With a growing Ebola death rate causing chaos in some countries devastated by the virus, there are rising concerns in Washington that terrorists and terror groups will take advantage and move in to establish new beachheads plot attacks on the United States.
“We need to take the Ebola epidemic in Africa as seriously as we take the Islamic State in the Middle East,” long-serving Sen. Lamar Alexander told Secrets.
“The danger to America is one flight away,” said the Tennessee Republican, adding, “Africa could be devastated by it, or those three countries could be, and so we need to do whatever it takes and enlist other countries and help control it so that those three countries aren’t devastated and become havens for terrorists, which would be dangerous to us.”
Alexander is the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions and cruising to reelection.
He said that the U.S. should succeeded in limiting Ebola within our borders.
But he warned against taking harsh international measures against Sierra Leone, New Guinea and Liberia, where Ebola is mostly based. He said that could lead to an economic disaster there.
“If you have devastated countries, if you have chaos, nothing good comes from it and troublemakers are not far behind. So I could see troublemakers coming pretty quickly into a country that was completely devastated and providing for themselves a safe haven,” he told Secrets.
“When you have a breakdown in society, and you would have it in those three countries, because if everybody is sick and there is nobody to take care of you, well then nobody has a job, food prices are high, you have chaos and chaos breeds lots of unpleasant results, not just for the people there, but for us,” said Alexander.
“I think it’s a national security issue,” he added.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
