I am no a foreign policy expert.

I am definitely not an expert in military history or tactics.  I have little familiarity with the science, such as it is, of national and international security.

I am particularly not adept at issues involving the Middle East, a region of the world that I have never visited and that is populated by diverse cultures that I know little about and people who speak languages that I don't speak.  I can't even call their languages "beautiful" as is the tradition, because I am not cunning linguist enough to know.

Sorry for the separate post on this but when the Ferguson Police Department released the name of the police officer who shot Michael Brown to death they also released a long police report detailing Brown as a suspect in a petty theft incident -- very clearly implying that Brown was killed while resisting arrest for a legitimate, though minor, crime.

I'm finding the current foreign policy narrative, as pushed by those who identify as liberal hawks, very disturbing.  The Obama administration is certainly not rushing to use U.S. ground forces but this is where drone strikes and aerial bombardment inevitably leads.  Our military interventions start with the low risk choices and then, as things progress, we start to hear about the "limits of air power," and "the limits of technology."  Before you know it, you're back to fighting an old fashioned war, the one human activity with, apparently, no limits.

Best I can tell, "broken windows" policing does sort of work to reduce crime rates, though it probably also gets more credit than it should.  The theory behind it is that you can reduce crime by reducing "disorder."  There's a logic to this that can't be dismissed.  If millions of people living in New York City really internalize the idea that the city cannot be governed, then the city will be harder to govern.