Here's a bumper sticker that occurred to me a while back.
I don't unreservedly share the sentiment, but at times like this, you have to wonder if our foreign policy establishment and the various presidents of the past 50 years or so have done us more harm than good by trying to meddle in foreign affairs in order to supposedly improve Americans' quality of life (at least, I can't think of any other justification for doing so). Would 9/11 have happened without US meddling in the Mideast? Unlikely. Not that that justifies 9/11 -- but the job of our foreign policy "experts" is to protect America from harm and advance the interests of the people, and if our foreign policy sparks such attacks, you have to ask whether they are doing that job effectively. Or are we becoming a garrison state because too much of the world hates us?
One other problem with this bumper sticker: as far as I can find Washington never uttered those words -- they seem to be rather a summation of his Farewell Address, commonly attributed to him as a quote.
(When I was in graduate school in U.S. history I found that our collective memory is littered with many such little errors, even among professional historians. In fact, the original definition of "factoid" -- a word invented by Norman Mailer -- was just this: an incorrect fact that enters into common circulation and takes on a life of its own through repetition. Most people use it to mean "little fact," however.)
In any case, despite these problems, I think it still packs a pretty good punch in our current context, this time of entanglement, and at least would provoke thought.
