War is a dirty nasty thing, but in my zero experience opinion, it cannot be the worst thing out there.  Many of my peers in the blogging world have made the claim that we are “at war” with terrorism in general, but I don’t understand this ambivalent definition on their part.  I say it is mutable because they use the term war to justify the actions of our military, but do not allow those that we fight the distinction of soldiers.  For this second part, I agree, but see the situation as infinitely more complicated.  I show my economist side when I start to explain the effect of globalization on the war against terrorism.  In decades past, access for these militants was not a question, it was the furthest thing on our mind that people who hated us in the remote parts of countries we could never located on a map, would want to effect decisive action in order to kill our citizens.  The problem has been that these countries have grown in precisely the things that we would like them to have grown in, they are passing through the same industrial revolution that our own country passed through 150 years ago, but they are doing it much quicker and within one or two generations.  At first it may not seem obvious why this is such a problem, until you think about your own life.  Those of us that are young need only look at the perceptions of our grandparents to understand how world-views change over time, and the resilience they maintain.  If we were to compact the changes in our own families over three generations into the space of our own lives, we would soon see the complication that these changes are making in the developing worlds.  I have given the purely economic example before about someone in a third world country who has had to go to sleep at night with hunger in their belly, this person will never know what it is like to want to accumulate vast amounts of capital.  A person trained to maximize present consumption as a means for survival will not understand the need to invest without dramatic intervention.  How much more true for a society as a whole?  Anyone who has ever had experience with wild animals knows that an animal which has learned to live in the wild can never be woken from sleep without fear of it lashing out against the first animal it sees; this is simply survival. 

I mean to build the idea that these new cultures are violent through no cause of their own inborn genetic traits, but because their culture has developed this ethos as a manner of survival.  Our own Anglo-Saxon heritage shows distant threads of this same capability and we had to learn to cherish the individual rights which allowed us to progress into a democratic republic.  When I make the claim that freedom is not created on the battlefield, I insist that strong armies are neither necessary nor sufficient for a democratic nation.  There have always been strong armies in history; it is true as much as a relative term can be true.  On any given playground there will be the strongest bully.  This I hold is the antithesis of peaceful and effective government, but ironically the source of reliance against those traits in man which will always seek to undermine stability.  I say not that the threats to stability are hard to understand, but that the tendency to have episodes of freedom in history is what should confound us.  The fact that man creates government out of a legitimate hope to achieve something better is what should make us pause. 

This brings us to the outright toppling of freedom, the creation of loopholes by claiming threats of war.  This was anticipated by the first ten federalist papers.  First we have to understand the political capital critique of why an executive would want to act in the present, myopically, for the benefit of his own interests.  This seems very easy, they are worried about their own legacy, they are worried about the growth rate of their party, which has to be ever maximized, and they have no long-term costs to their decisions.  The absolute worst thing that can happen is no reelection.  Look at the presidents who failed to win a second term, there were always extenuating circumstances, the system is meant to apologize for the current president, who is almost infallible with monikers like “the most powerful man on earth.”  Seeing that there is a huge deal of power and self interest in maximizing the exertive force of the entire executive machine (thousands of employees at the will of the president), it becomes very important for the party to control the white house.  This is the training ground for future bureaucrats of the next generation, the leaders of tomorrow.  How much more great if these programs desired by one president, or faction, wants can be put into place with hardly any objection?  Objection during wartime is considered treason.  Bush right now is able to cite the precedents of  John Adams and Lincoln in suspending the rights of political adversaries calling anyone that is against them against the nation at large.  This type of thinking is usually reserved for kings, the personal identifier between nation and leader.  It is a little scary to think of a very large and powerful system backing the personal identity of one man.  This is why the critiques of the Bush family vs. the Saddam family have significant relevance.  The  blind faith we are to have in our leader is similar to the faith Romans supposedly had in Caesar in his campaigns against the Gauls.  Insert Bush and terrorism here into this historical prototype.  I personally believe that there are many ways to solve problems.  I hope that we haven’t miscalculated the costs here, in terms of money, man power, foreign lives, hatred against our country globally, and opportunity costs of solving the problem a different way.  One can hardly imagine that a peaceful solution would be more costly than the enormous expense of the current war.   I know, it seems naive to people that have already been convince of the merit of war, but I don’t know anything else to advocate.  Wars are destructive politically as well as economically.  There are hidden costs which never get figured into the equations of how much gunpowder we are using.  Plus this is not the way that a great democratic country acts.  We don’t create wars to advance agendas at home, and we certainly don’t go around killing people in the mildly justifiable name of insurgency.  I will never understand why we think that a defensive war involves an invasion of a foreign country.  I will never understand why we act independently taking on the large expense of war, when Europe can bow out of the bills that war costs.  I will never understand why we are so committed to a president which has worked every last political advantage out of a war which almost certainly was timed inappropriately.