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November 19, 2009

Your Sobering National Security Thought for the Day
Posted by Michael Cohen

Sometimes it's worth putting American foreign policy - and the military decisions we have made and continue to make since 9/11 - in a proper and sobering context.

Eight years and two months since America was attacked on September 11th, and 3,000 Americans were killed, the United States has approximately 168,000 soldiers stationed in two Muslim counties, In neither of these countries is there any al Qaeda presence - and there has not been any such presence since 2002. Indeed, since the fall of 2001, al Qaeda has not launched a single major attack on US targets or the US mainland.

Yet, instead of having a national debate on how we got ourselves into such a bizarre and pointless predicament -- and squandered so many lives and so many billions of dollars in the process -- the current debate in Washington is focused on how many more troops we will send into harm's way to pursue an enemy that is down to about 200 core operatives.

Do you ever get the queasy feeling sometimes that somewhere in a cave in Pakistan, Osama bin Laden is having a bit of a chuckle about this?

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Yes, but this is just one of the many reasons why UBL will lose in the end. He simply does not understand the farce that is DC policymaking. He almost certainly is a true believer when it comes to thinking that the attacks his network launches has a positive impact in terms of winning converts, influencing US policy decisions, etc. The reality of course is that DC does whatever DC wants to do, or at least is capable of doing, and more than anything else needs to demonstrate it can do what it wants to do. Just remember it is not just UBL who is chuckling. I suspect the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, and so and so forth are beside themselves with laughter as well, and shall be enjoying another merry christmas.

By far the most insightful speech we’ve heard of late from an Obama administration official came recently when CIA Director Leon Panetta addressed the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. Panetta warned that if the federal government continued to run $1 trillion annual deficits – a very real possibilitygiven the blitheness of President Barack Obama and Congress about red ink –the national debt would become a threat to national security. The CIA boss makes a crucial point: An America that has to spend a quarter of its revenue just for interest on the debt is likely to be an America so weakened that it cannot protect itself from its enemies

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