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and a key member in an emerging global community, we are facing a convergence of at least several undesirable security challenges, not the least of which is the U.S. Government itself.

A total breakdown in the US national security apparatus on September 11, 2001, followed by an equally futile attempt to respond to Hurricane Katrina five years later, pulled open the curtain showing us that the wizard is not home. Despite NORAD, we didn't stop the planes and, despite the Homeland Security Agency, we failed in the aftermath of the most costly though not most powerful storm to strike mainland US. If not the US Government, then who is looking after the security of Oz?

Broadening the National Security Sweep * * * In order to clarify our collective status in the overall context of survival and well being in the world, and to preempt our crawling too deeply into the catacombs of analytical speculation, we need to define the terms of our investigation. We need to ask ourselves: What is meant when we use the term "national security?" Clearly, we are not only concerned about military threats, because we often war with others in order to preserve something called "our national interests." Granted, this is often code for "oil" or some other strategic, profiteering necessity, but as is becoming abundantly clear, we should be concerned about our sources of and use of oil.

We may be under-reacting to the extent and relative rapidity to which the availability of oil is succumbing to the demands of the world's burgeoning hunger for black gold. However, duking it out with comparatively defenseless small nations and loosely knit bands of angry religious thugs in order to protect the oil supply, even when cloaked in something loosely termed "democratization," is not the whole national security story.

Shortly after the World Trade Center melted to the ground our President made the bold assertion that the US is "resolved today, to confront every threat from any source that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America." As, arguably, the world's most well known and least informed, outspoken skeptic of science, he was, presumably, not talking about the weather, which has ominous signs of moving in the direction of extreme. And it is not likely that he was alluding to food or potable water supplies, both of which are hovering at the edge of catastrophic shortages. Asteroids? Extraterrestrials? What did he mean by "any source?" What was his intent with the words "terror and suffering?"

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