It appears that those terrorists out there who seek revenge for past military actions against them may have taken a page out of the Homeland Security playbook. Matching the firepower of the U.S. military would be impossible so they may have discovered that, in order to retaliate, all they need do is to make the leaders of America think that attacks are imminent.
That kind of psychological tactic or technique is certainly nothing new and it has been used in a wide array of situations in impending military conflicts for some time. Israel, for example, uses this kind of psychological tactic to make Iran think that an attack on their nuclear facilities is ready to happen at any given time. It's used in business in certain cut-throat competitions between corporations. It's used in professional sports to try to intimidate opponents or make them bite on a trick play.
Whether the "chatter" that is being picked up by intelligence agencies constitutes a real threat against these embassies or whether it's some kind of a bluff by Al-Qaeda we don't know, not yet. Many in the news media believe that it is just one more fabricated situation by the government, kind of a wag-the-dog scenario, that is designed to quiet down the furor that is swirling around the NSA spying program and, in fact, may be a blatant attempt to try to prove that this program's method of gathering data about terrorist threats is working to perfection.
Regardless of what may actually be going on in this scenario, it didn't take long for the White House to initiate a swift response; there was no hesitation and, just like a bunch of bulls ravaging a china shop, they launched deadly drone strikes against Yemen. Here they go again; once again using that massive club on that hornet's nest and stirring up more and more hornets instead of using rational, intelligent thinking to try to mitigate this inflammatory situation.
If we had a time machine at our disposal to allow us to turn back the clock to the period following World War II, and we had the gift of extra sensory perception to see into the future, the task at hand would be to convince the government leaders of that time to make absolutely certain that they stayed completely out of the internal affairs of all nations; that it would be foolhardy and extremely dangerous to engage in misguided wars, invasions and occupations.
Well, we have no time machine but I'd venture to say that the majority of Americans now wish that our leaders back then had somehow possessed the foresight and vision to understand that unrestrained military hubris would accomplish nothing but disastrous results. Or at least that the leaders of today would somehow learn the lessons of history and stop this madness.
If we had had such visionary leaders there never would have been a War on Terror, quite probably 9/11 would never have happened and right now we probably wouldn't even be talking about terrorist threats and closing embassies. But leaders of that rare kind were not to be found and so military force was used in dealing with serious differences with other nations as a pathetic substitute for cooperation, negotiations and diplomacy.
The way things are rapidly going downhill in American foreign policy and relations with other nations, this government may need to rename these embassies and call them armed fortresses. We can bet that going into the future many of them will be closed permanently because, in many now very unfriendly nations, protecting our diplomats will become impossible.
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