The demise of defense is an historic opportunity as well as an inevitability. Managed the right way, it could lead to better peace and security, for example, by breaking us of our habit of seeing everything as threats and throwing money at them.
What does this mean for us? Well, it's both good and bad. It's good because the extreme ideology of the group likely contributed to its downfall in Mali. It's bad because calls for pragmatism -- which would moderate its more severe violence -- may fall short.
Now more than ever, Americans must come together and send a message once and for all that torture is immoral, illegal and ineffective.
The controversy and shortcomings of Zero Dark Thirty has opened a critical conversation and debate. Hopefully it will lead to brave new Hollywood storytelling about these years when America went in search of monsters to destroy, and ended up slaying things once held dear.
More likely than not, a prolonged conflict and stalemate await southern Thailand.
America's moral leadership is gone; we have subverted our own liberties -- we have panicked in an unmanly manner. Taken together, these failures and transgressions are a heavy load on the collective national psyche. We are now a people whose timidity in acknowledging their failings is fear by another name.
So what does all this latest angry maneuvering around former Senator Chuck Hagel's confirmation as secretary of defense amount to? Not that much, actually.
Osama bin Laden may be living with the fishes -- but he still haunts the American mind and soul. His malevolence is marching on. That is not because we've been beaten or outsmarted. We simply have frightened ourselves literally out of our wits.
By the standards of slaughter in Vietnam, the deaths caused by drones are hardly a bleep on the consciousness of official Washington. But we have to wonder if each innocent killed doesn't give rise to second thoughts by those judges who prematurely handed our president the Nobel Prize for Peace.
The recent controversy over the film Zero Dark Thirty implicates free expression, artistic freedom and public policy issues that are of great concern.
Republicans are once again attempting to embarrass the president, this time by reporting that he fought President Bush on "enhanced interrogation" and now he's advocating "murder by drone."
How does the administration know that its targeted killings and use of armed drones have not merely exchanged one terrorist threat for another that will be bigger, longer-lasting, and more dangerous?
The regime in power rarely feels the effects of sanctions. Instead, it is the average citizen who bears the burden of sanctions. Ironically, the Iranian regime uses the sanctions as a scapegoat, blaming the United States Government for their country's economic woes.
Michaelangelo once said that "the greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark." Hillary Clinton has never done that. I have a feeling she's not planning on lowering her sights anytime soon.
Unquestionably, there have been a number of innocent people killed in drone attacks, either by proximity and/or mistake. But what is this in comparison to the land invasions and mass aerial bombings of the pre-drone era?
One subject, at least, got remarkably little attention during the inaugural blitz and, when mentioned, certainly struck few as odd or worth dwelling on. Yet nothing better caught our changing American world.