War State No Republic

Except for the first four years, I've lived my entire life in a war state with a huge standing army, centralized power, a vast security apparatus and a growing contempt for the Constitution and the American tradition.

You ought to ask yourself why the United States has a standing army exceeded in size only by China's. You ought to ask yourself why American armed forces are stationed in more than 100 countries, even though we are not at war, nor are there any countries conceivably inclined to declare war on us.

You ought to ask yourself why, after communism collapsed, the United States insisted on keeping the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and even on expanding it. NATO had been set up for one reason and one reason only — to defend Western Europe against a Soviet invasion. Now there is no Soviet Union. The Red Army was withdrawn completely from Europe. The Warsaw Pact, the communist answer to NATO, was long ago dissolved.

Yet NATO is being expanded. Why is that? Whom do they expect will attack Europe? And why did the American people remain dumbly passive when the Clinton administration persuaded NATO, a purely defensive organization, to launch an offensive war against the little nation of Yugoslavia? And why is the Bush administration also pushing NATO to adopt a new offensive strategy?