Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (39 page)

At a moment when the United States is fighting two losing wars and also supporting other peoples’ wars, it seems counterintuitive to claim that U.S. defense priorities should be at home. But that is the case. Indeed, there is no better advice for Americans and their leaders, in conducting their necessary war against al-Qaeda–led Islamist forces, than that which is dispensed to each airline passenger before every takeoff: in the event of losing air pressure in the cabin, be sure to put on your own oxygen mask first before trying to help others. Washington’s failure to heed this advice is most apparent in the areas of immigration and border control, securing the Former Soviet Union’s (FSU) nuclear arsenal, and energy policy.

Since the United States figuratively lost cabin pressure on 9/11, Washington has been gadding about the world trying to put oxygen masks on foreigners. Our military results to date show the validity of the airlines’ advice against creating a lose-lose situation: we have not affixed the foreigners’ masks and so are losing overseas, while at home we are gasping because we have not put the needed flow of oxygen and common sense to the design of domestic security. Why in the world are U.S. leaders and elites so border-challenged? In Afghanistan, Washington refused to close the border with Pakistan, and as we are seeing today, the Taliban and al-Qaeda escaped to regroup, rearm, train, and fight another day. In Iraq, the president did not order the U.S. military to close the borders, and so the country’s Islamist insurgents, Sunni and Shia, have had a constant and reliable flow of fighters, ordnance, and funding, provided by the private and public sectors of neighboring countries, with which to kill U.S. service personnel. In the continental United States, the majority of U.S. politicians, academics, new-age Christian do-gooders, and antinational organizations—be they human rights, refugee rights, or women’s rights groups—have prevented the lawful and effective control of U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada.

A pox on all of them. In America’s war with Islamists the only place to start is with the physical security of the United States. Because our bipartisan elite has refused to control either our borders or illegal immigration, law enforcement agencies at all levels of government—local, state, and federal—have been left without even a fighting chance to defeat our U.S.-based Islamist enemies or those who are coming in from abroad. As long as the immigration-and-borders status quo remains, police agencies will be working against an undocumented pool of aliens that grows by the hour. In this context, the billions of dollars that Washington has spent to install electronic-and biodetection gear at official border crossings, ports, and airports is of use only if the Islamists are stupid enough to walk through an official entry point—whether at Tijuana or Detroit-Windsor—wearing I-love-Osama T-shirts and carrying AK-47s, explosives, al-Qaeda identification cards, or WMD components. Unfortunately for America, al-Qaeda’s fighters have proven to be anything but stupid, and they are most unlikely to help us defend the United States by exposing themselves to the world’s most sophisticated detection equipment. In essence, we have, since 2001, spent untold billions beefing up security at official border-crossing points—which still allowed more than 21,000 illegal aliens to enter America since October 2005—and are now equipped to reliably interdict only the unimaginably careless or certifiably idiotic Islamist fighters. This failure also undercuts the unavoidably limited impact of the many admirable tactical victories that U.S. military and intelligence personnel have scored overseas. These men and women are executing Washington’s clearly inadequate policy of killing or arresting the Islamist fighters “one man at a time”—which has minimal negative impact on an extremely numerous enemy—only to find that their leaders have done nothing to prevent the fighters they do not apprehend or kill from getting into the United States and scoring a strategic victory.

How to proceed? Well, the best answer would be to deploy the U.S. Army and Marines along U.S. land borders to prevent the entry of illegals until an effective network of fences, trenches, watch towers, radars, and—if necessary—minefields can be built in a crash program along the Canadian and Mexican borders. But the world’s best and most expensive military is fully deployed overseas in losing Wilsonian wars meant to install the secular democracies that Muslims are resisting to the death. And even if U.S. forces were not stretched so thin, those elected to run the federal government have, for decades, failed completely, knowingly, and deliberately to ensure the physical security of U.S. borders. On this issue, Americans today find themselves in what Thomas Paine described as the “intolerable state” of being “exposed to the same miseries by a government, which we might expect in a country without government.”
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Currently, it is best to let federal officials babble lies about “greatly improved Homeland Security” and act instead at the state and local levels to protect Americans by taking hold of the responsibility for domestic security that Washington long ago abdicated. This means that state and local governments must effectively defy the federal government by working together; this is the only means by which U.S. domestic security can begin to be protected. At times this defiance will take the form of state governors using the same state-government powers they invoke when man-made or natural disasters occur; at other times, defiance will require blatantly refusing to obey Washington’s edicts. But in either case state governors must for now be the leading agents of this defiance. If America is to be protected, the governors must work across party lines and focus solely on the security of their citizens and nation.

The governors should exert their control over the military reserve units that fall under state jurisdiction and refuse to transfer control of them to the federal government. The governors should then mobilize and deploy these units to staff and administer state-mandated, border-control regimes to stop the flow of illegal immigration. Of course all governors do not have a border-control problem, but all governors do suffer from the adverse consequences derived from those who do. If extra military manpower is needed by the governors on the front lines of this federally mandated and protected immigration debacle—such as those in California, Arizona, Washington, Texas, New York, Michigan, and New Mexico—the governors of interior states who do not have contiguous borders with negligent, apathetic, or ill-intentioned foreign powers should provide it. If federal authorities threaten legal or physical action against the states, the governors must defy them. Washington will quickly find that the electorate, in time of war, will rally to governors who act to protect them when the federal government will not. At this point Washington also would find itself impotent: can any American imagine a U.S. soldier shooting a fellow citizen for defying the federal government in an effort to protect all citizens?

The governors can also use their control over military reserves to begin to rein in the president’s unilateral and unconstitutional war-making ability. Nothing in our Constitution is clearer than the requirement for Congress to declare war. In
Federalist 69
Alexander Hamilton stressed that the U.S. Constitution ensured that the president’s ability to make war would not equal that of the British king. The president’s power to make war “would be nominally the same with that of Great Britain,” Hamilton wrote, “but in substance much inferior to it” because the powers to declare war and raise and regulate military forces “all which by the constitution…appertain to the Legislature.”
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Our first and greatest president respected this limit on his power. “The constitution vests the power of declaring war in the Congress,” George Washington wrote, “[and] therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.”
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The U.S. military’s reserve forces, including those commanded by state governors, are key components of America’s war-making ability; without them large, long-duration wars overseas are not possible. Because the federal legislature since 1941 has allowed the president to effectively abrogate the constitutional requirement that Congress declare war, the governors must begin to deny the federal government this vital military manpower for use overseas unless Congress has formally declared war, thereby negating the ability of a president to take America to war simply because he or she is so inclined. There are, after all, few better definitions of a tyranny than a state where the decision to go to war rests with one individual. By retaining state military units under their command, the governors will provoke a long-needed constitutional confrontation between the electorate and the federal government that may at last return constitutional sanity to the issue of making war. Such actions would not, of course, be meant to make America vulnerable or render it unable to wage war abroad. Rather, they are meant to help destroy an unconstitutional power that has been assumed by presidents and to make domestic security certain and reliable, without which winning victory over our enemies overseas is, in any event, an illusion.

Unfortunately for Americans, the state governors cannot do all that must be done. Although it does not at first blush appear to be a matter of domestic-security policy, the securing of the Former Soviet Union’s (FSU) nuclear arsenal must be a top homeland-security goal if the continental United States is to be protected. As noted, sixteen years after the fall of the USSR, the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (1991) for securing the FSU’s nuclear weapons is less than half complete and has been reduced in personnel and funding during the tenures of presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. This is horrifying and unconscionable. A nuclear attack in the United States by our Islamist foes would cause untold human casualties, catastrophic economic and environmental damage, and requirements for rescue, quarantining, martial law, and reconstruction on a scale that could be addressed only by the resources of the U.S. military, thereby constraining the ability of those forces to operate overseas. Harvard’s Graham Allison has desribed such an attack in the United States as “the ultimate preventable catastrophe,” but so far Washington has not even done the minimum to reduce the chance of such a calamity to as near to zero as possible.

Additionally, only the federal government can lead the Manhattan Project–like effort that is required to release the United States from energy dependence on governments who are our enemies, who cannot control their own territory and ensure reliable energy production and export, or who would be tempted to disrupt our economy for religious reasons—such as, respectively, Venezuela, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia. That we are in this dependent state is a fact; that we must stay in that condition is not. Energy policy must become a priority national-security issue because it is quite clearly a life-and-death issue for our economy and lifestyle at home, as well as for our ability to conduct a foreign policy of our choosing—one that gives us options—and not one ultimately controlled by foreigners. The exploitation of oil and natural gas reserves in the Arctic and coastal waters, higher miles-per-gallon requirements for automobiles, the greatly increased use of nuclear power, the development of alternative and renewable energy sources, and conservation programs at all levels of government will need to be included in the drive for as large a measure of energy self-sufficiency as it is possible to attain.

The exact provisions of a national energy policy are beyond my writ—and wit—but the urgent need for such a policy is starkly apparent to all who see energy as a national-security issue and not just an aspect of economic policy. Those, like Daniel Yergin, who argue for letting the free market, increasing global integration, and the “great bubbling all along the innovation frontier” work out energy supply problems
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miss the point that the United States, in terms of ensuring its national security, is no longer operating in the nation-state-dominated Cold War era. If the threat came only from nation-states like Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, it would be manageable. To a great extent, self-interest will drive the activities of nation-state oil-producers, and presumably none would want to create a situation where the United States would simply have to take control of their oil resources and production facilities. But that is not the whole picture. Today al-Qaeda and other Islamist organizations are focused on disrupting the supply of oil to the United States as a means of achieving their war aim of driving America from the Muslim world by bleeding it to bankruptcy. “This [energy] vulnerability isn’t lost on Islamic terrorists,” the incisive energy analyst Gal Luft has explained. “They have identified the world energy situation as the Achilles heel of the West and have made attacking it a central part of their plan.”
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The ability of these groups to significantly disrupt U.S. oil supplies has not been proven, but their failed attacks have caused prices to spike. It would be short-sighted and negligent in the extreme to plan U.S. energy policy on the basis of a best-case scenario that assumes the Islamists cannot do so. Energy self-sufficiency, like border and immigration-control and securing FSU nuclear devices, is a measure of self-defense against a nonnation-state enemy whom we cannot deter by the prospect of military retaliation, who has no qualms about using any weapon he can acquire and exploit, and against whom our military power cannot always be delivered in an annihilating manner.

And Abroad—Hold Tight, Then Disengage

After the process of securing the home front has become irreversible, Washington can, over time, begin unshackling the United States from its failed policies in the Muslim world. In this context, achieving energy self-sufficiency is again pivotal. In the conduct of foreign policy, the degree of energy self-sufficiency America attains will be the degree to which it can begin to aggressively disengage from the problems, hatreds, and wars of the Muslim world in which it has a stake only as long as U.S. energy supplies are insecure. Put bluntly, as progress is made toward U.S. energy self-sufficiency, it will become obvious that there is no U.S. national interest in the Arabian Peninsula that is worth the life of a single U.S. Marine.