Report dubs US "greatest threat to world peace"
Published on : 11/04/2007
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The US-led 'war on terror' has been condemned in a new report that accuses America of being the "greatest threat to world peace".
Today's study from thinktank the Oxford Research Group (ORG) describes itself as its "most outspoken" to date, claiming that the US international policy has succeeded only in "treating the symptoms" and not "curing the disease".
The report's authors elaborate by describing the US' approach as being determined to maintain the status quo by "keeping the lid" on insecurity without addressing its root causes.
As evidence they cite the re-emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, rising support for 'political Islam', an increased number of serious terrorist attacks worldwide and the "state of bloody chaos nearing civil war" that is Iraq.
Chris Abbot, lead author of the ORG study, claims that the US-led preoccupation with identifying terrorists as the biggest threat to world peace had led to climate change; a lack of sustainable resources; the marginalisation of the world's populations and global militarisation all being overlooked.
"There is a clear and present danger – an increasingly marginalised majority living in an environmentally constrained world, where military force is more likely to be used to control the consequences of these dangerous divisions," he said.
"Add to this the disastrous effects of climate change, and we are looking at a highly unstable global system by the middle years of the century unless urgent action is taken now."
Endorsing the report, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1984, commented: "This incisive study is radical in the proper sense; it penetrates beneath the surface of the debate in the west over its security to demonstrate that the real threat to global peace and stability lies in our failure to recognise our interdependence – that the wellbeing of the privileged depends on the wellbeing of the marginalised."
