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Obama: "How Do We Keep America Safe and Lead the World Without Becoming Its Policeman"
(White House) President Obama said Tuesday in his annual State of the Union address: "How do we keep America safe and lead the world without becoming its policeman?...The United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth. Period. It's not even close. We spend more on our military than the next eight nations combined." "As someone who begins every day with an intelligence briefing, I know this is a dangerous time....In today's world, we're threatened less by evil empires and more by failing states. The Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia." "Priority number one is protecting the American people and going after terrorist networks. Both al-Qaeda and now ISIL pose a direct threat to our people, because in today's world, even a handful of terrorists who place no value on human life, including their own, can do a lot of damage. They use the Internet to poison the minds of individuals inside our country; they undermine our allies....Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped." "But they do not threaten our national existence. That's the story ISIL wants to tell; that's the kind of propaganda they use to recruit. We don't need to build them up to show that we're serious, nor do we need to push away vital allies in this fight by echoing the lie that ISIL is representative of one of the world's largest religions. We just need to call them what they are - killers and fanatics who have to be rooted out, hunted down, and destroyed."