Seven years into the "War on Terror," having spent close to a trillion dollars on military operations, endured ridiculous searches and confiscations while traveling, and suffered nonsensical delays in large monetary transactions even through the recent credit freeze in order to "control the funding of terrorism," does anyone think they're any safer?
If you do, you are -- what's the term? -- a #@(&ing idiot. I know my country, thankfully a lot better than our enemies do, and it's pretty clear to me that if someone really wants to do us serious harm, eventually they will, shoe removal and delay of access to funds notwithstanding. I won't say anything in particular, but I have no doubt that if Osama bin Laden knew what I know, or what most of you know, the "War on Terror" would be long over, and we'd have lost.
So I say we surrender. Make no concessions to anyone, but surrender. We continue to police criminal activity, including targeting conspiracies, but no more war, the difference being that in police work, the right of the state to pursue criminals ends when it puts innocent people at risk of harm or infringes unduly upon their freedom, while in war "collateral damage" and collective hardship is accepted and anticipated. And we don't forcefully occupy foreign territory in police work, nor insist that our troops and even our mercenaries be above the law.
We need, for a change, to have some confidence in our way of life and in humanity. Americans are not evil, current Administration excepted. We are often ignorant and inconsiderate, but that can change. And not many people in the rest of the world are evil, either. Right now, America is acting like a bunch of rats, essentially accepting at once that (a) we have no need to listen to any complaints about us, and (b) there is no hope that anyone who dislikes us will ever change his mind on the matter. These ideas, while mutually reinforcing, are rubbish.
We need to accept, as we do in domestic society, that there will always be a fringe of people who will be wicked around the world. But we also need to accept, as we do in domestic society, that our primary concern should be in doing right by the vast majority of people around the world who do not fall into this fringe, and not with hunting down the wicked people at any cost. If we can't do this, our society will fall, maybe not for many years, but with certainty.
The way we live in America is generally pretty good. We're destroying the planet, but we're waking up to that fact, and we're beginning to change it. There is no inherent reason that any reasonable person -- that would exclude people who insist that everyone should live in some sort of fascism -- should fear us or our way of life. There is no reason that we should not conduct our affairs with malice toward none and goodwill toward all.
But we don't do this, most pointedly at the moment through the "War on Terror." Among the vast majority of people around the world, this indicates that we are @$$#0)&$, and rightly so. We should stop being @$$#0)&$. Instead, we should hold out our values as something that we think reasonable people around the world should agree with, listen with goodwill when they disagree, and try to accept any irreconcilable differences.