Like its open-ended, ill-defined and misguided cousins, the drug war and the war on poverty, the “war on terror” is a rhetorical frame and set of policies that may not be very good at achieving the objectives for which it was created, but it is very valuable as an ongoing, never-ending pretext for concentrating additional power in the federal government and as a justification for preserving and expanding bureaucratic territory and budgets. If these “wars” were judged on whether they met their stated objectives in a reasonable amount of time in an affordable way, not only the phrases but most of the policies related to them would have been eliminated long ago. Whatever their initial ideal purpose and whatever the intentions of their creators, these “wars” become self-perpetuating rackets whose preservation becomes the priority of all those institutions and interest groups with a stake in the policies in question.
There's much more at the post. Yeah, the so-called libertarians and small government conservatives who backed George W. Bush have a lot to answer for.
2 comments:
Hey, I resemble that remark!
I'm not talking about those who voted for Bush in 2000. We knew he wasn't a Barry Goldwater or even a Ronald Reagan, but he campaigned on a non-interventionist foreign policy and we could delude ourselves that "compassionate conservatism" wasn't just a code word for big government.
But he quickly abandoned whatever limited government instincts he had in either foreign or domestic policy, and there were a lot of people who refused to call him on it until it was more than obvious how disastrous his reign was for the nation or for small government's public image.
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