The Terror Response - What’s Missing

        It looks as though the technology of travel, communication, and weaponry may lend themselves more readily to disruption and cruelty than to order and peace. It is fine to seek safety in watch lists and body scanners. In the long run, though, defensive measures will not be enough to avoid the worst results of a nuclear arms race overlaid with non deterrable terrorism. To achieve order and peace we had better make greater effort to employ the ease of communication and travel to reaching a closer knit world.

       The worst delusion that might beset our generation is that humans unavoidably and irrevocably must split into warring tribes. If we join Samuel Huntington and his legion of professors and generals who settle for perpetual war, end-time nuclear disaster will prove inevitable. The alternative is to bring people together, reduce grounds for cross-cultural hatred, and restrict weaponry to law enforcement that governs all nations and peoples and regulates the creation and ownership of weapons.

       A ready-made medium exists for starting the long process to achieve this - the cities and towns of the world. Their populations are the ultimate targets, both of terrorism and war. They house the achievements of civilization. Their politics and governments, unlike most of the national governments including our own, are within the political reach of ordinary citizens. And, a huge amount of cross border relationships between cities and towns already exists, through trade, tourism, cultural and educational exchanges, and organizations like Sister Cities International and Mayors for Peace.

       Targeted citizens, which in the nuclear age is all of us, world-wide, should emulate the courageous airliner passengers who have attacked suicide bombers hand-to-hand. They should move across borders with ballots, organization, communication, and travel. If a dozen citizens in three or four cities and towns in each of a few countries took a simple step, the effort could be underway within a year. That step would be to put a slot on the municipal ballot to directly elect a local representative to an international municipal security congress.

        A global security congress, empowered by the ballot, with a single assignment, the security of populations, would quickly insist upon the essentials of security, which are enforced global law kept accountable by cross border democracy. Fully realized, it might take fifty years, but the impact on the roots of terrorism would start right away. And, compared to the sixty-five years since Hiroshima that have brought us to this perilous time, it is not long at all.

       High on the agenda would be pressure on national governments to eliminate nuclear weapons. Sixty-five years without effective action reflects the fact that people who run national governments have more on their minds than the safety of populations, which, in the end, is all that matters. National governments answer to the stockholders and employees of their missile makers, to generals and admirals, to economic, ideological, and ethnic voting blocks, to excitable media. World order under law is not even close to the top of the list.

        A global security congress of elected city representatives could make national governments put first things first - war prevention ahead of war fighting, enforced law ahead of profits, security ahead of sovereignty, cooperation ahead of tribalism, communicating and understanding ahead of competing patriotisms.