Target Rich Environment

The coming year will surely bring much to chronicle, to dissect, and perhaps to lampoon. On the serious side, America remains locked in a war with jihadists worldwide with much of the fighting taking place (of course) in Afghanistan under the most restrictive rules of engagement US forces have ever been forced to fight under with the conflict drifting into Pakistan quite a bit and marked by an ever increasing number of missile strikes emanating from America's remote drone aircraft. Will 2011 see more conventional US involvement in the failing Pakistan state with open use of American boots on the ground beyond the twilight war in which the CIA and US special forces are already deeply involved? Will chaos in and terror issuing forth from Yemen or Somalia force American military incursions into either of these failed (in the case of Somalia) or failing states? Will North Korea become so cavalier in their aggression that they force the hand of South Korea and will China use the ensuing chaos to make their move on Taiwan? Will Iran instigate enough trouble in the Gaza Strip and or Lebanon to spark a regional war with Israel that could avalanche into World War III? Will Shia Iran achieve status as a state armed with a nuclear arsenal and blackmail the Sunni states of the Middle East into submission and even attempt to extort Europe? Will Barack Hussein Obama continue his twin policies of blame America first with his genuflecting to autocrats and apologizing for our defense of liberty in the world which Obama evidently considers colonialism and imperialism and blame Israel always which has been his dangerous and provocative course so far in office as he continues to reward extremism, intransigence, and ultimately the jihadist terror that America should be doing everything to fight? Will the US State Department (as rumors assert) really seek to facilitate the payment of a ransom to Somali pirates who have seized the crew of twenty-six Bangladeshi sailors from a US flagged vessel? If so, this would go hand in hand with President Obama's seeming mania for unilateral nuclear disarmament as was recently evidenced in the new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty which cedes America's advantage in strategic nukes with Russia clearly winning in the exchange by being granted veto of US missile defense while retaining a huge numerical edge in tactical (battlefield) nuclear weapons. Oh how my nation has changed from "billions for defense but not one cent tribute" as marked America's early determination to defeat the (Muslim) Barbary pirates to Obama's seeming ethos of "not one cent for defense, but billions in tribute". Will 2011 see this formerly mighty Republic, the storehouse of the world's liberty, continue to crumble as we relinquish our individual liberty (as in the TSA airport serial molestation) and are spent into oblivion by an insouciant egoist?