Let me ask you. Do you personally know anyone who lived on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain during the cold war? Were you living in NYC during 9/11?

For me the answer is yes to both. Communism was not a made up threat. Nor did it just impact a few rich people. The Soviets took control of hundreds of millions of people, and maintained control with tanks and guns. For instance ask any Czech who was around in 1968 how fun that was.

As for 9/11, someone flew those planes. (If you're one of the morons who thinks that missiles were used, then go talk to one of the millions of eyewitnesses who watched the second plane fly low and slow over Manhattan - half my workplace at the time was on a balcony and watched it.) Osama bin Laden took public credit. Al Qaeda was both real, and had appeared in lots of stuff before that. After 9/11 they had great branding.

This is not to say that the threats were considered realistically. The domino theory under which we fought in Vietnam was invalid. Supporting every anti-communist power we could just because they were anti-communist lead to our supporting everything from genocide in Cambodia to military coups in Chile.

Likewise this time around, Al Qaeda was not a force in Iraq. (Well, not until we invaded, and then people who wanted to freak us out began calling themselves Al Qaeda.) I do not believe that our response has been proportionate to the threat.

But do try to keep facts in mind. In the Cold War we did face communist countries. We do face terrorist organizations today. Those are not made up.

> None the less, we can't make policy decisions about how you feel.

You shouldn't make policy decisions based on how you feel. However, you should make policy decisions based on how people feel. The former is something that can cloud our judgment. The latter is rationally reacting to a natural phenomenon that exists in the population.

Designing security policy in a way that ignores the fact that people fear, and have their lives disrupted by, sudden random death in a way they do not fear natural, predictable death, is a luxury akin to that of designing an airplane in a world where gravity does not exist. Yeah, it would be easy to design airplanes in a world where gravity was not a thing, but that's not the world we live in. You can't ignore natural phenomena just because you don't agree with the reasons they exist.