Marginally Pynchonian

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THE RUMSFELD WALL WON'T DEFEND AMERICA
   DAVID H. HACKWORTH

Now it's the Space Wall!

Long-in-the-tooth pro-wallers, backed up by pals in the 
military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC), are at it again.  

Solving some of tomorrow's problems with yesterday's thinking -- while 
ignoring real threats that should receive the highest priority -- might end 
up wasting more Americans than all our wars combined.  

Just while I've been sucking air on planet Earth, there have been walls 
aplenty: Maginot, Westwall, Berlin and Robert McNamara's $2 billion 
electronic doozie designed by corporate America to fence in Ho Chi Minh's 
hordes. And let's not forget Saddam Hussein's supposedly impenetrable Kuwait 
Wall that Stormin' Norman turned into a monument to stupidity in just 100 
hours.

None of the 20th-century walls worked. Nor did their predecessors, from the 
Great Wall of China to the Limes in Germany to Hadrian's Wall in Britain to 
the massive Coast Artillery Wall that "protected" America and fed the budding 
MICC around the turn of the 20th century. History clearly shows that man-made 
walls don't do the job.

Sure, there's an ICBM threat, but the Space Wall -- which will cost more than 
it would to send every kid in America to fine schools like those the Clinton 
and Bush girls attend, modernize every hospital to the standards of the ones 
that look after our lawmakers so well and eliminate the thousands of ghettos 
that shame America -- is decades away from functioning as a viable deterrent. 
And many experts say that $100 billion later, the development of this latest 
version of Star Wars: the defense shield will have produced nothing more than 
the mother of all arms races. 

In any case, ICBMs launched by a few Looney Tune nations are the least of our 
troubles. Rogue states can be contained the way we and the Soviets did with 
Mutually Assured Destruction.  What we do is put out the word to places like 
Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Pakistan: Just one missile headed our way, and 
there won't be a city in your land that won't glow for 250,000 years. 

Instead of building another wall, we should be addressing America's No. 1 
threat -- TERRORISM. And to protect us adequately, anti-terrorist preventive 
measures should be fast-tracked the way FDR ramrodded the Manhattan Project, 
which gave us the A-bomb before Hitler. With the same urgency JFK showed when 
he pushed the throttle to get us up into space. And with the same passion 
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is displaying toward his new wall-to-be.

Enough plutonium has been slipped out of the ex-Soviet Union to build a dozen 
nuclear weapons. What's to stop Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden from making 
refrigerator-size atomic bombs, crating 'em up and shipping them to "cousins" 
conveniently living in key port cities such as Boston; New York City; 
Norfolk, Va.; Savannah, Ga.; Galveston, Texas; San Diego; Los Angeles; San 
Francisco and Seattle?  All with timers ticking away to go off at exactly the 
same second while the "crates" await customs inspection? And if they're 
shipped by a cutout in France or Ireland, there'd be no fingerprints, either. 

Remember, we still haven't nailed the perps who blew up our Air Force billet 
in Saudi Arabia or the bombers who did a number on the USS Cole.

Surely the best brains and leaders should be assembled and told to figure out 
how to work together to stop the nukes, chemical and biological weapons now 
brewing in labs around the world from clobbering the USA.  Quick smart before 
it's too late.   

But so far, our anti-terrorist countermeasures against Weapons of Mass 
Destruction have been relegated to the back burner. Only a fraction of our 
defense bucks has been earmarked for anti-terrorism, and the effort's been 
pretty much staffed by incompetents and gridlocked by governmental turf wars. 
More defense money's been shipped south of the border to fight the unwinnable 
drug war than used to stop WMD from creating an American holocaust.  

The arms race that would be created by Rumsfeld's wall might be great for 
Lockheed and Martin -- not to mention the rest of the MICC Cold War 
Millionaires Club made up of former generals and admirals and SecDefs. But 
long before those happy "duck and pray" days are here again, America could go 
down the chute from the effects of WMD.    
***
(c) 2001 David H. Hackworth
Distributed by King Features Syndicate Inc.

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