America the Frightened

Here's a link to a piece I did recently for antiwar.com. It's an expansion on something I touched on recently in this blog, the phenomenon that so many Americans, who live in the most successful country in the world, with the most advanced and powerful (although not, as we're discovering, all-powerful) military the world has ever seen, can find ways to be frightened of third-rate countries with pipsqueak dictators. All too many of us let ourselves become convinced that Iraq under Saddam was an outright existential threat to the United States. Now the administration is working overtime to convince us that if we don't do something right away Iran might blow us away. No wonder we make such a lousy imperial power. We have little ability to put threats in context and perspective.