Unger - The Emergency State: Americas Pursuit of Absolute Security at All Costs

THE EMERGENCY STATE

AMERICAS PURSUIT OF ABSOLUTE SECURITY AT ALL COSTS

DAVID C. UNGER

THE PENGUIN PRESS

NEW YORK

2012

THE PENGUIN PRESS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in 2012 by The Penguin Press,

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright David C. Unger, 2012

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Unger, David C.

The emergency state: Americas pursuit of absolute security at all costs / David C. Unger

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-101-56032-7

1. National securityUnited States. 2. Crisis managementUnited States. 3. National securityUnited StatesDecision making. 4. Security sectorUnited StatesHistory. 5. United StatesPolitics and government20th century. 6. United StatesPolitics and government21st century. I. Title. II. Title: Americas pursuit of absolute security at all costs.

UA23.U464 2012

355'.033073dc23

2011040107

DESIGNED BY GRETCHEN ACHILLES

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FOR KATHLEEN QUINN

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Americas emergency state was originally designed to wage hot war against Nazi Germany and cold war against Soviet-led international Communism. Its institutions, and the outdated worldview they embody, are not good at protecting us against todays most dangerous international threats, as the events of 9/11 and the wrongly targeted and disastrously mismanaged wars that followed painfully demonstrate.

That should not surprise us. Using American military power wisely in an age of financial interdependence and keeping Americans safe from terrorist networks in an age of borderless globalization are very different challenges from waging another world war, hot or coldthe challenges our institutions and policies were originally designed to meet. The world has fundamentally changed, but those institutions and policies have not.

The signature institutions of the American emergency state include the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department, and the White House National Security Council. All three were created in 1947. Over the years, their actions and policies have transformed the way we see ourselves and define our place in the world. The secure, prosperous, individualistic American democracy that won World War II has become a country anxious about the world, fearful of its economic future, and inattentive to the erosion of its constitutional principles. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventive wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.

Postwar presidents have assumed broad foreign policy and war-making powers never intended by the Constitution. The postwar Pentagon has woven a worldwide web of military bases, thereby entangling America in costly misalliances and creating artificial new security interests where none previously existed. Postwar Congresses, politically driven by emergency state demagogy, have diverted trillions of tax dollars from essential domestic needs toward expensive weapons and security alliances, leaving public services impoverished, taxpayers angry, and our fiscal and trade accounts chronically unbalanced.

These changes have been incrementala gathering trend, not a single dramatic transformation. Yet over the span of seven decades, they have completely transformed the United States.

Without recognizing it, let alone debating it, America has slipped into a permanent, self-renewing state of emergency. We have set aside the traditional balanced structures of our constitutional democracy in favor of the secretive executive agencies of the permanent emergency state. As this book will show, this change has deformed our politics, diminished our liberties, distorted our relations with the rest of the world, and undermined Americas inherent economic strengths. It has also not made us saferquite the contrary. It has made us more vulnerable, more isolated, and less free. We have needlessly narrowed our political choices, colonized our own economic development, and diminished our understanding of what it means to be an American.

* * *

The emergency state did not begin with the serial abuses of George W. Bushs presidencyfrom the Patriot Act to the cooked intelligence on Iraq, from Guantnamo Bay to Abu Ghraiband getting America back on the course of constitutional democracy requires more than just changing presidents. The record of Bushs two terms shows us just how much harm emergency governance has done to Americas ideals, reputation, and security. But our costly detour from Americas traditional democratic course began much earlier. The emergency state took on its present contours in the days of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Dwight Eisenhower.

The Bush administrations policies did not come out of nowhere; nor did the leading personalities who formulated them and ordered them carried out. Those policies, and those policy makers, came out of the experience, and the logic, of the emergency state.