Students of geopolitics and military strategy can find similarities in the tactics of America-hating Osama bin Laden and America-loving Ronald Reagan in their wars of ideas.
President Reagan is credited with bringing the Soviet Union to its knees in the Cold War by exhausting the Kremlin with overwhelming U.S. military spending the Soviets couldn't match.
Bin Laden and his deranged acolytes are attempting the same: forcing targeted nations to spend, spend, spend—not on larger armies but domestic security programs that nibble at the national treasury in billion-dollar bites and shrink civil liberties one law at a time.
Spending across the board by federal agencies, state and local law enforcement and corporate protective services is skyrocketing. Congress churns out laws restricting personal freedoms. Courts give President Bush generous leeway to seize and indefinitely hold persons as "enemy combatants," without lawyers, without bond, without formal charges, simply based on "suspicion."
As terrorism continues, as it has with bloody regularity, Americans will inevitably question whether uncontrolled spending and Big Brother laws emblematic of a police state are overdoing it.
Fighting terrorists with macho political bravado (such as President Bush's "bring 'em on!" bluster), wanton spending and subjecting citizens to more government control won't defeat terrorism. Terrorism throughout the world and Iraq in fact has increased, notwithstanding Vice President Cheney's absurd boast that insurgents are "in their last throes."
It doesn't help to have a commander in chief who regards the world like a Texas bar where picking fights prove his manliness.
In our last major war—Vietnam—the United States was handed a mortifying defeat by primitively armed peasant rabble moving on foot and bicycles. Even incessant pounding by the world's most awesome air power with modern weapons failed.
Vietnam sent President Lyndon Johnson into political exile and left the U.S. economy worn out.
If Americans are to defy Osama bin Laden's threat to wreck our way of life, politicians should stop trying to fool the public and turn the nation into permanent lockdown: absolute protection can't be bought with more billions and with more restrictions on personal freedoms that cheapen our constitutional way of life.
Americans must accept reality: The world is more dangerous. Not even tougher laws that create the world's largest prison population have made U.S. streets absolutely secure from a scary assortment of homegrown killers, molesters, con men, abductors.
Osama bin Laden really will have won if President Bush drains the national treasury and imprisons Americans with laws that "protect" them at the cost of their freedom.
Pat Murphy
