Listen up. Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth Institute at Columbia University seems to have been designated unsafe for op-ed readers since the war madness cranked up a year ago, 
but he was back this weekend in the Boston Globe with a piece full of home truths too tragic, too obvious for most of the Bush-besotted media. “Liberation is in fact military occupation,” he writes, “which in turn is a lightning rod for attacks on US troops. The United States is less secure than before the Iraq War… The war was about oil, specifically about a long-standing and simplistic US vision about the need to militarize the Persian Gulf in order to ensure the steady flow of petroleum… The repeated outcome of this policy, however, has been ‘blowback.’… US leadership has not understood, or perhaps cared, that others in the world do not want to be pawns in a plan for US hegemony… It is time for the United States to withdraw from Iraq in favor of a sovereign Iraqi government. The United Nations is very well placed to assist in that transition, and could do that for perhaps $10-billion in the coming year, or around 10 percent of the costs that Bush has requested.”
Jeff Sachs’ good sense could have saved a lot of blood and treasure if the Bush war party had tuned in to an interview Sachs gave me almost a year ago for our radio series, The Whole Wide World. We were talking broadly about global growth and global conversation about to be devastated by war. “It seems to be our fate after September 11,” he said, “almost to fall into Sam Huntington’s trap of the clash of civilizations, as if somehow Christianity and Islam are going to be off to war with each other… It’s a little preposterous, in a population that’s 5 percent of the world’s population, that absolutely depends for its prosperity on global peace, to think that we will bully the world.”
Jeff Sachs maps the road not taken a year ago. Aren’t we on it again, several miles back? Listen in here.
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