Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Garry Wills is one of most insightful intellectuals and historians. Anything he writes should be paid attention to. In the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books, Wills writes about how quickly Obama has begun acting like Bush. He attributes this behavior to our great national security empire that has been built up over the last 60 years. An extended excerpt:

Some were dismayed to see how quickly the Obama people grabbed at the
powers, the secrecy, the unaccountability that had led Bush into such
opprobrium. Leon Panetta at the CIA especially puzzled those who had known him
during the Clinton years. A former CIA official told The Washington Post, "Leon
Panetta has been captured by the people who were the ideological drivers for the
interrogation program in the first place." A White House official told Jane
Mayer of The New Yorker, "It's like Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that turning around the huge
secret empire built by the National Security State is a hard, perhaps
impossible, task. After most of the wars in US history there was a return to the
constitutional condition of the pre-war world. But after those wars there was no
lasting institutional security apparatus of the sort that was laboriously
assembled in the 1940s and 1950s. After World War I, for instance, there was no
CIA, no NSA, no mountain of secret documents to be guarded from unauthorized
readers, no atomic bomb to guard, develop, deploy, and maintain in readiness on
land, in the air, and on (or in) the sea.

Now a new president quickly becomes aware of the vast empire that is
largely invisible to the citizenry. The United States maintains an estimated one
thousand military bases in other countries. I say "estimated" because the exact
number, location, and size of the bases are either partly or entirely cloaked in
secrecy, among other things to protect nuclear installations.The secrecy
involved is such that during the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy did not
even know, at first, that we had nuclear missiles stationed in Turkey.

A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire's secrets. He feels
he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and
diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in this
vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of
commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could
not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his
disposal. It has all been given him as the legacy of Bomb Power, the thing that
makes him not only Commander in Chief but Leader of the Free World. He is a
self-entangling giant.