cost a great deal, and much should be gleaned from this experience, but we should be careful not to leash the wrong lesson and rule out helping weak states. shoring them up may not be cheap, but it is less expensive than the al ternives of occupying them or ignoring them. an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. richard, how do we draw back? we are so spread out across the globe, and it s not being an isolation ist to say we can t be the world s 911 anymore. exactly. it has to be a choice of doing what we did in iraq and afghanistan, going in whole hog and being ani isolationist. life takes place in between. what we can t do is force ourselves to do everything or nothing. the kinds of things we re doing in places like yemen now may be more of a model. we do a little bit. we do a little bit of training.