Steve Russell: Disease and fundamentalist religion still a threat

Politicians of a certain stripe are riding to victory in the coming elections in a flaming chariot called Fear pulled by two sturdy horses, Ebola and ISIS. This “certain stripe” does not describe a political orientation as much as a moral orientation toward victory in government at any cost to the governed.

Ebola in fact carries a deadly sickness, but carries it in a weak virus, easily killed and contagious for only a short time. There is no cure at this time, but patients diagnosed early and kept hydrated have a survival rate in modern hospitals far above the survival rate in the broken medical systems of West Africa.

ISIS in fact commits horrific crimes on video to terrorize people. ISIS is as deadly to the body politic as Ebola is to the human body, but it carries deadly tactics in a weak ideology and is contagious in a healthy polity for only a short time.

What if, as former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen asks in a Washington Post op-ed, the twin threats of Ebola and Islamic radicalism converged into one? Thiessen cites Dr. Scott Gottlieb of the conservative think tank, American Enterprise Institute, for the proposition that Ebola is “the perfect bioweapon.”

Scott Steward evaluates Ebola as a terrorist weapon in the latest security newsletter by STRATFOR. He points out that ISIS has used chemical weapons back when it was Al Qaeda in Iraq by loading IED’s with chlorine, finding “the results were not worth the effort.” More recently, they have deployed mustard gas stolen from Iraqi or Syrian dictators. They would use Ebola if they could.