I will make this brief.
The idea that we can stop terrorists who seem to be coming in via London, Amsterdam, or other foreign ports into America to set off havoc (and bombs) by essentially removing civil liberties here at home beggars belief.
A phrase that would have been heresy just several years ago, but is now on the TV-machine a lot is "security theater."
Now in my mind this would be the staging area for a secure zone, but in fact means staging an act which is designed to lend the appearance of greater safety.
We still haven't completely implemented the work of the bipartisan 9-11 Commission, Republicans continue to play petty politics by not conferring a TSA Chief, and meanwhile New safety measures appear arbitrary... I mean here.
The simple Strategical guidance I would offer is simple: We must shift from a Reactionary Defense to a Proactive Defense; We must shift from a Nation-State Invasion Model to a Sectarian Counter-terror Model.
Easier said than done!
That said, Proactive Defense looks more like what the British accomplished in 2005 with the liquid bombers; or the French have been dealing with since Algerian Independence in 1962. A lot of very advanced police work!
Our current reactionary basis has us looking at areas where the opponents last struck. As they say in investing, "past performance does not guarantee future results." This is backwards hindsight mentality.
The balance is to get international cooperation on improved intelligence techniques that somehow maintains reasonable personal privacy and functional civil liberties.
As for our wholesale invasion of places where terrorists live, well that is as delusional as the idea that Terrorists will somehow destroy the Freedom we enjoy in the West.
Our freedoms, our wealth, and our model of social change is not something that people plan on giving up on, and like any good product or service-- it is in high demand!
Ours is not a natural state of governance, but a logical outcrop as a result from hard earned lessons and wars of the past. Ours is the best model, for now, and people basically like Freedom, Liberty and Justice. So the terrorists can't expect random acts of havoc to remove or somehow dethrone this truth.
On the other hand there are dissenters and at the harshest end bad actors, those who would commit terrorist acts, probably in any major nation-state in the world. It becomes a question of what is aspirational and what is operational as to what threats are indeed real to human safety and liberty.
So, to invade yet another country to ensure freedom and democracy is so 20th century, and a very proven failed idea from not just a budgetary, but a benefit-cost, point of view.
Like NASA, our defense and offense needs to get more focused, accurate, and scale appropriate to live within their means.
