The United States has never been richer and
powerful as today. But though it commands the most powerful and
most expensive military force in world history, it has never
been less secure and more vulnerable than today.
America's physical security, notwithstanding its
US$370billion annual defense budget, is now more constantly in
jeopardy. The citizens of its own national capital in Washington
D.C. and its surrounding suburbs were recently in constant fear
of an indiscriminate sniper that made District of Columbia,
Maryland and Virginia residents duck while putting
petrol on their cars; and run to their cars. In short, the
entire capital city of the most powerful superpower on earth was
cowering in fear.
This nation with an offensive capability
sufficient to destroy the world many times over with its arsenal
of the most modern fighter planes, aircraft carrier fleets,
tanks, nuclear weapons, and chemical and biological weapons,
cannot anymore even protect its own citizens from anthrax
attacks or snipers roaming in its capital. Despite all that
money spent on intelligence and armaments, America's national
security is at risk, and its citizens are constantly terrorized
inside and outside the United States.
The United States today has over a million soldiers,
airmen and sailors stationed not only in the continental United
States but also in more than 70 countries. It has intervened in
Indochina, Lebanon, Korea, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Central
America, and the Persian Gulf, and even attempted to invade Cuba
many times, while pouring weapons it sold to its allies
including the most hated dictatorial and military regimes in the
world. Now it even wants to invade Iraq, a sovereign country.
Yet, its national security has even more constantly been put in
jeopardy. The US today is even more vulnerable and less
secure now than 50 years ago when the rival superpower of the
United States, the former Soviet Union was at its peak. Why is
this so?
The answer lies in its lessons derived from the Vietnam
War: that military solutions ANYWHERE cannot solve political
problems, much more socio-economic problems, or issues of
self-determination that breed popular national liberation
movements and social/political movements. Through military
means, the United States has tried to prove that challenges to
US hegemony (or to be blunt, to U.S. imperialism) don't work.
This is a curious attitude for the children and descendants of
the American Revolution against British colonialism to
hold.
Americans still have to learn that costly lesson that
the power to destroy is not necessarily the power to control.
Other countries and most especially their leaders might as
well learn this lesson fast.
True human and people's security was bequeathed to us
by the Indian
philosopher Rabinranath Tagore Gitanjali when he reflected:
