National security is a scam — an $8 trillion scam.

That’s the amount spent since September 11, 2001, on the
military, including the Iraq and Afghan wars, and “homeland security,”
according to Christopher Hellman of the National Priorities Project. If
“veterans benefits, future costs for treating the war-wounded, and interest
payments on war-related borrowing” are added, Hellman writes, the cost is much
higher: $11 trillion, by the estimate of Brown University’s Watson Institute
for International Studies. Hellman says by his reckoning, the full cost of
“security” is $1.2 trillion a year.

And yet officials say Americans must not let down their
guard. The mildest calls for cuts in the rate of growth in military spending
are met with panic by “defense” officials.

Considering that all that spending was triggered by a ragtag
group of airplane hijackers armed with box cutters on 9/11, something just
doesn’t add up. (Locks on flight-deck doors and armed pilots would have averted
the attacks.) As Thomas Paine, the soul of the American Revolution, wrote in
The Rights of Man about the British empire, “In reviewing the history of the
English Government, its wars and its taxes, a bystander, not blinded by prejudice
nor warped by interest, would declare that taxes were not raised to carry on
wars, but that wars were raised to carry on taxes.”

In America’s case, however, it is debt, not explicit taxes,
that was raised. On September 30, 2000, the national debt was $5.67 trillion.
Today it is $14.7 trillion, a 160 percent increase. But debt could well
represent future taxes or inflation, an implicit tax on cash balances — if the
government thinks it can get away with it.

It is said that 9/11 changed everything, but in fact it
changed nothing whatsoever. Opportunistic politicians simply used the attacks
to do much more of what they had already been doing and were hoping to continue
in greater measure. Admittedly they were good at that. The attacks gave them a
unique chance to frighten Americans into acceding to whatever the ruling elite
wanted. As a result, those trillions were spent with little real oversight —
the overseers were part of the conspiracy against the taxpayers. Reports say
that $60 billion in contract money for Iraq and Afghanistan has been diverted
to unknown recipients. The Pentagon routinely loses track of billions of
dollars.

The military-industrial complex has never been larger or
more pervasive. Thousands of companies exist to sell expensive things to the
government. Fortunes have been made. The post–9/11 period has been a feeding
frenzy at the taxpayers’ trough — grand larceny of historic proportions.

The attitude was well illustrated by Rep. James Clyburn, a
South Carolina Progressive Democrat who worries that military spending might be
cut because of concern about the budget deficit. Does he worry because he fears
that security will diminish? No, he explained, he worries because he has
military bases in his congressional district.

And people wonder why the economy is in a rut.

Of course, that is only part of the story. Monetary costs
aside, the security fetish has cost Americans their privacy, turned the
presidency into a virtual autocracy, and further blackened America’s reputation
abroad with civilian-killing drone attacks and house raids in the night. The
image of the United States has been firmly set as The Invader and The Torturer.

But isn’t all that, however regrettable, necessary because
there are people out there who want to kill us? That’s what the
national-security elite would like you to think. We’re told “they” attacked us
because they hate our freedoms. If true, they must surely hate us a lot less
now, thanks to the USA PATRIOT Act. Some say there is an intrinsic conflict between
Islam and the West.

That’s all self-serving nonsense. The 9/11 attacks were
intended as retribution for decades of U.S. policy that has inflicted death and
misery on Arabs through support for oppressive Middle East regimes and direct
military and CIA operations. The attackers committed mass murder, to be sure,
but Americans won’t be safe if they don’t comprehend the danger. U.S. foreign
intervention provoked the attackers, and the U.S. response played into their
hands by creating more people who seek vengeance and by bleeding Americans
financially.

Wherever Osama bin Laden is now, I suspect he’s laughing.

* Sheldon Richman is
senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation (www.fff.org) and editor of
The Freeman magazine.