I remember the cold war fondly. As a kid, I never thought that we were all going to be blown up. I never thought that Russians were evil or that we were even at war with “The Soviet Union.” I thought we despised a very small cabal of Soviet leadership and while we couldn’t ameliorate the situations, we weren’t going to play a part abetting their injustice. In the 1950s we drew lines and said, “Try your system on that side of the line and we’ll try ours on this side and see who makes out better.” By 1971 when I first started to be aware of the system, it was a cooled off cold war that felt for all the world like peace and prosperity to me.
Similarly, I don’t think we have a grudge against Tunisia. I think that a small cabal of dunderheads in the Arab world find that it is politically expedient for them to set us up as the boogie man, and I don’t see the point in playing along with that.
The President says that we can’t afford to withdraw from the Arab world. I wonder if that is true though. Have we really thought about it? Have we game planned out a new cold war against Islamic extremists? If we haven’t we should.