We're Not Safer

So says the former head of the bin Laden unit at the CIA Counterterrorist Center in Harpers Magazine.

This is what the U.S. needs to hear over and over:

"In the long run, we're not safer because we're still operating on the assumption that we're hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we're hated because of our actions in the Islamic world. There's our military presence in Islamic countries, the perception that we control the Muslim world’s oil production, our support for Israel and for countries that oppress Muslims such as China, Russia, and India, and our own support for Arab tyrannies. The deal we made with Qadaffi in Libya looks like hypocrisy: we'll make peace with a brutal dictator if it gets us oil. President Bush is right when he says all people aspire to freedom but he doesn't recognize that people have different definitions of democracy. Publicly promoting democracy while supporting tyranny may be the most damaging thing we do. From the standpoint of democracy, Saudi Arabia looks much worse than Iran. We use the term “Islamofascism”—but we're supporting it in Saudi Arabia, with Mubarak in Egypt, and even Jordan is a police state. We don't have a strategy because we don't have a clue about what motivates our enemies."

What that statement means is that there's no hope in force. That statement illuminates everything that is wrong with Bush's foreign policy. Force will only breed more hatred, more distrust, more violence.

Iraq is a not necessarily a lost cause for the U.S. Winning the war in Iraq is. The longer we embrace the unilateral use of force in Iraq, the more violence we are going to beget among people who were, not so long ago, potential allies in the War on Terrror. But, if we make the right moves from this point on, if we embrace diplomacy and international cooperation, if we develop a consistent and just stance toward human rights, if we acknowledge the wrongs we have committed and act to redress them, we might have a chance of making ourselves more secure.

That's not going to happen with our current national leaders, however. As long as they hold power in the U.S., Iraq will haunt America, terrorists will stalk America and we will never be secure.