Is America becoming a Garrison State?
David Shorr makes a good point regarding President Obama's insistence that America won't "hunker down" in the face of the jihadist threat:
The policy questions have to do with the dangers of making ourselves a garrison state; as a matter of political worldview, it has to do with how the terrorists ("THEM") loom in our consciousness. When it comes down to it, the essence of Cheneyism is that you can never overstate the threat from the terrorists, never be too dark in your assmptions, never do too much to counter them.
What's interesting here is that for decades now, Washington has (at least partially) justified an interventionist foreign policy as vital to avoid turning America into a garrison state. The idea was that we would erect a "defense in depth" and intervene abroad to forestall developments which could, eventually, close off the world to the United States and thus force a change in the American way of life.
But now a lethal, transnationalist terrorist group is bringing us the Garrison State through the back door.
When an earlier era generation of policy-makers were confronted with the prospects of the Garrison State, they oriented American foreign policy in such a way to avoid that. Clearly, the threat today pales in comparison to the international threats of the 1930s and 1940s, so a similarly sweeping change is almost certainly not going to happen.
Instead, as Shorr implies, we're going to have to learn to live with terrorism as a persistent feature of our society.
(AP Photos)
