Quote Originally Posted by hardblues View Post
I'll respond Spendur...I think we have gotten soft and I'm not referring to taking some aggressive action somewhere, I'm referring to America almost intentionally choosing a path of denial. America hates conflict as I think we are so conscious of our military strength, (waining now), former wealth. etc., that we have leant an ear to the rest of the world and mistakenly developed a Big-Guy complex...what I mean by this is we unnecessarily take blow after blow on the face because we fear that if we strike back, figuratively speaking, we will be perceived as the world bully. At this point, the bad guys of the world have our number and currently are playing us like a fiddle. They are chipping away at us and one day, we're going to wake up and realize that we are very, very vulnerable.
That is only part of the situation. You are right about the big guy complex, but what also plays a major role is the fact that the US has a history of throwing its weight around in other countries for the sole purpose of short term benefit. The actions in Iran and Iraq a couple of decades ago were bound to raise a generation of people for whom the US really IS the great Satan.

Every country on earth has some enemies who'd like to take a swing at it. What the US has done over the last decades is creating a large group of people with a lingering resentment towards the US from which people can be recruited to attack.

And you are right, sooner or later, someone will succeed.
But even if a bomb were to set off in a major US city every day, the chances of dying because of one would still be thousands of times smaller than the odds that you get into a lethal car accident.