Angelo Codevilla writes at the Liberty Law blog that the international contempt of America by people such as Russia's Putin and Iran's mullahs has its roots in US domestic policy.
The U.S. government did not have to spend billions to record metadata on every American’s phone calls and to access the rest of our electronic communications. It chose to do this because it had decided to deal with the threat of terrorism primarily by policing Americans rather than by forcing the Muslim world’s despots (that world is run exclusively by despots) to suppress anti-American incitement and activities rather than fostering them.Perhaps, however, the very ludicrousness of being lectured on civil liberties by Russia, one of history’s paragons of despotism, and on tolerance by the Islamic Republic of Iran for which oppression of any and all diversity is the very definition of justice, may cause our ruling class to reflect on its errors and on the truths of national existence.
1. However convenient it may be not to constrain the Muslim regimes that foster terrorism as well as to focus on their domestic sympathizers, treating all Americans as if any is as likely as not to be an enemy ends up making the government into the enemy of all Americans.
2. However politically convenient it may be to raise the consciousness of any group of Americans against any other group, the resulting national division will make all groups, together, playthings of foreign enemies.
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