From New York Sun: Peace Corps Part of Edwards Terror Plan.
Senator Edwards is outlining a new national security strategy that includes the creation of a 10,000-person civilian peace corps to stem the tide of terrorism in weak and unstable countries. ...The plan Mr. Edwards presented yesterday — which he dubbed "A Strategy to Shut Down Terrorists and Stop Terrorism Before It Starts" — calls for a 10,000-person "Marshall Corps" to deal with issues ranging from worldwide poverty and economic development to clean drinking water and micro-lending. He said investing in those areas would shore up weak nations and help ensure that terrorism does not take root there. That, he said, would allow the country to stop potential terrorists before they even join the ranks.
There are "thousands committed to violence" today, he said, and America needs to use all of its tools to go after them. But he said millions more people are "sitting on the fence" about whether to join those ranks. "We have to offer them a hand to our side instead of a shove to the other side of that fence," he said.
Mr. Edwards proposed creating a Cabinet-level position to oversee the initiative, which he said would require international allies.
The president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Clifford May, said he was "skeptical" of Mr. Edwards's proposal."Humanitarian aid is a good thing. I approve of that. But it doesn't really have much to do with the causes of terrorism," Mr. May said. "Mohamed Atta, the lead terrorist on 9/11, was based in Germany, was well-educated. The causes of terrorism are several, but poverty is not one of them."
Debra Burlingame comments:
Mr. Edwards wants to pull our troops out of there, leaving a power vacuum which al Qaeda’s Ayman Zawahiri and his boss, Osama Bin Laden are eager to fill. Can you imagine Edwards’ Marshall Corps of idealistic grad students and professors-on-sabbatical showing up in the abandoned Green Zone with construction blueprints and copies of Khalil Gibran hoping to win over terrified fence-sitters hiding from death squads?
For those who don't recognize the setting or the speech, see this.
Posted by Forkum at June 11, 2007 03:47 PM
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