HILLARY CLINTON REPEATS DRIVEL ABOUT POVERTY CAUSING TERROR
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=517421
Poverty Canard
Terrorism: Hillary Clinton, in extolling the role of development aid, repeats the old saw about poverty breeding terrorism. Nonsense. The new attacks haven’t been about living standards.We suspect Clinton was just trying to pump up the U.S. Agency for International Development mission and make the bureaucrats — like newly sworn-in USAID administrator Rajiv Shah — feel better about themselves yesterday when she said:
“We cannot stop terrorism or defeat the ideologies of violent extremism when hundreds of millions of young people see a future with no jobs, no hope, and no way ever to catch up to the developed world.”
But that doesn’t make her remarks any more accurate. It’s not the poor who are at war with us, but a group of deranged Muslim men from privileged backgrounds.
The poverty argument is laughable when one considers that al-Qaida founder Osama bin Laden is the scion of a wealthy Saudi family who went to private schools and studied business administration.
His Egyptian sidekick, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is a medical doctor. Pakistan’s 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a U.S.-educated mechanical engineer. 9/11’s hijack ringleader Mohammed Atta was an Egyptian architect and a German-educated engineer. The Fort Hood shooter is a psychiatrist. The Nigerian underwear bomber went to elite London schools. None ever wanted for anything.
Clinton ignores these facts to express a common canard that claims aid cures poverty and throwing money at problems solves it. In so doing, she muddles the objectives of the war on terror and takes our eyes off the real enemy. Aid may be helpful to poor countries in some cases, but it won’t resolve the war on terror.
Using the State Department’s own data, scholars including D.D. Laitin and J.A. Piazza have challenged the view in 2003 and 2004 studies that poverty breeds terror.
Harvard’s Alberto Abadie, in his 2004 “Poverty, Political Freedom, and the Roots of Terrorism,” took their work a step further: It wasn’t poverty but an absence of political freedoms showing the highest correlation to terror.
Most poor people are interested in making themselves less poor, so it stands to reason that tyrannies and other failed states happen to breed terrorists.
The real task of the State Department in the war on terror is fostering democracy, not delivering aid.
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