishes the instant that this reliance is sacrificed. Nothing can be balanced against this. In fact it is the most rudimentary definition of tyranny for such a body, we call them nations today, to permit such a sacrifice even of a single person. The nation loses its reason for existence and its right to obedience when it balances or temporizes on this point.

That Western men have lost this understanding of existence is the source of security, peace processes, and of Peace understood as an aim of nations for the sake of Mankind but not for the protection from harm of individuals.

The appointment of Mr. Ridge as Homeland Czar means this: America is no longer safe for its citizens because protection of them is being "shared" with enemies. The Peace Process has come to America.