I do not believe it is the United States job to police the planet, but someone must be watching to insure that a power mad ruler somewhere is not going to attempt to expand his domain without regard to the cost to the planet. It is the responsibility of the United Nations to insure global security and to insure that those who lead represent the will of their constituency. I do recognize the advanced position held by the United States and several other nations in technology, and I believe this technology should be used in the United Nations global security effort.
While membership in the UN is should be enough to keep most members from destroying each other, we must also somehow address those who would undermine the efforts of the United Nations through deception. We need go no father that the PNAC to see an example of this. For these reasons I favor a well established program of covert operations in all countries. In most cases I would expect the operatives involved in this effort to be engaged in information acquisition, passing intelligence back to the United Nations where it can be evaluated and if necessary acted upon.
I believe it is also important to revise the nature of these covert agents. Their qualifications should not be evaluated based on ex-military combat experience but rather their advanced education in a discipline that allows them to become part of, adapt to and study the environments they will operate in. While self defense and physical fitness may be criteria for this type of position, it is the intellectual ability of the individual that will really make a successful operative.
As far as who should be able to see this information, I believe that the leaders of any trusted nation (who are members of the United Nations) as well as the UN Security Council should get access to this information. In almost every case, I believe that it is the duty of the UN to act on the intelligence gathered. It is too dangerous for a single country or a single leader for that matter to be the sole evaluator of this type of information. It is too easy for them to read into the information what they want to see just to be able to justify an otherwise criminal or at least morally reprehensible act. For example, ambiguously interpreting intelligence that makes it look like weapons of mass destruction are being built to justify a first strike on a sovereign nation.
It is my belief that an event like 9-11 cannot happen with an effective covert operations program in place. If a rogue dictator exists in a country somewhere, a UN covert operations operative should be in his inner circle.
There
is one other topic worth noting here. I do not favor an organization for fatherland
homeland security. We have one it is called the FBI. Let us learn from history
and not walk down the same road as Hitler in the administration of our
Government. This is just another form a separatist politics which leads to
further misunderstandings internationally as well as an erosion of Human Rights
domestically.