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THE CRISIS OF NATIONAL INSECURITY: Approaching the precipice?

In the current aura of strategic, evangelic crusades, it is difficult to discuss any single challenge to the security of the United States without slipping into doomsday paranoia and turning off the ears that need to hear. It is equally challenging to present a picture of all the foreseeable ways that our nation, as we know it, is being threatened, if it is not already under siege. Unfortunately, the task we face in the not so distant future is much larger than the sum total of one; terrorism is not the day's only dilemma.

Although some politicians might prefer to ignore the larger emerging truth in favor of the more tangible security-as-a-strategic-concer n of the Department of Defense, they do so at our risk, and that risk is becoming ever more obvious and real.

In his pitch to the world to establish Global Warming as a far superior threat to our national security than terrorism, Al Gore has done us a service that will exceed the new national urgency that should follow. By putting Terrorism and Global Warming on the same plate, he has broadened our perspective so that we can more easily ask ourselves: "Well, if it's not just terrorism that threatens us, then what else?" If he is correct, and our President and his non-science friends are among the sparse few who refute this, the former Vice President may have single-handedly freed us to look at the future of the United States, and the world, for that matter, without the tunnel vision that has constrained our national perspective to issues that divide and distract us rather than pull us all together.

National Security is not just about war, whether declared or not; whether against a sovereign nation or in opposition to nebulous quasi-organizations given embellished form by hawks and media cranks, or not. The challenge is much larger than Iraq, Aghanistan and Pakistan, and the amorphous black hole of terrorism that has emerged in the Middle East (at the cost of more than 5,000 Coalition troops and contractors, a half million Iraqi dead and several million displaced, and an estimated, eventual cost of $1 trillion U.S. tax dollars). Forget, for a moment, that violence around the globe, not the least of which is in Iraq, has increased substantially since our government responded to the attack on the World Trade Center. Distinct from that violence and the related questions unanswered by the most secretive US administration in history, as an independent country

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