Last Wednesday, our President said, “We will not succumb to a siege mentality.”
All i can say to that is, “But ya have, Blanche” since he said it as he was announcing a panoply of heightened security measures because for the second time since 9/11 a terrorist had attempted…and failed… to bring down an airplane enroute to a U.S. destination.
We are three hundred and eight million strong. We are the most powerful nation on the planet. We have by far the biggest and best military. We could incinerate any nation that attacked us.
And yet, we are currently involved in wars of occupation in two countries on other continents, squandering our patrimony and our youth in nations that have neither a navy nor an air force. They do not have ICBM’s, they cannot touch our shores, much less our heartland. They are incapable of doing anything more harmful to us than encouraging terrorists. (The actual training of the terrorists, such as it is, is by all accounts occurring mostly on the soil of our trusted ally, Pakistan, with minor help from Somalia and Yemen.)
Of all of the approximately 14,000 murders in the U.S. in 2009, only 14 were from allegedly jihadist attacks – 13 at Ft. Hood in November and one at a military recruiting station in Little Rock in June. Yet all three hundred and eight million of us are so terrified of a handful of terrorists that we have become a nation of sheep, cowering in our pens and begging our leaders to lock us up more securely.
No, President Obama, we have long since succumbed to a siege mentality. Two administrations in a row have inculcated this state of mind to further their power, fearful of being outflanked on the right by the opposition.
At some point soon, if the good of the nation is not given precedence over the maintenance of our overseas empire, we will become a dictatorship controlled by the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us against. Or at best we’ll be a nation democratic in name only, like contemporary Russia and Iran.
Here’s a power vacuum on Caledonia Street: