"Interdiction," or aggression?

In his 2002 book Bush at War--which was compiled with ample help from the White House, Pentagon, and CIA--Bob Woodward describes a ceremony conducted by U.S. Special Forces and intelligence personnel near Gardez, Afghanistan, on February 5, 2002. About 25 men gathered around a tombstone marking a buried piece of the World Trade Center. During the ceremony, one of those present declared: "We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of our great nation."

Obviously, there are occasions when defending our nation will require the focused delivery of lethal violence against our enemies. Just as obviously, 9/11 was one of those times. But death that is "exported" to distant regions sometimes returns in the form of "blowback"--lethal terrorist attacks capitalizing on growing resentment over America's interventionist foreign policy, often carried out by onetime allies or assets of the U.S. government. One such asset was Osama bin Laden, who was supported by the CIA, but who later became a key component of the international terror network.

Lt. Commander Brad Kieserman, operations legal chief at U.S. Coast Guard headquarters, offered a variation on the idea of defending our nation by exporting death. Speaking to the December 19 Denver Post, Kieserman defended the Coast Guard's recently enacted policy of deploying cutters off Latin America and arresting foreign nationals trying to leave their own countries. Over the past four years, the Coast Guard has blocked at least 37 Ecuadorian boats, detained more than 4,575 suspected illegal immigrants, and scuttled a dozen emptied boats designated "unseaworthy."

"The president has authority to secure the borders of the United States," Kieserman explained, not only in Ecuador but "anywhere in the world." Coast Guard vessels will "go to the source of transnational crime and interdict it before it gets to the United States."

It seems reasonable to believe that a president determined to secure our borders would not be eager to grant amnesty to illegal aliens, as President Bush has been shown to desire. Furthermore, the understandable resentment bred by the policy carried out by the Coast Guard is fomenting anti-Americanism in Ecuador--and with it the possibility of blowback. Carmen Gutierrez, a teacher at an elite Ecuadorian school, recently returned after three years in the U.S. "And when she put up a U.S. flag in her classroom, she said, Ecuadorian students 'were mad, really mad,'" reports the Post. "They demanded an explanation: 'Why did you put that on the window? Take it off!'"