Paul Craig Roberts
Friday, Nov. 15, 2002

The midterm election has given us evil twins – a Department of Homeland Security and a Middle Eastern war. The unintended consequences will be costly to Americans and come back to haunt Republicans and conservatives.

One hundred government agencies from 22 departments crammed into an unaccountable bureaucracy of 170,000 civil servants creates less security. Many of these agencies have histories of feuding with one another. The feuding and lack of cooperation will be exacerbated by lumping the agencies under the same department name. Shear bulk will not cure the federal government's inability to protect us from terrorists.

Prior to 9/11, the INS was incapable of keeping Muslim terrorists out of the country. Post-9/11, nothing has changed. Six months after their deaths, the INS issued visas to terrorists who flew the jetliners into the World Trade Center.

The INS is too politically correct to deport known illegals, including Malvo, who has gone on to sniper fame. The INS cannot even rid us of illegal rapist-murderers, as documented by columnist Michelle Malkin in her new book. Once the INS has a 170,000-person bureaucracy in which to hide, the opportunities for passing the buck will be endless.

"Homeland Security" is Orwellian. To what homeland does it refer? Americans no longer have a homeland. Deracinated by "multicultural diversity" and turned into a sanctuary for unassimilable Third World cultures, America is a Tower of Babel.

You can forget the "security." The new bureaucracy will be a department of citizen insecurity. You will have to guard your words, or a thoughtless joke or critical Internet posting could result in a knock on the door from the internal security police.

The Department of Homeland Security will define "terrorist" to fit its needs. Such a costly department will need to justify its budget, and the definition will take on wide latitude. The department's main achievements will be the diminution of American civil rights, censorship of the Internet and gun control.

Federal police forces will be able to liquidate any group by declaring it "terrorist," just as Janet Reno exterminated the Branch Davidians by declaring them "child abusers," and FBI and BAFT agents murdered Randy Weaver's family by declaring him "armed and dangerous."

What the neoconservatives pushing Homeland Security and war don't understand is that our insecurity has as much to do with their policies of multiculturalism, open borders and total commitment to Israel as it does with Muslim terrorists. Americans are under a greater threat from their own elites, who are determined to destroy our identity with multicultural diversity and mass immigration.

Paradoxically, Americans are seeking security by placing themselves under new and dangerous government powers while permitting the Bush administration to foment war in the Middle East.

Removing Saddam Hussein achieves no security interest for the United States. Jews mistakenly believe that American aggression against Iraq will increase Israel's security. Instead, it will stir a hornets' nest.

Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq is a secular state. Removing him opens the way for those who want to merge Islam and government. Secular Muslim states are weak, because Muslims are loyal to religion, not to states. Overthrowing states does not overthrow Islam. To the contrary, the mullahs are strengthened by the fall of secular rulers.

Neoconservatives mistakenly believe that the U.S. postwar re-socialization of Japan and Germany, purging the former of militarism and the latter of nationalism, is a model for reconstructing the Middle East. But it took a world war to make Japan and Germany accept defeat and cooperate with the United States.

What if in 1945 the Japanese Emperor had said: "The Americans have defeated us with weapons of mass destruction. Now they come to destroy our culture. Reply to them with terror."

Today, Muslims respond to U.S. military supremacy with terror. Our viceroys in charge of conquered secular states will be assassinated. The large Muslim populations in Europe and the United States provide bases for terrorists, whose grievances will mount as Americans extend hegemony in the Middle East.

The Bush administration had best cool its jets and come up with a less emotional response to 9/11. Otherwise, future historians will describe Bush as Lord Birkenhead described Stanley Baldwin: "He takes a leap in the dark, looks round and takes another."

Dr. Roberts' latest book, "The Tyranny of Good Intentions," has been published by Prima Publishers.

Copyright 2002 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
George W. Bush
Saddam Hussein/Iraq
War on Terrorism

Editor's note:
Saddam Hussein's race to make a nuclear bomb