The biggest problem confronting the world today is the 'illusion that our differences matter more than our common humanity,' former United States President Bill Clinton has said.
"It is not just that there is an unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict. Osama Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri can convince young Sunni Arab men - and some women - who have despairing conditions in their lives, that they get a one-way ticket to heaven in a hurry if they kill a lot of innocent people who don't share their reality," Clinton argued on NBC's Meet the Press aired on Sunday.
"That means, by definition, everything about them, the differences are more important and that is driving the terror. That is driving the attempt to acquire, for terrorist groups, small-scale chemical and biological and maybe even someday nuclear stuff," he added.
"In the longer term, climate change will be the biggest threat, because if it is allowed to come to fruition, and particularly if we are, at the same time, running out of affordable or recoverable oil, you are going to have, almost overnight, a dramatic change in the way we live," Clinton said.
And it will cause millions of food refugees, it will cause probably food and water wars, and it could change the underlying conditions on which our civilization rests. So I would say terror based on human difference today, climate change over the long run," the former President observed.
Clinton was quite forthcoming on Iraq looking at the issue beyond of whether it was right or wrong to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
"What I believe was an error was for us to unilaterally invade before the United Nations had finished its inspections, because we said the reason that Congress was asked to vote to approve this was to give teeth to the UN inspections and then to use the authority to invade if he flunked the inspections. I am glad he is (Saddam Hussein) gone, but I think we have to realize, every time you are someplace, you are not someplace else. Every dollar you spend here, you don't spend it there," he said.
"But we are where we are now. And since we have broken this egg, as General Powell used to say, we have got to try to make an omelet. I think whether this succeeds or fails now depends more on Iraqis than Americans. I think most of the really big political and military mistakes made by the American forces in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam have been learned from and corrected," Clinton maintained.
"I think that now it's just a question of whether the various Shiite factions and the Sunni can make a political accommodation sufficient to overcome the insurrection and I think for us, we have to try to keep our footprint as low as possible so as not to inflame things, but our impact as high as possible," he added.
