In the 1990’s, AIDS was widely acknowledged to be the preeminent threat to health and security on the planet Particularly in the world’s underdeveloped countries, and most particularly in Africa, where an entire generation is threatened by the rampant spread of the disease.Then 9-11 happened. Suddenly, the “War on Terror” took all the headlines, and most of the money and resources the US was prepared to commit to making the world a safer place.What got obscured in the first three years of the War on Terror is that AIDS is a much greater source of terror, for far more people, than any religious fundamentalism, and America ignores this truth at her own peril.Speaking at a NATO summit recently in Turkey, President Bush declared: “We face the challenge of corruption and poverty and disease, which throw whole nations into chaos and despair. These are the conditions in which terrorism can survive.” The conditions, unfortunately, are present in an alarming number of countries, and the years spent by many governments denying that the disease was a problem only in someone else’s backyard have contributed to huge increases in the number of victims, and a vast increase in the social destabilization that often produces terrorism.
