Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

ARTICLE: "Man-Made Disaster: Five years on, the Department of Homeland security is still a catastrophe," by Jeffrey Rosen, The New Republic, 24 December 2008.

The basic bit:

The only way of calming people down is political leadership that puts the terrorist threat in perspective. But, despite efforts by Chertoff to avoid the color-coded hysteria that defined the department in its early days, DHS officials inevitably feel the pressure to exaggerate the terrorist threat--scare-mongering that creates further public demand for promises of security that can't be fulfilled. And so the very existence of DHS creates a chain reaction of self-justifying insecurity. For this reason, Republicans (who used to be the stiff-upper-lip party of limited government) and Democrats (who don't trust the government to run the war in Iraq and generally are cautious about spending too much on defense) are willing to sink billions into an institutional money pit that has more to do with symbols than substance. Both parties seem incapable of acknowledging an uncomfortable but increasingly obvious truth: That the Department of Homeland Security was a bureaucratic and philosophical mistake.

I made this argument in both PNM and BFA, saying we should have focused outward on spreading nets and transparency and not inward on silly firewalls easily breached. I feel the same way about strategic missile defense: we reach for 20th-century answers to 21st-century challenges.