Like many of you, this week for me has been a hectic week of post-holiday busyness and as I know that many of you are still digging out (both literally and figuratively) I thought I’d call your attention to two important speeches that deserve your attention when things settle down. The first speech (full text), by President Obama, is the more immediate and specific of the two, dealing as it does with changes to U.S. transportation security and intelligence gathering and analysis in the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing attempt. The second speech (full text), by Secretary of State Clinton, has a broader focus and will likely have long-term implications, as it deals with how the U.S. aids and promotes development in the world. Are the two speeches and issues related? As this report notes, Clinton suggested in her speech an implicit linkage between terrorism and economic development:
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,” she said. Clinton’s speech was prompted by a belief that social and economic conditions need to improve in countries beset by Islamist insurgencies, aides said, citing situations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen as prime examples. “We cannot be assured” of promoting a safer, more democratic world “when one-third of humankind live in conditions that offer them little chance of building better lives for themselves or their children,” Clinton said.
That the latest jihadist bomber was the scion of a affluent Nigerian family seems to somewhat undercut the linkage between lack of economic opportunity and terrorism. We can only hope that jobless and hopeless jihadists will not step forward to prove the logic of the argument. While I fully support U.S. aid and development projects and find them to be a worthy and even noble aspect of the American role in the world, I’m skeptical about encouraging development as means of fighting terrorism. There are many reasons to support aid and development projects and those reasons existed before 9-11 and will exist long after the last jihadist is defeated. The Peace Corps, after all, predates the war on terrorism by a generation or two. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that young jihadists are attacking us because they couldn’t find a nice 9-5 job.
