Something I've been thinking about for awhile...

Today, July 4th, seems a particularly good day to ask this question that has been bothering me for more than a week now...

Since the breaking of the Snowden leak story, and the facts that have stemmed from the leak itself and the subsequent followup stories and comments, I've been forced to ask myself (and now you guys):

Is America safer today then we were in 2000?  Is the War on Terror accomplishing anything for the US as a whole?

Let me lay things out for you...

We have overthrown the Taliban in Afghanistan, and have pulled the bulk of our forces out of that country... yet the situation in Afghanistan is every bit as fluid and volatile as it was in 2000... perhaps even more so.  We have overthrown the despotic regime of Hussein in Iraq, and that nation is as chaotic as it has ever been, with a civilian death toll of more than 500 per month since the removal of US forces.  Terrorism in both nations right now is as high and as deadly as it has ever been.

Libya, Egypt, Turkey, and Syria have all erupted into bloody, deadly hotbeds of violent protest and unrest, costing thousands of lives (many of which were American).  America has intervened in each of these nation's crisis', in one way or another, with no measurable effect to lessening the violence.  In fact, the only real result of our intervention in these states seems to be greater and greater local resentment of US intervention.

We have watched as US policy in prosecuting the War on Terror has turned the public opinion of "ally" nations such as Turkey, Pakistan, Jordan and Saudi Arabia into seething cauldrons of hatred towards anything American.  This, coupled with the state-initiated institutional anti-American madrasas that are teaching hundreds of thousands of young men and women to hate ANYTHING America (especially in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan), has produced a degree of anti-US resentment in the streets of most of the Muslim world that is as great now as it has ever been in the past.

Perhaps most distressing of all, though...

Since the implementation of such "protective" measures as the Patriot Act, we have seen the "land of the free" become less and less "free" with each passing year.  Revelations today show that standard operating procedure for domestic surveillance in 2013 would have landed you an indictment and Congressional hearings in 1996.  The means by which both the Bush and Obama administrations have used military force to surveil and even kill Americans landed members of the Gestapo into the docks during the Nuremberg Trials facing death sentences.  Snowden proved that very nearly 1 out of every 3 Americans in this country has had phone conversations, emails, texts and search histories from their computers monitored and recorded and stored for future review.  110 million people in this country, monitored and recorded without cause, due process or public oversight... but with access to such information easily available to even the lowest members of the bureaucracy's hired help, without even the possibility of oversight or review outside of the monthly one hour "briefings" that the eight members of the Senate Intelligence Committee receive but CANNOT talk about... ever... even to voice concern or dissent.

I'm afraid that what I'm about to say now is going to insight some wrath, but...

If THIS is the means by which we are to make America safer (and I do mean "safer", because there is no 100% SAFE from terrorism/extremism/random violence), then I'm not sure the price is worth the prize.  If we can only "win" by allowing a level of "police control" that only a generation ago would have been called "fascist", then I fear we have already lost.

The men that planned to bring down the WTC didn't want to drop buildings... they wanted to sow division and distrust and FEAR (read: TERROR) in the hearts of Americans everywhere.  It is looking more and more like they are winning, and we are losing.