Gary Hart, Peter Beinart and Richard Perle

Even if your city or town, or this country, is not attacked by terrorists, if you lost your job, you feel insecure, if your community loses its major employer, you feel insecure, if your children are poisoned by environmental pollution, you feel insecure, and if your son or daughter has to go fight Gulf War III so your neighbor can drive his Hummer, you’re really not feeling secure.

Gary Hart on Open Source

Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)

Some quotes from Gary Hart’s new book, The Shield and the Cloak: Security of the Commons:

The new security will be both national and international, defensive and offensive, and will require a shield for the homeland as well as a cloak of nonmilitary security.

Gary Hart, The Shield and the Cloak

What is strikingly obvious when security is understood from a larger, multi-dimensional viewpoint, is the limited role that the military plays in achieving it.

Gary Hart, The Shield and the Cloak

So you have to get serious about the environment and about starvation, and you have to do it not for the good of the world, but for the safety of America. Richard Perle is the author of An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, and he is, among others, the author of the Iraq war. He is a hawk of the old breed, a protege of Scoop Jackson and an unapologetic defender of Bush’s Iraq policy. When we booked him this afternoon we suggested, with Gary Hart, that we had in one corner the Prince of Darkness and in the other, the Prince of Light. His response: “Oh, I don’t know if it’s fair to call Gary Hart the Prince of Darkness.”

This war and its execution have, from the very beginning, rested on a single premise: terror is not an issue of law enforcement, but one of war. But is that how we define security? Is it possible to look at security as a broader issue, consisting of hard-nosed offense and international aid, international cooperation and attention to pandemics of disease and poverty? Or are those latter three superfluities, luxuries to be taken up again only when the hard-nosed offense has made its point?