Corruption Bad: Increases Terrorism

Corruption Bad: Increases Terrorism

Larry Diamond, Sr. Fellow Hoover Institution, 2002, Winning the New Cold War on Terrorism: The Democratic-Governance Imperative, Institute for Global Democracy, Policy Paper No. 1, [http://www.911investigations.net/IMG/pdf/doc-267.pdf], p. 2

This twisted logic resonates emotionally among large numbers of the one billion Muslims who stretch from Morocco to Indonesia–and even some who live or reside in Europe and the United States. With time, force, vigilance and some luck, we may substantially destroy and disrupt the existing global infrastructure of terrorism. But no amount of military force, law-enforcement vigilance and operational genius can contain an army of suicide bombers that stretches endlessly across borders and over time. We must ultimately undermine their capacity to recruit and indoctrinate new true believers. That requires getting at the root factors that generate breeding grounds for terrorism. And one of the principal factors is chronically bad governance.

Madalene O’Donnell, NYU Center on International Cooperation, 2006, Post-conflict Corruption: A Rule of Law Agenda?, Draft Chapter for International Peace Academy, Civil War and the Rule of Law, [http://www.worldbank.org.ezp1.harvard.edu/wbi/governance/pdf/corruption_conflict_and_rule_of_law.pdf], p. 9

Finally, only recently has there been growing emphasis not only on the costs of corruption for developing countries themselves, but also for international security. The head of Interpol, four weeks after 9/11, noted that the most sophisticated security systems could be side-stepped by a simple bribe.41 The current US National Security Strategy identifies corruption as creating an enabling environment for terrorism, organized crime, and trafficking in persons.42 The international security lens tends to focus particularly on corruption in police and border agencies.

Corruption Bad: Undermines Democracy

Larry Diamond, Sr. Fellow Hoover Institution, 2002, Winning the New Cold War on Terrorism: The Democratic-Governance Imperative, Institute for Global Democracy, Policy Paper No. 1, [http://www.911investigations.net/IMG/pdf/doc-267.pdf], p. 10-1

The most urgently important institutions of horizontal accountability are the ones directly charged with controlling political and bureaucratic corruption. Corruption is the core phenomenon of the predatory state. It is the principal means by which state officials extract wealth from the society, deter productive activity and thereby reproduce poverty and dependency. Outside of the central state, landed elites, corporate oligarchs, political barons and organized crime bosses use corruption to purchase access to resources and immunity from taxes and the law. Politicians use corruption to barricade themselves in power. Patrons distribute the crumbs of corruption to maintain their clientelist support groups. Corruption is to the predatory state what the blood supply is to a malignant tumor. Cut it off and the tumor will shrink and die.

Robin Theobald, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Polytechnic of Central London, 1990, Corruption, Development and Underdevelopment, p. 78

Robert Charlick, Political Science Professor, Cleveland State University, 1993, Corruption and Reform 7:177-187, p. 177-8

From a governance perspective, however, corruption is the tail rather than the dog. As the authors of the World Bank’s seminal paper on governance correctly perceived, pervasive or systematic corruption is a symptom of poor governance. While corruption is manifest in every society, and in the democratic as well as authoritarian regimes, systematic corruption is a deadly sign that a society can no longer effectively manage its resources for public purposes. In its systematic form, corruption makes the notion of “public” meaningless. Every resource is privatized – appropriated for private gain at the expense of those members of the public who are supposed to be served by governance. Corruption both feeds on the breakdown or failings of good governance, and it makes the attainment of such governance extremely difficult. By particularizing everything, corruption poisons the relationship of authority between governors and the governed. Rule which is only “self” serving can hardly be accepted as legitimate. It can hardly be expected to conform to clear rules of law which would restrict the prerogatives and the gain of the corrupt. It is obviously incompatible with the development of transparency – the subjecting of decisions and the bases of those decisions to the light of public knowledge. It can not be squared with any meaningful form of accountability, other than that of payoff. To get corruption under control is, therefore, not a simple matter. While minor miracles may be possible in particular times and places using astute strategy, and through the determined acts of courageous and honest individuals, in general, managing corruption seems to involve improving governance at least in the governmental sector of a society.
LEAVING LOW LEVEL CORRUPTION UNADDRESSED DANGEROUS – WILL SNOWBALL AND CAUSE HARMS

Kempe Ronald Hope. Center for Graduate Studies, Atlanta University, 1987, Corruption and Reform, 2:127-147, p. 128

Corruption has been described elsewhere as “the secret and usually illegal abuse of conferred monopoly status” (Beenstock 1979). However, once an organization, rather than an individual, becomes corrupt, or where corruption is a normal and acceptable means for transacting official business, then systemic corruption dominates the organization’s modus operandi. Caiden (1981) for example, has argued that once such corruption enters into the blood of a public organization, it spreads quickly throughout the rest of the organization and “if it is not diagnosed and treated it will eventually destroy public credibility and organizational effectiveness. Even if treated, there is no guarantee that it will be eliminated or that all infected areas will be reached. The possibilities of stamping it out altogether are remote as long as the machinery responsible for eliminating it is also corrupt.”