Build it, and they will die

As usual, Geov Parrish hits the nail on the head:

The fact that the United States spends an enormous percentage of its enormous wealth perfecting and mass-producing ways to kill people is significant for how we aren't spending that money instead. There are plenty of worthy needs to be addressed at home, to be sure -- universal health care? repairing decaying infrastructure? education? -- but using the world's most powerful economy to promote minimal health and housing and education standards and job opportunities globally would also do far more than any army could to enhance our security, by drying up the grinding global poverty and hopelessness that is the wellspring for terrorism and war.

Instead, our self-perpetuating militarism is in many ways creating the new doctrine of Imperial America. American neo-imperialism is fueled by two elements central to human nature: our belief that we are a uniquely virtuous nation, and our inability to not use technology or tools that we have available to us.

Humans don't have a good track record resisting temptation, and the temptation, for America's leaders at the moment, is to use the overwhelming muscle at their disposal to force the rest of the world -- all of it -- to behave exactly to our liking. (In certain religions, the notions of yielding to temptation and evil are closely intertwined, but never mind.) At home, political support for the spending that enables America's bullying has been further fueled by 9/11 -- which, in turn, would never have happened if the U.S. had either kept more to itself or behaved more benevolently overseas. Paradoxically, our belligerence is becoming the greatest threat to our own security; we are manufacturing new enemies, one by one, as quickly as we can churn out any Pentagon munition. And as 9/11 (and Israel's entire history) demonstrate, with enough enemies, no army can fully protect us.

Whether America's overseas coercion is either benevolent or helpful -- and the record is at best mixed -- is ultimately beside the point. War should be a last, not a first, resort. More pointedly, the democracy that Democrats and Republicans alike like to proclaim us as standing for and as exporting is impossible in the absence of self-determination, and America at the moment is not interested in anyone else's self-determination. We'd like to be doing all the determining ourselves, thank you very much. Why? Because we can. And humans, when they can do something, usually do.