The Way We Are

The U.S. police state starts at the top and, unlike money, trickles down to communities. It is always dressed in the best military hardware our tax dollars can buy. Whether the U.S. is intent on controlling the oil fields of the Middle East or the poor in our own ghettos, violence is the surest methodology and collateral damage is, like torture or a choke hold, something we must all accept--or else.

President Barack Obama has bungled the job of appointments to key national security positions for the past six years, and the nomination of Ashton Carter will allow him to maintain his streak. Carter is the classic example of the defense intellectual who has labored in the halls of academe, and then becoming extremely hawkish as he or she attains status and influence in the halls of the Pentagon.  An important example is Carter’s views on national missile defense over the past three decades.  In the 1980s, while on the faculty of Harvard University, Carter wrote a study for the Office of Technology Assessment that assailed the effectiveness and usefulness of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.  As a defense department official in the Clinton and Obama administrations, however, Carter became a strong supporter of both national missile defense in the United States and even the ridiculous idea of installing a regional missile defense in Eastern Europe against the possibility of a threat from Iran.  The latter idea at least displays a certain amount of imagination.

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