It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a corporate executive, a political pundit, a religious leader, the president of the United States of America, or anybody in between; the question of effective leadership can always be broken down to one essential principle, and that is the measure of the leader’s credibility. It can most effectively be assessed through an analysis of the amount of accountability and consistency that is exhibited by the leader. Once one has determined how accountable and consistent each of their leaders or potential leaders are, it becomes innumerably easier to figure out whether or not true integrity lies inside of any of them, and once each individual’s integrity has been determined, in effect, so has their credibility.
Being accountable is accepting and admitting responsibility for not only the actions that we carry out, but also for the actions that our actions cause, whether directly or indirectly. Displaying a significant level of consistency is thought to be the same thing as being stubborn, but in actuality, the two words are far from synonymous with one another. The term ‘consistent’ is appropriately used to describe a certain degree of constancy, coherence and reliability present within some entity, or to represent a theory that is void of any logical contradiction, while the word ‘stubborn’ refers exclusively to determination without reason. When dancing on the fine line dividing consistency and stubbornness, it is absolutely vital for us to remain certain of the fact that the convictions we keep are not unreasonable, or else we are to be the designers our own downfall, whether or not we are bold and brave enough to admit that fact to ourselves and one another.
The vital characteristic at the core of both accountability and consistency is honesty. Being accountable is nothing more than being honest about one’s one actions, and if someone were to be dishonestly accountable, they wouldn’t actually be displaying any accountability at all. Consistency, however, can present itself in the absence of honesty, but unlike accountability, consistency is a personality trait that isn’t always necessarily a positive one, and being consistently dishonest would be far more sinful that virtuous. If we want our leaders to be virtuously credible once again, we need to find a way to force them into being consistently accountable not only for their actions, but also for all equal or opposite reactions that are caused by their actions, either directly or indirectly. The simplest way to do this would seem to be a soft injection of honesty to cure the sickness that has so corrupted our system of government, but that recourse always proves to be the hardest for people to embrace on their own because it is forced to the most complicated option presented to them, due to a general lack of adequate funding and representation. There’s no money in being honest, so nobody bothers to do it on a consistent basis, and hardly anybody ever does it after they’ve done something wrong, which is why we have so many elected officials failing the true test of accountability when they face it.
In the wake of the Second World War, amidst the creation of the Great American Arsenal of Democracy, there was a division taking place within the U.S. Military, which had just become the primary employer of over a quarter of the population and now had a vital responsibility facing them; or an lucrative opportunity, and out of that schism came two distinctly different establishments. The Arsenal was the overt sector, and it essentially managed the areas of the world that the American people were in support of our occupation, and, although it was chiefly due to the GAAD that the annual budget for the Department of Defense would eventually rise to half of the national budget and beyond, it was the other half of what was now being referred to as the Military Industrial Complex that would be causing the real national security problems.
The first blatant example of covert military action that would jeopardize national security in the future was the Bay of Pigs, but Jack Kennedy and the CIA didn’t commit that atrocity until Eisenhower and the CIA had overthrown two democratically elected governments and Truman had begun what would come to be our long-term tensions with Iran. All of this was covert, and due to this, things like the Cuban Missile Crisis and hostility towards Americans in the Middle East came as a surprise to many Americans; people who might have understood Far-Eastern hostility, as we had overtly gone to war in Korea, but who had no idea that we were engaging in such a far-reaching imperialist plot of sorts. Much of the same happened during the overt invasion of Vietnam, which provided a near-perfect veil for the covert Air America operations in Laos (which would also mark the beginning of the CIA’s long-running history of drug-running), and the illegal bombing of Cambodia, and when our involvement in the hostilities there finally came to a close (but unfortunately only after we paved the way for the Khymer Rouge takeover and genocide in Cambodia), the CIA found out that there were Soviet troops in Afghanistan, and, along with a small but powerful group of senators infamously spearheaded by Charlie Wilson, armed the Afghani people, taught them how to fight the sophisticated Russian invaders, and when the job was done, left them with a country that was all but destroyed and had nothing to offer but an extremely lucrative opium crop, which would soon come to be controlled by the people who would soon come to be the terrorists that we say are going to follow us home if we leave Iraq and Afghanistan (Claims that the CIA has and has had a hand in the opium coming out of Afghanistan would have to be filed under conspiracy, but, for the record, they do exist). After we left the Afghani people to fend for themselves when we had an opportunity, and quite possibly an obligation, to stabilize the country that we helped break, for the sake of long-term global and national security (much like the obligation that we now supposedly have in Iraq), simultaneous covert actions began in both Nicaragua and Iran, in an exchange that is now commonly referred to as the Iran-Contra Affair, which just might have added some more gasoline to the flame of hatred for us in Iran.
This brief rundown in the period of our history that laid the foundation for the blowback we now feel might shed some light on the fact that the problem isn’t being in the wrong country; it’s being in the wrong region of the world. We do not belong in the Middle East (as overly stated as that is), and despite the only reason to be there is to get our hands on the oil (which is running out anyway), we need to focus on the fact that the anti-American sentiment in the Middle East can only survive off of our military presence there, and we need to demand that Afghanistan not become the new Iraq (despite the potential obligation that we had to that nation once upon a time), and that the War on Terror be fought by good police work rather that military intervention in a place that has proven to be more hostile than any has ever been in human history (I only state this so confidently due to how close we are to having people that have the intention to attain nuclear weapons to use them immediately get them). The only things that seem to be consistent in the American political system are deception and corruption, but if those two brutally human vices can be transformed into the necessary humane virtues of consistency and accountability, there might still be a chance for us to rejoin as a united people and restructure our republic.