Triumphant or Overextended?

Walden Bello has an interesting piece exploring whether Washington will triumph or overextend itself with a continuation of its current foreign policy orientation. He concludes with this sobering analysis of the current war on terror:

There are no clear winners so far in the so-called war against terror. But there are clear losers. The Taliban is one. The other big loser is liberal democracy in the United States. Not even the Cold War was presented in such totalistic terms as the "War against Terror." Laws and executive orders restricting the rights to privacy and free movement have been passed with a speed and in a manner that would have turned Joe McCarthy green with envy. The United States was scarcely three months into the war when legislation had already been passed and executive orders signed that established secret military tribunals to try non-US citizens; imposed guilt by association on immigrants; launched a massive effort to track down 8000 young Muslim men; authorized the Attorney General to indefinitely lock up aliens on mere suspicion; expanded the use of wiretaps and secret searches; allowed the use of secret evidence in immigration proceedings that aliens cannot confront or rebut; gave the Justice Department the authority to overrule immigration judges; destroyed the secrecy of the client-lawyer relationship by allowing the government to listen in; and institutionalized racial and ethnic profiling.

Americans have often prided themselves with having a political system whose role is to maximize and protect individual liberty along the lines propounded by John Locke and Thomas Jefferson. That Lockean-Jeffersonian tradition has been severely eroded in the last few months, as Americans have been stampeded to giving government vast new powers over the individual in the name of guaranteeing order and security. Instead of moving to the future, America's limited democracy is regressing in its inspiration from the seventeenth century Locke to the sixteenth century Hobbes, whose masterwork Leviathan held that citizens owe unconditional loyalty to a state that guarantees the security of their life and limb.