Can you believe this is in a Fareed Zakaria column here?
In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is, of course, a war without end.
So we continue to stand in absurd airport lines. We continue to turn down the visa applications of hundreds of thousands of tourists, businessmen, artists and performers who simply want to visit America and spend money here, and become ambassadors of good will for this country. We continue to treat even those visitors who arrive with visas as hostile aliens – checking, searching and deporting people at will. We continue to place new procedures and rules to monitor everything that comes in and out of the country, making doing business in America less attractive and more burdensome than in most Western countries.
We don’t look like people who have won a war. We look like scared, fearful, losers.
How many members do you think are in Al Qaeda?
I would guess there are no more than 10,000 members, if that.
So we’re a nation of 330 million people who, after a horrible terrorist attack, turned around and started two wars, spent trillions of dollars, built a surveillance state and trashed our own civil liberties?
Does that seem like a measured response?
Not to me.
