Postulate: The purpose of government is to protect its citizens' human rights.
Postulate: The basic human rights are those of life, liberty, and property.
Since no one is more zealous in the preservation of his rights than the citizen himself, he should be the one who decides what the government must and can't do through some kind of regulated voting system.
In order to prevent possible abuses of human rights by a true democracy (e.g. we all get mad at Socrates and decide he must be executed), previously agreed-upon limits on the government's power must be set down in writing.
Theorem: The system that best protects these three basic human rights is a government elected by the citizens that is restricted by the rule of law.
Argument: While imperfect, the United States government is elected by its citizens and does operate under the rule of law. It is thereby empowered to protect its citizens and their rights, if it operates within its own laws in doing so.

Any quibbles? Argue with my logic if you want, and I'm sure I've committed at least one error that Aristotle would immediately call bogus on, but if we don't fundamentally agree on these things, we're just not operating on the same page.

So, the United States government's main duty is to protect its citizens against infringements on their rights from inside the country (criminals, outlaws, fraudsters, robbers, wannabe dictators, unscrupulous politicians and military officers) and from outside the country (invaders, terrorists, pirates, raiders).
On September 11, 2001, the rights to life, liberty, and property of many more than the 3000 citizens killed directly by extremist Muslim terrorists were infringed upon from outside the country. If we include the pursuit of happiness, basically a reformulation of the rights of liberty and property, as a right, then the terrorists infringed upon every American's rights. Every American's basic rights are threatened by terrorism.

Are we still together? I hope so.

In order to protect the rights of its citizens, the United States government has two responsibilities: to punish those responsible for the past infringement of rights, in order to demonstrate that violators of Americans' rights must pay serious consequences to discourage others from doing the same thing, and to impede those who may not have learned the lesson not to mess with Americans' rights from doing exactly that in the future.
In response to the grave violation of Americans' rights that happened on 9-11, those responsible must be punished. Many of them, Al Qaeda members and their protectors in the Taliban, already have been. But many of them haven't yet. Also, those who plan to violate Americans' rights must be stopped before the violation can happen.

Any problems here? I don't see any myself except for the standard pacifist argument that all violence should be renounced.

Postulate: You can't renounce violence completely. The only ways to stop infringers of rights are to threaten them with violence (you burglarize your neighbor's home, you're violating his rights, you will be arrested, tried, convicted, and sent to jail; if you try to escape before you are released, you will be shot) or to actually use violence against them (note that when the Japanese violated American rights at Pearl Harbor, we blew up their homeland in retaliation). Renouncing violence may be highly moral, but it is not precisely a good survival and defense mechanism.

OK, here it comes.

I submit that there is a loose alliance of terrorist organizations and rogue states, including Al Qaeda, Iraq, the PLO, Syria, the PFLP, Sudan, Hezbollah, Iran, the ETA, North Korea, Islamic Jihad, Libya, the FARC, Cuba, Abu Sayyaf, the Al Aqsa Martyrs, ad infinitum. The common enemies of these organizations are capitalist democracy and human rights, symbolized by the United States, their chief hate. Their motivation is wounded pride caused by their own weakness. I also submit that several so-called American allies, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, harbor many sympathizers with the cause of the terrorist organizations and rogue states. I do not consider this to be a conspiracy theory because there is a good deal of evidence that these people are actually conspiring--ETA guys training in PLO camps in Libya and the like. There are thousands of similar connections. A connection nearly all these groups and states have is with the former Soviet Union; they received subsidies, arms, training, infrastructure, and many other kinds of support from the Soviets. The lion is dead but the hyenas and jackals that trotted at its heels are still alive.

All of these states and organizations are involved either directly or indirectly in the 9-11 bombings. Either they actually did it themselves or they, at one time or another, trained, supplied, funded, hid out, collaborated with, or somehow helped the guys who did it. They must, therefore, be punished for what they did so that in the long term no one ever gets the idea in his head that he can violate Americans' rights in such a way again, and those whose goal is still to violate Americans' rights must be impeded from doing so in the short term. The best and by far most effective way to impede them is by using violence. That violence, of course, must be as limited as possible.

America is very careful about using violence inside its borders. The police and judicial system, whose job is to enforce the laws that protect us against internal violations of our rights, operate under a great many legal limitations that are also designed to prevent citizens' rights, in this case against overzealous, corrupt, or arbitrary treatment which would violate the rights of the accused. He's a citizen and he has rights, too, unless a judge should take them away from him after due process. (Note that judicial punishment #1, the death penalty, deprives the convict of his right to life, punishment #2, jail, deprives him of his liberty, and punishment #3, a fine, deprives him of his property.) False arrest or imprisonment or conviction or police shooting of a citizen are treated as major scandals within the US, and deservedly so.

The problem is that there is no world legal system. The United Nations does not protect citizens of states; it protects states. It is an organization of governments, not of peoples. Most of these governments are dictatorships and most of them are murderous, corrupt, or both. They are in violation of every single line in the UN Charter and of every single honest resolution the UN has passed. Yet the UN insists on protecting them, because the UN is a union of dictatorships. In fact, for most of the UN's career two dictatorships held veto power over every significant UN action, and even today one dictatorship and one corrupt half-dictatorship hold veto power. The UN is by no means democratic, and it is by no means a legitimate organization. It holds no honest elections and it obeys no rule of law. It does nothing useful to protect anybody's basic human rights, much less those of American citizens. I submit that the United States has no reason even to be a member of the UN, much less to actually pay any attention to any of its dictates.

NATO is a different story. NATO is a union of democracies, and it has always been made up mostly of democracies. The problem with NATO is that a minority can hold out and stymie the alliance because each country has veto power. However, there's nothing that says the United States has to operate within the confines of NATO if it feels that its citizens' rights are in danger. The fact that fifteen NATO countries support the US and three do not is telling, and the fact that the Gang of Eight and the Vilnius 10 also support the US is even more telling. The great majority of decent, democratic states in this world are on America's side because they value their citizens' human rights and they know just as well as the Americans that the loose terrorist-rogue state alliance is a threat to them, too.

As for the European Union, we're not a member, so who cares what they say?

Three notes. I am not saying that might makes right. I am saying that governments have the duty to protect their citizens and their rights, and if America's government does so and somebody else gets pissed off, that is that somebody else's problem. You can't get your rights if you don't have any might. There are many kinds of might, not only economic and military and political, but also moral. The Western democracies, including America, have might. Their responsibility is to use it well. Second, I understand that citizens of other countries should enjoy the same rights that America's government more or less successfully guarantees to its citizens. This is why I hate dictatorships and corruption, and why I am unwilling to respect any country's government that tolerates such things at home. The problem is tolerating such things abroad. The United States cannot solve everyone's problems, and it should avoid intervening in other people's business as much as possible. We should never fight against any other democracy under the rule of law. Those people are taking care of their own rights. We often must deal with dictatorships. As a practical manner, we can't just cut off all relations with, say, China, much as we'd like to. But we don't have to be any friendlier than necessary, and if some dictatorship is genuinely a threat to the people of the United States and the civilized world, we should have no qualms about wiping it out, just as we would have no qualms about wiping out an organized crime family back home. We will be safer and their people will be much better off. Third is the "who are we to judge?" argument. Well, as an internal matter, who are we to judge those of our citizens who try to kill or kidnap or steal? Who are we to put them in prison or fine them or execute them? We are the legally established government, elected by its citizens and bound by the Constitution. That's who we are to judge. I don't see the difference between an individual who kills or kidnaps or steals and a state or an organization that does so. They're all dangerous to our rights. They all must be stopped.