If the bombs don't fall on ISIS, before long Americans will be speaking Arabic and their children will be studying the Koran in America's government schools.

It's all just one great big racket — a racket based on "national security," a term that isn't even found in the Constitution and that doesn't even have an objective meaning. The only way that the U.S. national-security state apparatus — i.e., the vast military establishment and military empire, the CIA, and the NSA — can justify its continued existence is by ginning up crisis after crisis with the aim of keeping the citizenry filled with fear, anxiety, and depression. The apparatus then becomes people's sedative, assuring them that everything is going to be okay because the apparatus is the only thing keeping them safe.

Never mind that the national-security apparatus produces the very threats it then uses to scare people with. After all, did anyone hear of ISIS before the U.S. invaded and occupied Iraq, a country that had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so?