And many writers have imagined for themselves republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for there is such a gap between how one lives and how one ought to live that anyone who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation: for a man who wishes to profess goodness at all times will come to ruin among so many who are not good. -- Niccolo Machiavelli
As America's military deploys troops, armor, planes and ordinance to bases in
the Middle East surrounding Iraq, they will do so after years of fending off
another kind of attack, one by the massed forces of environmental
organizations that have done everything in their power to reduce and restrict
the ability of our military to train its soldiers, sailors, marines and
airmen.
A Green Fifth Column has waged its own war on this nation's ability to be
ready for war on land, sea and air, seeking through legislation and
litigation to thwart the training of our military forces and hinder the
development of new weapons systems. It is the largely untold and unknown
battle of environmentalists versus the US military.
After sixty years as the best and only live-fire training range and training
area for amphibious landings for the US Atlantic Fleet, Vieques, a Puerto
Rican island, will be shut down in 2003 by a coalition of environmental
groups and politicians that included Hillary Clinton and Robert Kennedy, Jr.
Without such training, you can count on "friendly fire" accidents that will
cost the lives of American troops in the field.
Late last year, in California, the Navy was pressured to fly fewer bombing
runs (using nonexploding dummy bombs) at Fort Hunter Liggett near Big Sur.
Environmental radicals claimed that fairy shrimp pools and endangered mint
plants had a higher priority than the ability of fighter pilots to hit
targets that posed a threat to ground troops or our ships at sea. Lawsuits on
behalf of the snowy plover severely restricted the training of Navy SEALs on
California's Coronado Island. Marines can train in California's Mojave Desert
only during the daytime to avoid endangering tortoises as if a determined
enemy would never fight at night.
Since 1941, the Barry Goldwater bombing range in a desolate area of Arizona,
south of Phoenix, has been the training ground for WWII pilots and, in modern
times, F-16 and A-10 pilots. Defenders of the Wild, an environmental group,
waged a battle of lawsuits forcing the military to be more concerned about
so-called endangered lizards and Sonoran pronghorn antelope than on the lives
of our troops in combat.
In Florida, the Pinecastle bombing range, nestled in the Ocala National
Forest, has been under siege by groups called "Forests Not Bombs" and
"Friends of Gaia" who believe gopher tortoises have a greater priority than
the ability to wage war swiftly and decisively.
There are restrictions on training for amphibious landings at Camp Lejeune in
North Carolina because of limits during turtle-nesting season and because of
a rare species of woodpecker. Lawsuits by environmentalists to protect a tree
snail shut down Hawaii's Makua Military Reservation in 1998.
In May of this year, a federal court issued a 30-day injunction banning the
military from conducting any kind of training on Farallon de Medinilla in the
Northern Marianas Islands because the Center for Biological Diversity filed a
lawsuit in 2000 against the Navy and the Department of Defense to end
live-fire training exercises, claiming they violated the Migratory Bird
Treaty Act.
One would think that the lives of those who have volunteered to protect
America against its enemies in war would be sufficient reason to spare our
military these and other restriction on their ability to train our armed
forces, but they are not. So far as the Greens are concerned, human life is
secondary to various species of flora and fauna.
As recently as August, an environmental coalition led by the Natural
Resources Defense Council, sued the Navy to stop using a powerful new sonar
system to detect enemy submarines, claiming that it can harm whales and
dolphins.
All this is occurring against the background of the 2001 attack on American
soil that killed more than 3,000 civilians, commercial jet passengers, and on
the Pentagon itself. It simply does not matter to the Greens and therein lies
the truth of their loyalty to this nation.
The same Pentagon that suffered losses when al Qaeda terrorists crashed a
commercial jet into it on 9-11, spends $4 billion dollars a year to comply
with the endless environmental laws that have been imposed on this nation to
thwart every kind of manufacturing, provision of energy, development of every
description, logging, mining, and agricultural activity.
For years now, those laws, particularly the Endangered Species Act and the
Marine Mammal Protection Act, have been used as a weapons against our
military by Greens intent on finding every means possible to limit this
nation's ability to train its armed personnel and test new forms of military
hardware to fight sophisticated weaponry arrayed against this nation.
Under threat from foreign nations seeking or possessing weapons of mass
destruction and by secret Jihad cells of terrorists at home, the Greens
continue to wage their own war on our ability to protect our troops wherever
they are needed and our civilian population's domestic security.
The time has long passed when all branches of our military should be freed
from these environmental restrictions in order that they need no longer fight
the domestic battle against as determined an enemy of this nation as any to
be found in far-flung lands across the oceans.
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Tom DeWeese is the publisher/editor of The DeWeese Report and president of
the American Policy Center, a grassroots activist think tank headquartered in
Warrenton, Virginia. The Center maintains an Internet site at www.americanpolicy.org.
