Simply put, America is better positioned geographically to protect itself from threats abroad. 9-11 was a fluke, a deadly fluke, but one whose threat has too often been overstated.
Terrorism is little by nature, cheap shots. Attempts to chip away at a superior power, based on efficiently employing limited resources and hoping the enemy will ... overreact and hurt himself.
Much like what happened with America, shooting itself in the foot head essentially after Sept. 11, 2001, and invading a sovereign Iraq under false information, and then mishandling the "war" in Afghanistan, which in retrospect might have been best served by limited, intelligent strikes, much like the one that "got" Osama bin Laden in the end, but not by positioning inexperienced soldiers in remote outposts with missions of winning civilian hearts and minds via nation-building. No more Bowe Bergdahls.
Back to the geopolitics, though...
I first heard the term in Richard Chapelle's high school class at Thornwood, where he taught advanced (or gifted) students much like a college class. Readings, essays, and written tests. When we studied TR, Teddy Roosevelt -- a Chapelle favorite, we drew editorial cartoons instead of putting our thoughts into an essay. That was about far as he steered us into "fun" learning styles, preferring the old bread-and-butter methods of learning.
You don't need to be a frequent flier to the middle-East to understand why geopolitically, Israel and America's national security interests diverge. Simply look at a map.
Study fresh-water supply -- a pillar of life and growth, and other natural resources. America as a vast land, indeed is blessed. One can't under-emphasize, either, how the fracking industry and our nation's quick response to exploit our own natural resources here at home, will recalculate our investments in the Middle East oilfields.
Speaking of calculations:
If Iran gets access to nuclear materials, and enough of their scientists are not assassinated to allow them to independently develop weaponry, well, it won't be so much a bomb here in the States as it will certainly affect Israel's foreign policy positions.
Israel, with her foreign culture and her limited landmass, is forced to rely on the dominant power of force: without the military advantages, there has been little investment in any ideology that would permit a more pluralistic power-sharing between neighboring peoples. Too much fear, and an outsider mindset that too often lacks the trust to build.
Here in America,
we ought to be concentrating on securing our own borders. Defensively, for all the money allegedly spent in helping secure other people's homelands, they tell us we're simply unable to enforce the borders of our own.
Bull roar. The will simply is not yet there.
With our technology, our drones, our money ... if anyone thought that the newcomers crossing were indeed a national security threat, please don't tell me we'd still have gaping holes and world's wounded still streaming in.
Instead,
look at those brown boys, and think of them, perhaps as some in our government see them: as tomorrow's freedom fighters, fighting for U.S. As the past decade has shown, if America's plan is to continue attacking and overthrowing governments in all those countries who might harbor populations that could cause us threat, well we simply won't be able to keep good American soldiers in stock here at home without lowering standards.
Perhaps that will be one way -- in the hunger games of the future -- for undocumented citizens to earn their way in: fight for America's alleged interests abroad (when in reality, we ought to be asking: how much do our allies' ongoing needs differ from our own?)
Does anyone remember the good guys and the bad guys in the American Revolution, back the way they taught it in elementary school? The Brits, the Redcoats, were well funded, formal fighters. The minute men were not. But they took their shots, they knew their territory, and eventually: they drove the better trained professionals out of their country.
They fought for theirs, they won, and damned if we didn't keep our country for 200-plus years now. Let's see 1776, 1976, another quarter century brings up up to 2001, and we're still going, even with the unconstitutional mistakes made since then. We voted to rectify, and we're getting there.
Steven Erlanger of the NYT has an article up today that hints at the strategical differences between Israel and the United States, but he doesn't come right out and say it:
America is not inherently threatened by Iran developing a nuclear bomb. Indeed, I am in the camp that says perhaps, it might be a brighter day, if a true nuclear deterrent is developed between the two "superpowers" in that region: Israel and now, Iran.
(Did you guess wrong, and think that the United States is a superpower player there? Look at your map, students of the world, and think again.)
Ditto the Syrian slaughter. If America looked away as Africans killed thousands, understanding that we did not have a role, short of providing humanitarian support, then surely we will do the same again. In fact, there are those who say that minus America helping arm the Syrian "rebels", the Syrian leadership would have violently, but more effectively, put down the opposition threat long ago.
Bleed it Out.
Let's count our blessings and secure our defenses here at home, and stop with the arrogance that tells us we as Americans can create a risk-free future, half a world away, if we only force enough people to do our bidding. Many here still struggle with the legacy of our own bloody past, fighting to establish our own nation and define our people and delineate their civilian rights.
We will never be able to safety-proof the world, so we ought to start distinguishing between peoples and terrorists, and not confuse the two. The Iranian people are not our enemy. We need to develop a comprehensive foreign policy, that owes less to multi-national corporations interested in securing holdings abroad, and more to the realities of the countries in our hemisphere.
We need to be more educated about the daily lives and peoples living alongside us, some unrecognized legally, their needs effectively ignored and in more proximity to affect ours, not as terrorists but as neighbors with daily needs, here at home.
We need less Jewish pundits* telling us of the importance of Israel, the Jewish peoples history and the middle east, and more understanding of Latin countries below us. We're ignoring our own neighbors to the south, and with an increased emphasis on growing a comprehensive, more socially responsible government network of public welfare services, their troubles come to our doorsteps.
Steven Erlanger concludes:
The next obvious question is what the world would look like if Iran and the six powers fail to do a deal, with the United States and Israel vowing that a nuclear-armed Iran is unacceptable. Both countries may be bluffing about attacking Iran, but that is not a proposition anyone really wants to test.
I'm not afraid to find out what the world, the middle east, might look like with a nuclear-weapon equipped Iran. Even an admitted, nuclear-weapon equipped Israel. Don't think I'm alone either.
I suspect, here in the buffered heartland, a student of geopolitics and risk-assessment would weigh things more evenly. Perhaps, it would not be as bad -- nor as expensive, so much ultimately ineffective Big Bang for our bucks -- as the ongoing predicament America finds itself in currently, with regards to the seemingly never-ending conflict of making over the middle east in our own Western image.
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ADDED:
Perhaps the lack of diversity -- with little to no Asian-Americans or Hispanic-Americans, and a dwindling voice of European-Americans -- indeed affects the political discussions our established news media is trying to lead:
Take Roger Cohen (please! ;-)
In "
Let It Bleed", he writes this:
The objective of Zionism was to create not only a Jewish homeland but a state of laws; Israel can only be that when the lawless enterprise beyond the Green Line ends.
Left unsaid is how long and whose responsibility it falls to in order to make the world safe for Israel's ongoing survival. The settlers who believe G-d promised them more expansive boundaries should not be dictating America's security needs, confusing their needs with those of the more demographic American people, residing here at home -- legal citizens or not.
In "
The Diplomacy of Force", Cohen tells us:
OSLO — If there is one rule of international affairs that the Obama administration has forgotten or never learned, it is that mediated settlements reflect power balances. The principal way such balances are changed is through force.
This is not a popular thing to say in a peacenik moment, when the aversion to the use of military action in the United States is running high after the failure of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But as the disasters in Syria and Iraq (now an undifferentiated, jihadi-infested “Syraq theater”) illustrate, plenty of people can die when force is abjured and the place of military action in diplomacy is forgotten.
...
The past months have constituted a low point in American foreign policy: the rampage by the Sunni fanatics of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria through wide swathes of Iraq; President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and successful troublemaking in eastern Ukraine; Syria’s descent into ever further horror; China’s growing assertiveness in the South China Sea; the failure of U.S.-brokered Israeli-Palestinian talks.
...
In his recent West Point commencement speech, Obama said: “U.S. military action cannot be the only, or even primary, component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.” This is true. It also missed the point. Force can be, sometimes must be, an essential component of persuasive American diplomacy advancing the national interest.
The funny thing is, military men -- America's military men -- do not define the Syrian opposition or overthrowing the Syrian government as being essential to our nation's security interests. Consult your maps, students of the world.
Speaking of doubling down, in "
Take Mosul Back", he writes:
Iraq and Syria, well before America’s hapless intervention and hapless paralysis, were rotten to the core, as ripe for dismemberment as the Ottoman Empire a century ago, sickened by the personality cults of brutal rulers, cracking at the internal lines of fracture colonial overseers chose to disregard. They were in a state of postponed decomposition. Sunnis in Iraq and Alawites in Syria, minorities both, believed (and believe) they had some irreversible right to rule. They do not.
President Obama should use targeted military force to drive back the fanatics of ISIS. If the jihadis cement their hold, the blowback will be felt in Europe and the United States. Such action will not resolve Iraq’s problems, or the region’s. But the alternative is far worse. It would be a betrayal of the thousands of American lives lost since 2001 and of the millions in the Middle East who view the Middle Ages as over.
More blood, more treasure, surely the results will be different this time: "Targeted" military force. "Smart" bombs. The Redcoats were convinced they couldn't lose either.
Look, you don't have to be a globe-trotting citizen of the world to understand that America needs to protect her own Constitutional way of life first, before she can continue playing policeman to the world, which is a role plenty of us are willing to abdicate, seeing as though the police so often don't even understand the players, and cannot tell the political good from the political bad from the culturally ugly.
Roger that?
(I don't mean to suggest Mr. Cohen is alone in his world-analysis arrogance. David Ignatius has a piece in the WaPo: "Oust Maliki to save Iraq." Wow. The people suggesting no-confidence in our own president certainly have no qualms about advising how OPGs (other people's governments) should be dictated by select American interests.
Remember: this is NOT the American people speaking here, who understand their own safety needs and welfare concerns better, depending where on the map they reside. Still, even the coastal residents can be reassured that with those big oceans, the only thing we have to fear are likely small-ball terror attacks, which would be much better countered by effective intelligence, than force and overreach.
