The whole world is laughing at the Obama administration’s latest
weapon in the War on Terror: jobs for jihadists. State Department
spokeswoman Marie Harf unveiled this new policy on Sunday.
“We cannot kill our way out of this war,” Harf explained on MSNBC. “We
need, in the longer term, medium to longer term, to go after the root
causes that leads [sic] people to join these groups.” She continued: “We
can work with countries around the world to help improve their
governance. We can help them build their economies so they can have job
opportunities for these people.”
Amid ensuing global giggles, Harf doubled down on this initiative.
“We’ll take direct military action against these terrorists,” she told
CNN yesterday. “We have done that. We are doing that in Iraq and Syria.
But longer term, we have to look at how we combat the conditions that
can lead people to turn to extremism.”
I added this morning to the guffaws over this fascinating new way of
treating the people who just beheaded 21 Egyptian Christians and burned
alive 46 people in the last few weeks. I decided, nonetheless, to test
the Harf Hypothesis. Does poverty equal militant Islamic terrorism . . .
er, I mean, extremism?
The Global Terrorism Index is the work of Statista, a statistical portal
that aggregates more than 18,000 data sources. As Statista explains, it
“systematically ranks countries of the world according to their
terrorist activity. Iraq ranked first on the global terrorism index with
a score of 10 points, making it the country most affected by terrorism
on Earth.”
For 2014, here are the top 10 nations affected by terrorism, as well as
their Global Terrorism Index scores:
1. Iraq (10)
2. Afghanistan (9.39)
3. Pakistan (9.37)
4. Nigeria (8.58)
5. Syria (8.12)
6. India (7.86)
7. Somalia (7.41)
8. Yemen (7.31)
9. Philippines (7.29)
10. Thailand (7.19)
Meanwhile, the Central Intelligence Agency publishes and regularly
updates The World Factbook. Among other things, it ranks 228 nations
around the world, from top to bottom, according to per-capita GDP,
estimated on a purchasing-power-parity basis.
Here are
the ten poorest nations on that list, along with their respective
statistics.
219. Tokelau ($1,000)
220. Madagascar ($1,000)
221. Malawi ($900)
222. Niger ($800)
223. Liberia ($700)
224. Central African Republic ($700)
225. Burundi ($600)
226. Somalia ($600)
227. Zimbabwe ($600)
228. Democratic Republic of the Congo ($400)
The Harf Hypothesis would suggest that Earth’s ten most terrorized
nations would be the ten poorest on the planet — or at least, these two
lists largely should overlap.
In fact, only Somalia appears on both rankings.
Team Obama:
Their theory is 10 percent correct. This
means that the Harf Hypothesis is only 90 percent ridiculous.
Continue the laughter!
In all serious, I'd like to hear your solution. In advance, I have not listened to this interview, nor have I read anything really about it, so I'm not asking for a dissertation on why what is posted here is a stupid idea. For decades now, we have backed thugs in the region, sent shitloads of weapons, boatloads of money and are current flinging millions of dollars worth of missiles a day into the region. Am I missing something crucial hear that shows our current plan is working? I'm genuinely interested to hear what a solution would look like because I see very few good choices.
ReplyDeletePerhaps a serious look at where the people are being radicalized is a starting point.
DeleteWhat current plan?
The US has no strategy unless I have missed something.
ISIS is the creation of the vacuum left when we vacated the region. Maybe we could export a few million jobs to the middle east. Maybe invest a few trillion more. Can't do that as we no longer have a few trillion to waste. Jobs? That won't work as we all ready did that with China and Asia/Mexico and our free trade partners.
Seems the world waits for the US to do something. As the US isn't up to it, the terror spreads.
Perhaps if the world gets tired of ISIS, we can take our seat in the back of the bus and let them handle it.
In fairness Lou, the US has never had a strategy in the middle east other than,1) protect the existence of Israel, 2) ensure flow of oil. It's fair enough, I guess, to say that the rise of Isis is because of the power vacuum when we left, but by default, that kind of insinuates we had some sort of control when we were there. I think that's a highly debatable. We controlled what our military occupied. Nothing more.
DeleteI guess what I would like to see is an honest assessment of what we have done that has contributed to the ME as it is today. Rand Paul actually has been one of the few with enough sack to ask legit questions. Historically, pretty much every part of the world has had some sort of uprising when economic imbalances grow to large proportions. Your last sentence to me hits it on the head, but I also think we have no one but ourselves to blame for being in a situation where we are expected to militarily solve a problem we helped create with decades of decisions that were designed to uphold what I said in para one. Outwardly, it seems like a lot of the people going there to join are people who feel like they have little else to cling to.
And you are correct we have had no strategy, At least Saddam held the bad guys in check, something we cannot do.
DeleteThe same applies to Libya and Egypt before our intervention. We were better off with the dictators than now. And no one wants to ask the hard questions not to mention think about the answers. Keep in mind that applies to all our friends in Europe as they pretend the ME doesn't exist.
The protection of oil from the ME is the perfect and logical answer for building the Keystone pipeline. We can move away from oil but that's in the future not today or tomorrow or next year.
Meh, Keystone isn't going to happen and from what I've read, the Canucks basically want a way to get their oil into the open market. I'd like to think it would drive the price down or that we would get a deal on it, but things like that never seem to happen.
DeleteTo me, the reality is that we will keep using ME oil until it runs out. To some degree we are stuck there and need to admit that. Next, we have few palatable choices but to occasionally back the thug like Sadam, like we did. We backed Osama and a whole host of other unsavory people. What doesn't help is to go on Sunday talk shows every week like Graham and McCain do and the rest of the idiots for that matter and rant about what a shitty job Obama is doing. For the longest time, we quietly accepted that bad deals needed to be made once in awhile. Now, we scream with some new outrage every week only to drop it a week later when some new thing pops up. I think you read the same book that I did from Friedman about the next ten years and I agree with a lot of what he said. Our partisan bitching at home in order to fundraise is not helping us abroad. If we want to relieve ourselves of some of the peacekeeping duties of the world, we can't scream every week about how week Obama is making us.
The issue at hand is all oil we purchase is from the open market.
DeleteOil from the ME is the same price as the oil from Canada. Which would you prefer?
Once the Canadians decide to contract it all to China which isn't impossible the ability to buy it from Canada will evaporate before your eyes. And yes we will remain on oil until we have a viable alternative. There is not an alternative to oil today.
#1 Lou why is it that the Canadian Oil is open market as long as it comes this way but closed to all except China unless we build this useless pipeline. that argument is totally un-factual and holds no water.
DeleteCanada will continue to export oil to all takers on the open market, the whole China theory, just another scare tactic.
As far as alternatives to oil there are many and we are falling behind the rest of the world in the implementation of these alternatives. We are the #! producer of natural gas, and fracking didn't do it. We have always been one or two in natural gas production flipping the #1 spot with the Russians over the years. Just because the pretty lady didn't do the commercials back then doesn't make it not so. We have always been a great natural gas producer. We have had many years to find ways to use NG in place of oil and we have done nothing. Solar, yeah bring up Solyndra because you know nothing of the gains in Solar energy only the companies that failed, you are deeply into the blame game and not into searching for solutions. We have brought online more solar power then any other kind last year. Eletric cars are going to rapidly become the future Lou and like it or not General Motors is a leader in the development of electric cars. The EV2 aka Volt has some of the best distance marks out there going totally electric and some of the best overall mileage ratings in the category. GM is soon to begin manufacture of the second generation Volt which will be even better in it's performance. It's time to stop fighting progress fighting over a shitty pipeline that is more benefit to Canada then us, and get on with the reality of what is coming. American Exceptionalism : Part of that many pronged moniker is that we have always been on the leading edge of technology and development, and we while away the days fighting over 1890's technology, a pipeline.