What should be the number one issue - you know, the one issue at the very top of the national agenda? My guess "national security" is always the answer.
Right now the Bush administrations argument as to how this is best accomplished is obviously "Combating Terrorism To Protect US Citizens." Because of the nature of terrorism itself this is an extremely difficult process... Although people can argue about whether or not the policies instituted as a result of this are actually working until we are blue in the face, I think the most important question we should be asking is whether or not "fighting terrorism" around the world should even be accepted as the means by which, at least at this point in time, is the most conducive to strengthening our security.
If we accept the premise that "Terrorism" is the major threat to National Security then the next question that should be asked is what are the CAUSES of terrorism?
Poverty and all the vices that come with it. Impoverished states mean less education, which means people are more prone to believing things that are stupid - breeding problems such as religious fanaticism, violent and peaceful alike. Those people that are religious fanatics in any country are stupid, including those that live in the United States. If you believe that the earth was created in 7 days for instance, just because the book of Genesis says so, then you are not well educated.
George Bush is correct when he says the fight against terrorism will be a long and hard fight, and that we MUST prevail. I just believe his approach is fundamentally flawed.
The real question we need to answer is how do we solve the root cause of terrorism? POVERTY. Do we not have the power to do this? Are we not so prosperous that we have the means to become 10 times the humanitarian power that we are today?
I think humanitarianism is the only real way of fighting against terrorism, with some military action from time to time on WELL KNOWN terrorism camps.
Eventually, we probably should have ousted Saddam and his regime... but much later on once we had doubled our humanitarian efforts and taken advantage of the immense pro-american feeling all over the world. Instead, we threw it all away...
What is the answer? Well, it's going to be a whole lot harder now. There will be more terror attacks. As Bill Maher mentioned on Larry King Live last night:
I know 9/11 was supposed to change everything but 9/11 didn't change anything. And when history is written, 9/11 will not be seen as the date that didn't change anything, 9/11 will be lumped in with all the snooze alarm dates.
That's what we say now. We say oh, we took look out when the World Trade Center was attacked in '93 and the Cole was bombed and the African embassies. All those things that led up to 9/11, we should have - no, 9/11 was just another one of those, it goes right in that category with the Cole and embassies and first World Trade Center bombing. The thing that changes everything hasn't happened yet, but it will.
Hopefully we can get our reason back before this more horrifying event takes place. The only thing we can do is pull out of Iraq immediately, admit that we made things worse, and accept that we have made the world LESS SAFE and LESS OPEN for democracy. The world will come around eventually, as we spend a few billion dollars less on starting wars and more on bringing food and maybe even enacting regulation on corporations involved with countries with enormous human rights violations on their citizens.
Once we have the world's support by doing what we can to make other countries more prosperous and free strictly through humanitarian means the more allies we will have, and the less likely there will be groups that form with the intent on killing Americans - and the more likely those groups will be hated by the rest of the world, and therefore the more support we will have in combating them.
This approach has the advantage of not only reducing the power of limited "terrorist" organizations such as Al-Qaeda, but also the Iran, Saudi-Arabia, and North Korea's of the world...