America sings.

Perhaps she only goes where others say she should.

Nobody likes Patrick Buchanan.
But he wrote a book a couple of years ago about terrorism on our home soil that was denied by the media and the public. Not only were there NO debates about this touchy subject during the election, but it's not even fashionable to discuss it now.

I'm not Buchanan fan myself, but he made points we should have listened to THEN.
What also is not addressed these days is the poor return our "defense industry" has given us. They take BILLIONS from us each and every year, yet HOW could such an event happen to us right under our noses? Is it a failure of our "intelligence networks".
And where do we go from here?
Nobody wants to look at the big picture.
This is NOT pretty, so dig in:

From: Buchanan, Patrick J.,
A Republic, Not an Empire; Reclaiming America's Destiny
(Washington D.C.: Regnery Pulbishing, Inc., 1999) Pp. 44-46

(excerpt begins here)

The Terrorist War. It is in February of 2005 that the explosion
occurs in the port of Seattle. It is a low-yield atomic device,
but the devestation is incredible. Thousands are dead; thousands
more are injured and wounded, many burned horribly. The
device was smuggled in the cargo hold of a ship and detonated
only hours after the ship had docked. No one knows for certain
who put the device there. Iran condemns the act as an inhuman
atrocity and an affront to Islam, but notes that America was the
first to use such weapons. North Korea is also suspect. But intense
speculation focuses on a group associated with the financier of terror
Osama Bin Laden, whom U.S. special forces ran down and killed years earlier.
Bin Laden's agents reportedly acquired nuclear weapons from rogue army
elements in Russia or Kazakhstan in the 1990's, or got one from a Pakistan
now controlled by allies of the Afgan Taliban. But one thing is certain:
The missile defense system America is completing has proven to be a Maginot
Line. The enemy has gone around it.

The U.S. military now concedes there is no way to stop Scud or cruise
missile from being launched from a merchant ship a few miles off the United
States coast. It will be a Herculean task to inspect thousands of such
ships passing the American coast or entering U.S. ports each year.

At this point, a call comes to the U.S. Embassy in Bahrain warning that
another device will be detonated within two months in another U.S. port, or
in the locks of the Panama Canal, if America does not declare that it is
getting out of the Middle East and the Gulf. The CIA confirms that the
caller demonstrated knowledge of how the Seattle bomb was delivered,
knowledge that U.S. investigators have not yet given out to newspapers.

Meanwhile, ther is panic in every American port. From Boston to
Baltimore to New Orleans to San Diego to San Francisco, millions of people
are refusing to go to work near port areas and are selling apartments in
order to move inland. Manhattan and Brooklyn are in panic. Calls for
retaliation are heard across the political spectrum, but no one knows
against whom to retaliate. Pakistan, Iran, and Nother Korea are all nuclear
powers, but no one can say for sure if their leaders had a hand in nuclear
terrorism.

Good-Bye to All That

In the scenarios above, none wholly implausible, the United States could
find itself in a major war with few allies. Yet in none of the wars would
any vital U.S. interest be at stake to justify sending a large American
army or to risk nuclear war. In each of the wars described above, [Note;
Buchanan also scenarios a China-Taiwan War, a Second-Gulf War, a Baltic War,
a Second Korean War, and a Second Balkan War earlier in his book --DE]
America is drawn in because of committements dating to a Cold War that has
been over for a decade, a Gulf War that ended in 1991, or a commitment to a
Balkan peninsual that should never have been made. Should simultaneous wars
break out in the Gulf of Korea, and should the Middle East or the Balkans
flare up, America will come face to face with that Lippmann called foreign
policy bankruptcy.

In his 1966 book The Next War, former Defense Secretary Casper
Weinberger lays out other scenarios for major American wars. These include
a U.S. invesion of Mexico to overthrow a regime whose anti-American and
Marxist policies bankrupted that country sending millions of refugees
pouring across the U.S. border; and Iranian terrorist strikes on Bahrain
and Saudi Arabia, bringing down those pre-Western regimes.

If two or more of these scenarios played out, U.S. forces would be unable to
fight these wars simultaneously, and American would confront disaster after
disaster as its people refused to send their young to fight and die for an
imperial policy they had never voted for and never understood.

Before any of these scenarios is played out, the United States desperately
needs a "bottom up" review of all its commitments to determine which remains
vital to our security and which we must let go in order to stay out of
future wars that are not our wars. For the United States has unthinkingly
embarked on a neo-imperial policy that must involve us in virtually every
great war of the coming century -- and great wars are the death of
republics. Finally, if we continue on this course of reflexive
interventions, enemies will one day answer our power with the last weapon of
the weak -- terror, and eventually cataclysmic terrorism on U.S. soil with
weapons of mass destruction. Then liberty, the cause of the Republic, will
itself be in peril.

Yet any who raises a voice to demand that the United States reassess these
insanely extravagant war guarantees, or at least stop adding to them, is
shouted down as an "isolationist!" It is time to expose this malevolent
myth of "isolationism," so our foreign policy debate can proceed on the
grounds of what is best for America.

(end of excerpt)