End the war on terror and save billions By Fareed Zakaria If you want to know why we’re in such a deep budgetary hole, one large piece of it is that we have spent around $2trillion on foreign wars in the past decade. Not coincidentally, we have had the largest expansion of the federal government since World War II. The Washington Post’s Dana Priest and William Arkin have described how the U.S. government has built 33 new complexes for the intelligence bureaucracies alone. The Department of Homeland Security employs 230,000 people. A new Global Terrorism Index this week showed that terrorism went up from 2002 to 2007 – largely because of the conflicts in Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq — but has declined ever since. And the part of the world with the fewest incidents is North America. It could be our vigilance that is keeping terror attacks at bay. But it is also worth noting, as we observe the vast apparatus of searches and screening, that the Transportation Security Administration’s assistant administrator for global strategies has admitted that those expensive and cumbersome whole-body scanners have not resulted in the arrest of a single suspected terrorist. Not one.
Posted on: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 20:13:37 +0000
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