Experts See More Dangerous World for U.S.

By Jon Fox
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said yesterday that the U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attacks over the last five years has not made the world safer from terrorism (see GSN, Jan. 25).

Representative Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) called for U.S. leaders to focus on  threats not just in the Middle East but in areas such as Africa and Latin America.

“I’m struck by the fact that so much of our attention has been taken up by the Middle East,” he said.  “We need to look at emerging threats.” 

Reyes, along with Representative Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), spoke at the Center for American Progress as the think tank released its second “Terrorism Index.”

The bipartisan poll found that 81 percent of the more than 100 foreign policy experts surveyed believe the world is becoming more dangerous for the United States and the American people.

“Five and a half years after 9/11, I’m certainly chagrined that we haven’t made it a safer world,” Reyes said.  “I certainly believe that it is a much more dangerous world.

“We need to collect ourselves and come up with a worldwide, comprehensive strategy” to address threats to the United States, he said.  “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

Reyes offered no ideas about what such a strategy might entail but maintained it was imperative. “We have to, as Michael Jordan used to say, ‘Just do it,’” he said.

Shays called for a national debate on security policies while venturing that U.S. citizens are safer now than they were before Sept. 11, 2001.

“The Cold War is over, and the world is a more dangerous place, but I believe we’re safer,” he said, noting that there was a false sense of security on U.S. soil before the terrorist attacks of 2001.

“What we have not still have not had is a debate about what our strategy is today,” said Shays, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee.

His own vision of what that strategy is a pre-emptive, likely unilateral approach of “detect, prevent,” he said.  “We aren’t going to wait for a small group of scientists working in a country that tolerates it to create an altered biological agent that is going to wipe out humanity as we know it.”

If the United States is confronted with a “world asleep,” whatever administration is at the helm might have little choice but to act alone, Shays said.  “What are you going to do, just join them?” he asked.

Still, he said the Bush administration had been “dead wrong” about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the concerns that led up to the 2003 invasion.  “The president lost a tremendous amount of credibility and so did I,” he said (see GSN, Jan. 29).

While criticizing the management of the war, Shays has been and remains a stalwart support of U.S. involvement in Iraq.

The Center for American Progress survey indicated that 64 percent of the experts believed the United States would suffer another attack on the scale of Sept. 11 within five years.  More than 80 percent believed it was likely or certain to occur within a decade.

Forty-one percent of respondents said they believe that the war in Iraq would be the motivation for the next attack on the United States.  During the last survey six months ago, 28 percent cited the war as the likely motivating factor.

Sixty percent of the experts said the United States was doing the “worst possible job” managing the war in Iraq.

Seventy-three percent of experts identified North Korea as the primary national security concern and said it should be the paramount priority in the coming five years.  Seventy-three percent also thought the totalitarian state was the most likely nation to transfer nuclear materials or technology in the next three to five years (see related GSN story today).

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