Michael Scheuer, Imperial Hubris (Potomac Books Inc., 2008) p. XV.U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalization of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s. As a result, I think it fair to conclude that the USA remains bin Laden’s only indispensable ally.
George Washington, 5th Annual Message, Address to Congress (December 1793).There is a rank due to the United States among nations, which will be withheld, if not absolutely lost, by the reputation of weakness. If we desire to avoid insult, we must be able to repel it; if we desire to secure peace, one of the most powerful instruments of our rising prosperity, it must be known that we are at all times ready for war.
William Cabell Bruce, Benjamin Franklin, Self-revealed (The Knickerbocker Press, New York, 1917) p. 168.The way to secure peace is to be prepared for war. They that are on their guard, and appear ready to receive their adversaries, are in much less danger of being attacked than the supine, secure, and the negligent.
Thomas Jefferson, Paul Leicester Ford, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson: 1807-1815 Vol. IX (1898) p. 520.I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power, the greater it will be.
Eugene Carroll, before the First International Conference on US Military Toxics and Bases Clean-up (1997).In a mindless, criminally negligent process, we poured resources into military expansion both at home and abroad without any regard for the environmental consequences. Pollution was ignored on the grounds that ‘national security’ took absolute priority over all other considerations.
The words that best described the nation’s original foreign policy and the policy that should be pursued now were spoken by Thomas Jefferson during his first Inaugural Address in 1801: “Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”
Unfortunately, this is not the policy that has been followed in the last century.
Ever since the proponents of surrogate power took over the country, the government has grown in excess of constitutional boundaries on all levels. The nation is now involved militarily all over the world. Defense spending, added to all of the unconstitutional domestic programs, has bankrupt the country and made its people much more fearful and vulnerable to attacks.
As Douglas MacArthur said many decades ago, “Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war, hysteria, and an incessant propaganda of fear.”