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How Does Iraq Play Into the Economic Crisis?
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Contributor | mtrz |
Last Edited | mtrz Oct 06, 2008 11:36am |
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Category | Analysis |
News Date | Thursday, October 2, 2008 05:35:00 PM UTC0:0 |
Description | Since September 11, the American imagination has been captured by the terrifying image of an American city struck by a terrorist WMD attack. It's a gripping scenario, but though the risk of such an event is certainly a reason to do our best to halt and reverse nuclear proliferation, it's always been a pretty outlandish concern. Nuclear weapons, it turns out, are really hard to build, even for states and for all the understandable anxiety nobody's ever created an effective biological weapon. A smallish band of terrorists operating on a shoestring budget doesn't have any plausible means of creating a mass casualty device. And though stolen Russian missiles became something of a 1990s movie cliché, in the real world, the Russians guard this stuff pretty carefully.
A more plausible, if less dramatic, means by which terrorists might bring the United States low was outlined by none other than Osama bin Laden himself in his November 2004 pre-election message. In that tape, bin Laden described a strategy of "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy" by provoking us into undertaking costly military adventures. Mocking a certain panicky quality in American policymaking, bin Laden bragged that "all that we have to do is to send two Mujadedin to the farthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits to their private companies."
Today, as a swirling financial panic pushes national security issues out of the headlines it's worth returning to bin Laden's warning. |
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