Agence France-Presse March 10, 2004
After Saddam, US remains at risk of attack: experts
By Patrick Anidjar
One year after President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq, claiming it would make the United States safer, the country remains at risk of suffering another attack, experts warn.
The threat that Saddam Hussein once posed to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel dissipated with the fall of his regime, but experts doubt that his regime was as great a danger as the Bush administration insists.
The US failure to find Iraqi weapons of mass destruction cast doubt over allegations that Iraq posed a threat to America and the rest of the world.
"Everyone is better off with Hussein out of power," wrote Doug Bandow, a foreign policy expert with the CATO Institute in Washington. "But he apparently had no WMD, and thus was no threat to the US or other allied states."
"Alas, America may ultimately find that it has made a more dangerous world by loosing the "dogs of war" in the Mideast," Bandow wrote in an essay titled "Making US Voters Happier, Not Safer."
The Bush administration often repeats its contention that America and the world are safer without the regime of Saddam Hussein as well as without the Taliban in power in Afghanistan.
But specialists on security issues are divided on how to measure whether the nation is actually safer, saying one year is too short a period of time to predict an improvement in the safety of the Americans.
"No terrorist attacks against the United States? Well, that could change tomorrow morning," argues Marcus Corbin of the Center for Defense Information in Washington.
He cautions that the war in Iraq "has inflamed the feeling against the United States, especially in the Arab world."
According to Patrick Garrett at GlobalSecurity.org, a think tank specializing on defense issues, "it's going to be a while before we can really say that Iraq is going to be an influential and stable facet of the Middle East that will be able to add to the security of the region and of the world."
Aside from Libya, it is still too early to draw conclusions if US intervention will leave a lasting impression and will encourage other regimes to get rid of their weapons of mass destruction, experts said.
It is also too early to know if extremist groups have slowed their recruitment and eased off on planning new attacks. There's also little way to measure anti-American sentiment in the Arab and Muslim world.
But it has become clear, Garrett insists, that "Iraq has become a hotbed for terrorism over the last year that has sparked a variety of bombing against civilian and military targets."
"In many ways, it has contributed to a destabilization of the country," the expert said.
He also warned that the massive US deployment to Iraq could pose long-term problems to US security.
"When you have between four and six divisions out of ten divisions involved in Iraq over the last year, our readiness is down," he said.
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