this is one of the most disturbing things i've read on FR in a long time.
our civilization is not in the least threatened, only our empire is.
but human pride and avarice will not allow us to forgo the throne and the thousand assassins' arrows that will accompany it. seeing our turn as king of hill finally arrive, the neocon can think of nothing but keeping us there at all costs. meanwhile the isolationist conservative, the "america first" conservative, the (heaven forbid) pacifist conservative are everywhere derided as wanting to handicap the US, as wanting to make her weak.
well, there is more than one kind of strength. all of our current trouble with fundamentalist islam, tragically, can be traced back to some past meddling of ours into their affairs. projecting american "strength" is not the solution to the problem, it is the cause of the problem. and each time we "solve" a problem by projecting our strengh, we create a new one (we've seen this pattern repeated many times in the middle east - the career of saddam hussein is the most recent and obvious example). admittedly, once this cycle has begun it is very hard to escape it.
what this country needs is more civilization, not less.
i want an america that is strong, secure, and self-sufficient. leave the empire to others with a hunger for gold and a taste for blood.
That reminds me of something I read this morning. The U.S. State Department said GRAPO issued a statement following the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States expressing satisfaction that "symbols of imperialist power" were decimated and affirming that "the war" had only just begun.