Sowell and Peters each have pieces addressing this mystery. They're worth the time.
In the Guard, we'd be tested on identifying friendly from enemy armored vehicles, using flash cards (I confess I always said "it depends" when the French AMX-30 came up). Maybe we need flash cards for the upper echelons of our government to tell friends from foes.
Or maybe not. If they are also in charge of making them, God knows what they'd come up with. It's all pretty relative to them.
UPDATE: Examples so soon! The great willingness to punish our best ally:
Sen. Chuck Schumer yesterday called for sanctions against Britain if there was a quid-pro-quo" involving the release of the Lockerbie bomber and Libya's approval of a multibillion-dollar oil deal.
And then there's this ad, which trivializes 9/11 as just a minor irritant compared to natural disasters (though the WWF did not authorize it, apparently).
Victor Hanson reflects on our periodic bouts of thinking we don't have enemies and so don't need to defend ourselves.
Although we might forget who our enemies and friends are, our enemies never forget we are their enemy. When these enemies of America compel us to remember this with attacks or atrocities so terrible even the densest of us can't ignore, we'll finally confront them.
The question then, of course, will be how many friends that we've forgotten will still stand with us at crunch time?
