The Petraeus projection: The CIA director’s record since the surge
Hero worship hides the military failures of the CIA director’s “global killing machine”
http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/03/petraeus_projection/singleton/
This is a very interesting article that lays out pretty well what I personally feel is well established fact that we are destroying our society in a vain effort to achieve the impossible: prevention of the next terror attack. So many innocent people have been killed in our effort to root out terrorism that we have probably increased the likelihood of another (first (or rather second (actually third or even later, history being so poorly understood here in America)) in a series) of terror attacks by several orders of magnitude. Our military has a long history of failure to learn from its own mistakes (it appears that it is US culture to completely ignore anything that happened outside of your own personal life experience, no matter how detailed the evidence contrary to your held opinions is) which supports our political 30 second attention span and leads our unbelievably credulous populace (repeat anything with bombast and dramatic force enough times and it becomes true, no matter how idiotic and nonsensical it is) to champion a losing strategy of more war in more places to generate even more passionate sworn enemies so we can continue to drain our resources in even more pointless efforts. Old Osama will be living a cheery afterlife looking down as the US bankrupts itself in a vain attempt to stamp out all the angry ants it makes even angrier by continued stamping (why not just move away from the ant nest? I guess that it would make us look like ineffectual quitters). Wasn’t that Reagan’s strategy against the USSR? Bankrupt them by forcing them to try to keep up with our military output? Well, we have finally found a foe who can beat that strategy (they don’t have to come close to matching our spending to have equal effect), except we won’t realize that until way past the bitter end when we have exhausted every bit of our economy trying to stop the tide. When erosion of civil liberties takes precedent over maintaining our roads, bridges and infrastructure it is easy to predict the path to destruction, all is left is to predict the irreversible point where no effort to mitigate the effects will have any beneficial effect (I try to make myself believe that point is still in the future, but often have trouble doing so).
