Stardate 20030808.0829

(On Screen): In a classic pithy piece from 1998, Ralph Peters described seven factors which identified nations which were uncompetitive in the world. They were both diagnostic and causative, and each of them was debilitating.

One of them was a refusal to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure:

The cult of victimhood, a plague on the least-successful elements in our own society, retards the development of entire continents. When individuals or cultures cannot accept responsibility for their own failures, they will repeat the behaviors that led to failure. Accepting responsibility for failure is difficult, and correspondingly rare. The cultures of North America, Northern Europe, Japan, and Korea (each in its own way) share an unusual talent for looking in the mirror and keeping their eyes open. Certainly, there is no lack of national vanity, prejudice, subterfuge, or bad behavior.

But in the clutch we are surprisingly good at saying, "We did it, so let's fix it." In the rest of the world, a plumbing breakdown implicates the CIA and a faltering currency means George Soros--the Hungarian-born American billionaire, fund manager, and philanthropist--has been sneaking around in the dark. Recent accusations of financial connivance made against Mr. Soros and then against the Jews collectively by Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir only demonstrated that Malaysia's ambitions had gotten ahead of its cultural capacity to support them. Even if foreign devils are to blame--and they mostly are not--whining and blustering does not help. It only makes you feel better for a little while, like drunkenness, and there are penalties the morning after.

The failure is greater where the avoidance of responsibility is greater. In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, oil money has masked cultural, social, technical, and structural failure for decades. While the military failure of the regional states has been obvious, consistent, and undeniable, the locals sense--even when they do not fully understand--their noncompetitive status in other spheres as well. It is hateful and disorienting to them. Only the twin blessings of Israel and the United States, upon whom Arabs and Persians can blame even their most egregious ineptitudes, enable a fly-specked pretense of cultural viability.

On the other hand, Latin America has made tremendous progress. Not long ago, the gringos were to blame each time the lights blinked. But with the rise of a better-educated elite and local experience of economic success, the leadership of Latin America's key states has largely stopped playing the blame game. Smaller states and drug-distorted economies still chase scapegoats, but of the major players only Mexico still indulges routinely in the transfer of all responsibility for its problems to Washington, D.C.

As we all know, we have no better nor more steadfastly supportive allies than Saudi Arabia. Just ask their ambassador, he'll tell you. Saudis are gentle and peaceful people who would never hurt a fly, let alone actually engage in terrorist attacks.

In the first months after 9/11, the government of Saudi Arabia denied that 15 of the 19 terrorists who had made the attack were actually Saudi citizens. They tried to claim that those 15 had engaged in identity-theft. They tried to claim other things, too. Eventually there was a rather low-key acceptance of the truth.

But the Saudis have been in denial about their terrorism problem for a long time. It was only recently, with a very high profile and extremely well organized terrorist attack against a western enclave inside Saudi Arabia that they seem to have finally gotten serious about it, or at least have finally gotten to the point where they're willing to even admit that it exists at all. It remains unclear just how serious they actually are, and whether their efforts are still more cosmetic than real.

In the late 1990's there were a series of bombing attacks in Saudi Arabia. Of course, it couldn't possibly be Muslims who had done it; Muslims just do not do that kind of thing. Must be the foreign devils; you just can't trust them Christians.

As a result, they ended up accusing several westerners who were in Saudi Arabia of being responsible. The working theory was that the bomb-blasts were the work of rival gangs of liquor smugglers. (I know that sounds far fetched, but it just couldn't be anything else, because there wasn't anyone else in Saudi Arabia who would even consider doing anything like that.)

Since it was more important to the government to appear to have solved those cases and to get the right kind of outcome than to actually find out what had happened, they grabbed whatever non-Arab happened to be handy, tortured them, and forced confessions out of them. Several of them were condemned to death.

Today five Brits and a Canadian who had been convicted of carrying out a series of bombings in 2000 and 2001 were freed by the Saudi government. There is no acknowledgement of what has been blatantly obvious all along: these men never had anything to do with the attacks. Rather, they've graciously been granted clemency by the Crown. The Saudi government is not acknowledging that these men were framed; rather, they're still pretending that they're guilty, but giving them pardons.

I'm glad that they're free. But the point Peters makes is valid: you can't really start working to solve a problem until you admit you have one. By trying to blame foreigners for what were clearly domestic terrorist attacks, the Saudi government let the real problem grow and expand, and we all have paid for their failure.

And they're still trying to hide and cover up, and we're going to continue paying for it. In fact, we're going to help with the coverup. Because, apparently, that's what true friends and steadfast allies do: engage in a "war on terrorism" without actually engaging the diseased core in Saudi Arabia which has spawned or financed most of it.