The best way to protect Americans would be for our country to get out of expensive, overseas wars and invest that money in healthcare and ending the drug war, things that actually kill Americans in large numbers.
It's basically US stirring trouble all over the world and then saying "look how great we are for defending peace across the globe!".
While we see the US as an ally here - we haven't traditionally been at war with Arab countries and I think a big part of it was the influx of military equipment from the US to Israel and from the USSR (and later Russia) to the surrounding countries. (This is an oversimplification but for brevity - I opted for just the gist of things)
Intervention in Iran and conquering it and installing a puppet government (the Shah) also did more harm than good in retrospect.
I believe that if the US exported more education and equalizers (like more accessible MOOCs, better infrastructure companies to get work there, more remote position etc). It would both be more competitive economically and would contribute more to middle-east stability.
Literally since the founding of the state of Israel the country has been at war with the Arab nations. Could you expand on what you mean by this?
[citations needed]. I've not been aware of any war on US soil.
9/11 was not an act of war. It was the work of a few deranged cultists who got lucky, nothing more and nothing less. Our response was equivalent to reacting to the Branch Davidians by bombing the Vatican.
The attack was planned by a group that wasn't the internationally recognized leadership of any country, and they hid in a war-torn country whose government was being violently contested. And the Taliban were also not recognized, at least not officially, as the leadership of Afghanistan.
So to call it an act of war is indeed a stretch.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare
Sure, there will always be people who think this not "real" war. But that's an irrelevant classification detail to the belligerents or the people caught up in the collateral damage.
Fast-forward 20 years to 9/11. Osama Bin Laden is funded by his family, and by other rich Saudis, which means the government of Saudi Arabia because all Saudi wealth is owned by the House of Saud.
But they're our allies, so instead, we attacked Iraq and Afghanistan, even though none of the 9/11 attackers were from either country. To get approval, we lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction, which we never found, because they didn't exist.
I'm not really following your war narrative, but I am finding a lot of cronyism and false flags.
My point was limited in scope to the 9/11 attack itself. I think terrorism on that scale can be classified as assymetric warfare.
Warfare predates nation states. Today, most of the world is parceled into nation states. But violent non-state actors never ceased to exist. And therefore we shouldn't limit our definition of warfare only to war between nation states.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Clarke#9/11_Commiss...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/opinion/bob-graham-releas...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Matters-Arabia-Failure-A...
FTFY
Pearl Harbor is very much on US soil.
Would love to work on actually protecting American lives but at this point Pentagon in an unaccountable monster that has actually funded terrorist organisations and has made America (and rest of the world) unsafe. Not to mention I find it morally reprehensible that our young kids are dying in distant third world countries like Iraq, Afganistan and Syria and involved in killing thousands little kids and innocent civilians in the name of "protecting American lives".