I never know what I'm going to do for the Post next. Two weeks ago I had a piece on Homeland Security. This is one of my pig ongoing projects. How unprepared we are for a terrorist attack.
America is a country that seems forever to be toddler or teenager, at those two stages of human development characterized by conflict between autonomy and security.
The popular, and one may say naive, idea is that peace can be secured by disarmament and that disarmament must therefore precede the attainment of absolute security and lasting peace.
The relationship of the two problems is rather the reverse. To a great extent disarmament is dependent on guarantees of peace. Security comes first and disarmament second.
The security of which we speak is to be attained by the development of international law through an international organization based on the principles of law and justice.
Thus, if armaments were curtailed without a secure peace and all countries disarmed proportionately, military security would have been in no way affected.
When distrust exists between governments, when there is a danger of war, they will not be willing to disarm even when logic indicates that disarmament would not affect military security at all.
Some pacifists have carried the sound idea of the prime importance of security too far, to the point of declaring that any consideration of disarmament is superfluous and pointless as long as eternal peace has not been attained.
And in terms of entitlement reforms, we have to save them from themselves, because if we don't reform social security and we don't reform Medicare, they're going to actually implode.
