Accountability

Sunday breakfast, rainy day, cleverly disguised coffeehouse on the street level of an expensive condo in an expensive small town near Washington, DC. The three of us, Peter, Loren and I, have been meeting Sunday mornings for a few years now. We are old friends bound by time and shared experiences, and we enjoy the flights of ideas that hover above the table.

We've all been reading the papers and watching the news, amazed at the ongoing dance of organizations, leaders and countries great and small who remain obstinately unwilling to be held accountable for the miscreants in their ranks.

First and foremost is the Muslim world, numbering between 1.6 and 1.8 billion. Active within this number, much like a cancerous virus, are some 10,000 terrorists who, as terrorists do, are perfectly willing to sacrifice life and limb to their varying causes. The leaders of nations harboring the terrorists maintain that these criminals are beyond their controls, unreachable and beyond the arm of the law. This, of course, is poppycocks, as our British friends say. Closer to the truth is that the terrorists serve a purpose. The leaders get a great deal of money from other nations to deal with the problem. The more terrorists there are, the more anti-terrorist money flows into the leaders' coffers. Additionally, the leaders are seldom on sure footing, so it is better to be pals with the bad guys than not. Lastly, many such leaders are already in the terrorists' pockets. So they claim a powerlessness to remedy the situation. Call this a variation of the 12-step mantra that we are all powerless over people, places and things. But as anyone actively involved in any twelve-step program knows, powerlessness and helplessness are not synonymous.

Part of the social contract discussed by John Locke and later Jean-Jacques Rousseau some three centuries ago establishes that humans have made a deal with governments, and that within the context of the agreement, government and people have distinct roles. Humans contribute to society and government, and the government in turn provides a social structure and, most important, protection. This has seen some serious erosion in the past 20 years as governments allow groups of individuals to practice a form of natural law, that is to say live in a natural state permitting actions harmful to the group. This, in a nutshell, is what terrorism is all about--the abrogation of rule to meet an end.

In essence, the world is being held hostage by some 10,000 ruffians. That's roughly the population of Hendersonville, Tennessee, or Anetta, Texas. That minute segment of the world's population (there were approximately 6.8 billion of us as of last year) is responsible for billions of dollars spent world-wide in the war against terrorism, countless lives lost on the front, and an endless series of large and small annoyances that plague daily life. It could be said that to an extent the terrorists have won. They've forced us to change our ways of life, our behaviors, our thinking, our day to day existence.

All this because a few nations have decided to allow lawlessness to thrive within their borders and plead outraged innocence at the results of their choices. The Saudis are a good example: we have a tendency to forget that the perpetrators of 9/11 were Saudis, that al Qeda's leadership is Saudi, that Saudi Arabia has done remarkably little to stem the growth of terrorism, terrified as it is of an internal revolution that would oust the present leadership. And yet Saudi Arabia is but one nation. Yemen, Lybia, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, the Sudan and a host of other countries have accepted if not welcomed forces hostile to the West. With friends like these, who needs enemies?