Richard Clarke's Scary List

Richard Clarke wrote an excellent piece about what is going on with the rest of the world while the Bush administration has been so focused on Iraq to the exclusion of other topics. He argues we've got blinders on while other dangerous and far-reaching changes are occurring:

And with the nation involved in a messy war spiraling toward a bad conclusion, the key deputies and Cabinet members and advisers are all focusing on one issue, at the expense of all others: Iraq.

National Security Council veteran Rand Beers has called this the "7-year-old's soccer syndrome" -- just like little kids playing soccer, everyone forgets their particular positions and responsibilities and runs like a herd after the ball.

Clarke's list is:

Global warming
Russian revanchism
Latin America's leftist lurch
Africa at war
Arms control freeze (weapons proliferation)
Transnational crime
The Pakistani-Afghan border.

He writes:

As the president contemplates sending even more U.S. forces into the Iraqi sinkhole, he should consider not only the thousands of fatalities, the tens of thousands of casualties and the hundreds of billions of dollars already lost. He must also weigh the opportunity cost of taking his national security barons off all the other critical problems they should be addressing -- problems whose windows of opportunity are slamming shut, unheard over the wail of Baghdad sirens.

It's a scary world out there folks, and I have little confidence that this Administration is doing what we need to be doing right now. Read the whole thing, think about it, and demand answers of your representatives as to what they are doing about these problems. We must not let Iraq take up all the oxygen in Washington or we may wake up in a few years to find that some of these problems have matastasized into major security problems for the United States. We need foresight, initiative, and judgment to deal with the world.