Tom Toles Cartoon: White House Security

Alan: Americans are unusually dedicated to the proposition: "Failure is not an option." 

To avoid failure and guarantee "success," Uncle Sam depends on massive acts of violence like "carpet bombing" and "bombing them back to The Stone Age" as if sufficient destruction obligates victory. 

Until recently, armies fought on designated battlefields (away from civilian populations), and belligerence -- at least of imperial type and waged by super-power surrogates -- was routinely projected "over there, far away." 

Surely the designation of battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan would insulate "The Homeland" from direct devastation.

The seeming advantages of "violence over there, far away" formerly conspired with limited transportation and primitive communication so that blowback was geographically contained or sufficiently delayed to detach cause from effect, providing a prurient semblance of "violent solution." 

BOOM! A climax devoutly to be wished.

The fact that The Treaty of Versailles ended World War I while causing World War II is a case in point. (Will the establishment of modern Israel at the end of World War II bring about World War III?)

Most people fail to see the connection. Hitler was an inexplicable monstrosity, not the predictable embodiment of the German people's simmering rage at the onerous terms of The Treaty. 

Nowadays, blowback is so swift that "cause and effect" are linked by unbroken chains. 

Marshall McLuhan summarized this sea change with an observation both tragic and laughable: "To the spoils belongs the victor." 

A case in point is Netanyahu's recent war on Gaza, ostensibly "won" by Israel. 

Paradoxically, feisty resistance by Hamas prolonged the war beyond any expectation so that Gazans consider themselves "the victors." 

As night follows day, Palestinians will be back on the battlefield as soon as wounds are licked and they have recouped sufficient psychological energy to re-direct attention from "the ruins" to "the battlefield."

Short of extermination, the people who live in "killing fields" eventually prevail precisely because they live there. 

They are already "at home" and are not going away.

Invaders and occupiers always go away.