Six months after 9/11 on March 11, 2002 "Homeland Security Presidential Directive Three" created the color code threat system. Life in the United States has been Yellow ever since; Orange a good deal of the time around our air traffic system. We have altered our infrastructure to accept constant threat as normal. It isn't normal. In fact, it arguably means that our enemies are winning in their objectives to attack the American way of life and strategically alter the geopolitical structure of Earth in a direction that allows their conflict to go on. A decade ago, I believed our strategic objective wasn't to live in fear but to invest our national resources to hunt down and negate the source of that fear. We've deployed troops and paid with blood yet after almost a decade the color of the cloud that hangs over us hasn't budged an iota.
When was the last time a President reported on the Nation's progress towards regaining the Blue-Green before 9/11? When was the last time officials reported to the People how the troops deployed, the enemies eliminated, the diplomatic agreements reached, and the political alliances made moved us away from the 21st Century equivalent of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) back to a stable world where our planet and it's people could again be aimed at a global economy built on a community of nations valuing free trade, human rights and environmental stewardship? We lost the peace dividend and I don't really see that anyone is paying attention to getting it back. Instead we focus on holding ground like an aimless bureaucracy hopeless trapped in maintaining a bizarre status quo.
There's no long term national interest strategy in this. We need to rediscover that there is a terrible cost to coloring the planet in a Yellow-Orange hue. Like MAD, the longer it perpetuates, the riskier it becomes. So I ask President Obama to please explain just where is the United States in our quest to win this "Warm War" of will versus our enemies? Not the tit and tat of marginal maneuverings that serve only to lengthen our predicament. What's the plan to make us Green again?
Click here to read the actual text of directive HSPD3.