How skewed are this Administration‘s priorities? Consider the insanity of throwing away billions of dollars on hightech military boondoggles like Star Wars that don’t work. Or doling out billions in tax giveaways to the richest Americans. If we want true security, shouldn’t we be investing in our country’s infrastructure–from upgrading our power grid to improving transportation, healthcare and education?
President Bush called the largest blackout in US history a “wakeup call”? (And that after his Administration lobbied against legislation that would have modernized the country’s power grid.) Well, maybe Bush and his team need another wakeup call–relating to Iraq. This time last summer, many opponents of the rush to war argued that an invasion and occupation would serve as a recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda, fuel existing anti-Americanism in the region and make the US less secure.
One year later, these concerns seem tragically on target. Just this past weekend, a London-based research company, issued a report saying that the war against Iraq has made America more of a target for terrorist attack. According to the World Markets Reseach Center, the US is now the fourth most likely–of 186 countries surveyed–to be the target of a major terrorist act within the next twelve months. (Colombia, Israel and Pakistan top the list as the only countries with a greater terror risk than the US.)
“Networks of militant Islamist groups,” the report observes, “are less extensive in the US than they are Western Europe, but US led military action in Afghanistan and Iraq has exacerbated anti-US sentiment.”
And, as the US occupiers endure almost daily casualties–and with shortages of fuel, water and, yes, electricity, precipitating riots and fueling anger among the Iraqi people–it is worth paying attention to the underreported warnings of Ghassan Salameh, a senior UN official and adviser to the late Sergio Vieira de Mello, Kofi Annan’s special representative to Iraq, who was killed today in the tragic attack at UN headquarters in Baghdad.
In a recent interview with the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur, Salameh, a longtime observer of the Arab world, warns that prominent Iraqis who “despised” Saddam Hussein will take up arms against US forces if life under occupation does not quickly improve. “Many influential Iraqis who initally felt liberated from a despised regime have assured me,” Salameh reports,” that they will take up arms if the coalition troops do not arrive at a result. Time is short.”
Salameh warned that ordinary people, frustrated by the lack of basic services four months after Saddam’s fall, could rally behind ideological opponents of the occupying forces. “In reality, the population is very surprised,” he told the French weekly. “They don’t understand how such a level of efficiency during the war could be followed by such a lack of efficiency in ‘peace.'”
