One small observation (my apologies if it’s already been made, I’ve been mightily distracted this week): It’s worth remembering that we owe the existence of our Constitution in part to the existence of Muslim pirates. If you’ve read Michael Oren’s wonderful book, Power, Faith and Fantasy: American in the Middle East 1776 to the Present, you’ll remember that the Articles of Confederation were thrown out in part because they couldn’t provide for a Navy capable of defeating the Barbary pirates and others. We needed a strong central government for that. I’ve always liked to bring this up in discussions about the conflict — sometimes real, sometimes imaginary — between a strong national defense and civil liberties. You know the argument, the bigger the “national-security state” gets, the more curtailed our constitutional liberties become. Etc. etc. Whatever the merits of that argument — and I think there are fewer than most people realize — the great irony is that the cart is put before the horse. And I don’t just mean that the military defends the American way of life and all that. Rather, if we hadn’t needed a bigger military in the first place, we might not have those constitutional liberties that bigger militaries are supposed to be at odds with.