WASHINGTON, July 17 (UPI) -- Terrorists are making the world an increasingly dangerous place for U.S. citizens, a new survey warns.
Analysts and policy experts across the political spectrum believe that the world is becoming increasingly more dangerous for America and her citizens, according to the Terrorism Index released last month by the liberal Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy magazine.
Eighty-six percent of the hundred liberal, conservative, and moderate experts surveyed believe that the world is progressively becoming more perilous, with 30 percent attributing this condition to some form of Islamic animosity. Twenty-eight percent attributed the worsening of the situation to the war in Iraq.
Some 84 percent of the analysts disagreed with President George W. Bush's assessment that the United States was winning the war on terror.
Michael Scheuer, former head of the CIA's Bin Laden Unit and author of Imperial Hubris, a critical study of the Bush administration's War on Terror policies, told a recent CAP meeting discussing the study, "The findings that the war is somehow out of our control is disturbing because it follows along with so many things in the country today that are 'too hard to do.' Its too hard to control the borders, its too hard to secure the Soviet nuclear arsenal, it's too hard to do most of anything. I really think that America has it's future in it's own hands."
Forty-five of the respondents identified themselves as liberal, 40 as moderate, and 31 as conservative. The survey weighted each group to one-third of the total ranking said Joseph Cirincione, CAP senior vice president for national security.
Lawrence Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the Department of Defense and as Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff from 2002-2005, said there was a discrepancy in the current U.S. budget between the $450 billion allocated for the Pentagon and the $30 billion allocated for the State Department. He noted that 87 percent of respondents said the State Department and other federal diplomatic groups should receive an increase in funding while 52 percent wanted a decrease in the Defense and military budget.
"It's not the revenge of the Foggy Bottom crowd," said David Bosco, senior editor of Foreign Policy magazine. Foreign Policy magazine collaborated with the CAP to choose the 100 respondents.
"If there was just a new deal in the Middle East, if we could put people to work and give them schooling and provide more development aid that would make a difference," that idea goes, Scheuer said. "That is a tragic leftover of the last 30 years. It hasn't worked, it won't work."
Scheuer advocated a more confrontational approach in the war on terror for U.S. policymakers.
"We vastly underestimate the amount of killing we will have to do. The idea that somehow the military has done all that it can do is a mistake. It hasn't done all it can do because politicians won't let it and many more of the people who oppose us are going to have to be killed before we bring this to a tolerable state," he said.
Wilkerson said that at the first CIA briefing that he attended after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks one analyst claimed that between 40 million and 100 million of the 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide supported al-Qaida through their monetary contributions.
"Bombs, bullets, and bayonets are not the answer to this problem," Wilkerson said. "It's going after that 40 (million) or 100 million and convincing them that killing innocent men, women and children for political objectives is not the way to do business. And you don't do that with (the) military."
