We don't want to believe that our greatest threat is internal [View all]

[cali]

I suppose that's just human nature, and it's much more complex, involves more complex analysis, presents less straightforward "solutions".

I'm not saying that ISIS isn't a threat, though I see its threat directly to the U.S. as not being a huge one. I'm not even convinced that the threat is that great to the middle east. I think, and yes of course I could be wrong, that ISIS' growth is self-limiting. But we have clear visuals of what ISIS is and does. We don't have those clear visuals about other threats, be they disease, corporate control, climate change, right wing ideology right here at home. We don't have images of helpless men on their knees awaiting a dreadful death, stuck in our minds, from those other threats.

ISIS arose out of our military and political interventions in the middle east and those interventions were about oil and the money to be made as much as anything else. Are we just going in frenzied circles when we use military force, and fueling radical groups when we keep doing the same thing again and again?

I see ISIS as a distraction as much or more than a threat, and our reaction to ISIS as a potent threat in and of itself. Want to bet that military sequestration cuts are reversed? that the military budget gets a big boost from this? How about the odds that our projected years long war with ISIS/other groups, results in budget cuts for social welfare spending and infrastructure and bolsters the privatization movement?

What is the threat to us from being on a perpetual war footing? What is the threat to our civil liberties from believing that we are constantly under the threat of evil hordes? What more are we willing to give up in order to be safe? And what about the billions and billions spent protecting the "homeland" over the past 13 years or so?

I don't know. I don't have any answers, just unsettling questions.