Terrorist mass murder in the US on Sept. 11 summons the oil and gas industry to a new mission.
In their shock following suicide bombings of the World Trade Center in New York and Pentagon in Washington, DC, the world's civilized people have much, intellectually and emotionally, to sort out. They feel horror, grief, anxiety, fear, and outrage. They hear calls to war. They witness surging suspicion that terrorist leader Osama bin Laden bears responsibility for the massacre-that he is, indeed, the enemy.
Fear. Outrage. Suspicion.
The combination is dangerous, appropriate for war. But the danger should be the enemy's. In this war, it is supremely important to remember who the enemy is and who it is not.
Targeting the enemy
The enemy is a network of hate-sickened murderers. The cause of the sickness is less relevant than the demonstrated need of everyone else in the world to vanquish consummate evil. To this war, that's all that matters. To the global civilization that will survive, however, it matters profoundly that self-defensive fury targets the enemy, not people who look like the suicide bombers, speak their language, or share their religion.
The enemy is not the Arab world. It is not Islam. The conflict is between civilization and the blind hatred of terrorists who happen to be Arab Muslims.
In the wake of mass murder, it is painfully easy to hate indiscriminately. Video images of airliners slicing through skyscrapers, and of the gruesome aftermath, now fester in human consciousness.
Suspicion, official and private, looms for Arabs and Muslims in the US and elsewhere. The suspicion and the resentment it creates are tactical victories for the terrorists. The danger is the tendency for those impulses to become hateful alienation.
If that happens, the terrorists will have transmitted their sickness, and the tactical victory they already have won will become strategic triumph. If understandable outrage decays into conflict between whole ethnolinguistic groups or religions, the terrorists will have defeated civilization.
Resistance to reactionary hatred requires conscious effort. That's where the oil and gas industry has a new role to play.
The industry and its workers have stronger affiliations than most others do in the Middle East. They have worked close to Islam and within Middle Eastern cultures. Industry workers with experience in the Middle East know that the hatred acted out against Americans on Sept. 11 is in no way representative of the Arab world or of Islam at large.
However easy it is in the Middle East to find suspicion toward the US and disagreement with policies of the US government, hatred expressed through mass murder goes beyond grievance and revolts the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims as much as anyone else.
Through every means available, the oil and gas industry should attest publicly to that reality. It should add its voice to emphatic messages from the US and other governments that the 21st Century's first major war has to do with evil behavior, not ethnicity or religion.
The industry can communicate constructively in another direction as well. The Middle Eastern governments with which it does business now must choose between international civility and terror anchored in distorted interpretations of Arab unity and Muslim orthodoxy. Yet clear choices can be difficult for undemocratic governments ever threatened by internal dissent. In the past, political and religious tensions have bred allegiances of convenience that the Sept. 11 tragedy makes untenable.
An example is Saudi Arabia's past support for the Taliban faction governing most of Afghanistan and protecting Bin Laden. As US leaders have made clear, the global response to newly escalated terrorism won't tolerate such equivocation. The oil and gas industry should look for ways to help convince its Saudi and other Middle Eastern associates that the time has arrived to look forward and choose sides.
Ex-officio diplomacy
As it fights terror, the civilized world must not let generalized hatred or political expedience corrupt fundamental decency. It must not give terrorists that triumph.
Passions of the moment place relations between peoples at risk. Yet relations between peoples are as essential to civilization as security against random murder. To that end, ex-officio diplomacy might now be the oil and gas industry's most important mission ever.
