There’s a lot of fear these days about terrorists.  George Bush got a very warm welcome in Israel recently because people here worry a lot about terrorists.  They appreciate a man who worries as much they do.

I’ve lived some big pieces of my life in “dangerous places”.  In the early 90s, I spent six years in South Africa during the political transition and visited the townships regularly. Secret police rifled my desk one night and stole my journal.  I never got shot at, but once I led a workshop on conflict resolution for a group of radicals whose motto was “One Settler One Bullet”.  Seriously.  Since I looked a lot like a settler, it started out with a lot of frosty questions about who I was, who I worked for, and what I thought about Ronald Reagan, but by the end, they were enthusiastic and ready for more.

Presently I live in Jerusalem and spend a fair bit of time in Ramallah, which is a very dangerous place according to people in my neighborhood. I also visit sometimes in the south of Israel, where Hamas militants send rockets from Gaza. A few weeks ago a Qassam landed in the living room of the home of friends we had visited a month or two earlier.  I guess I’ve seen the ugly face of danger often enough that I ought to recognize it when it comes around the corner.

Want to know what really terrifies me?  What makes me sweat and mutter and complain?  Car travel.  Everywhere I’ve ever lived, worked, or traveled, the odds of dying in a car are far higher than dying from a bullet or bomb.

Including Israel.  In the most dangerous of times from terrorism, Israelis had three times as much reason to fear death by road travel as they did to fear terrorist attacks.  Specifically, at the height of the Intifada, the peak time of danger for Israelis, 440 Israelis died in road deaths during the year 2000.  In that same time, 120 Israelis died from terrorist attacks.  More recently, in 2006, which is well before the Wall was anywhere near complete, 15 times as many Israelis died of road deaths than at Palestinian hands.  In that year, there were 345 people who died on the roads of Israel, while 23 Israelis were killed by Palestinians, and 660 Palestinians were killed by Israelis.

If you think that Israeli rates of road death are high, think again.  The number of people per million who die on the roads in the US is roughly double that of Israel!  So, it turns out it’s the folks sitting in safe ‘ole America who really ought to be afraid!

Every death is one too many.  And there is something unnerving about knowing that there are people out there who’d intentionally kill innocent people if they had a chance.  But the truth about terrorism is that the greatest danger is not that at any moment large numbers of us will die.  Rather the danger is in wicked over-reaction on our part, that in our fear we will respond in ways that multiply victims, and thus escalate the danger to ourselves and our children long-term.  This is a “feel better” response to terrorism – if we do something drastic, we feel better afterwards.  There, we got rid of the rascals!  Until sons and brothers and cousins of innocent victims caught in our counter-attack mount their own revenge….

Americans might have felt safer for a while after our leaders invaded Iraq.  A nation traumatized and angry about 911 bought a basketload of untruth.  But it is our children and grandchildren who will pay the bills, not only for the human and economic costs to us of a long and pointless war, but in the instability created in the Middle East and the hatreds stirred against all Americans.

Sustainable security starts with thinking carefully about long-term consequences and managing our emotions well in times of danger.  We take it for granted that living involves risk.  We accept that risk philosophically with road travel.  We do not quake in our boots every time we drive, nor do we consider shutting down whole communities or altering our entire lifestyle due to this fear.

Fear is completely understandable.  But when our fear-driven responses put the lives of many at risk we have a duty to recognize that fear is usually irrational and often drives people to do things that make things worse.  To live responsibly in a world where terrifying things do happen we need to develop disciplines of analysis that help us not to yield to the adrenalin flowing through our brains and the distortions in thinking that usually accompany it.

Terrorists are rarely simply loony individuals that can be eliminated by “killing the bad guys”.  In most cases they are the extreme fringe of large communities of people who bear significant grievances.  Individuals can be removed, of course, but if the underlying causes that spurred them to sacrifice their lives are not addressed, they will eventually be replaced by others.  Multiple others.

The only real answer is to address the underlying grievances.  And in the meantime to find ways to reduce exposure to the danger of the extremist fringe without using tactics that aggravate the majority and drive them to extreme measures themselves.

By Ron Kraybill.  May be re-posted or reproduced if credit is given to www.RiverhouseEpress.com/Wordpress.

For more on this topic, go to a previous Paxblog entry which develops the analogy of a bearhunter who unintentionally stirs up hornets.  A related essay is Conflict Transformation in an Age of Terrorism.

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Recently someone suggested that my last blog on the Israel/Palestine conflict is about “second-track diplomacy”.   Not really.  True, the strategies there focus on levels other than the traditional high level or “track one” political approach. But they differ from normal “track two diplomacy”, which usually refers to efforts by non-political people to mediate between top political actors. My concern is to highlight the need for peace to be constructed across all levels of society, not through a ”let’s hope peace trickles down from the top” approach but through direct involvement of people at all levels.

Imagine two pyramids, side by side. Each has a top level, middle level, and grassroots level. Now imagine lines across between the pyramids, connecting top to top, middle to middle, grassroots to grassroots. Most peace processes have only a line across at the top. A very important line, to be sure, but it is hard to carry the freight of decades of hostility across that one line, no matter how strong it is.

In South Africa there were many such lines constructed beginning very soon after the talks began. Some didn’t work, but others did.

Occasionally key linkages across at the middle level proved pivotal in helping keep the top level process on track. For example, the creation of the National Peace Accord which I describe in the last blog came only because, in a time of crisis when the talks were floundering, influential business and religious leaders got together and then jointly convened the politicians into a weekend of problem-solving talks. Or, near the very end when one of the key black leaders pulled out of the talks entirely and thereby threatened the entire process, it was a middle level Kenyan professor (summoned through religious networks) who flew to South Africa and talked Buthelezi into returning to the process.

But those are exceptional moments. The top-level usually is pretty good about arranging its own political mediators when people are ready for it.

What is missing in most peace processes:
- active linkages at the other levels
- awareness by people at the top that those other levels are critically important
- awareness by leaders at other levels of the society that they have a crucial role to play if they are to attain a peaceful society
- any kind of strategic coordination among the levels.

It is difficult and often impossible to get support for a peace settlement if it is forged at the top and then simply dropped on the rest of the societies involved. This “trickle down theory of peace” is very poorly supported in reality.

There needs to be a preparation process and some kind of involvements of people at other levels in the society in the dilemmas that peace creates.   Awareness among the people at the top of how important work at the other levels is obviously critical to make this happen.  Somehow top level politicians in South Africa realized this and put a good bit of time and effort into setting up mechanisms to enable this to happen, and they did this alongside their other involvements in the political track.

But the truth is that top level people rarely recognize the importance and potential for work at other levels. South Africa was gifted with a number of business and religious leaders (ie: middle level people) who had the chutzpah to establish connections among each other on their own initiative, and then used their personal connections with top level people to convince them of the need for attention at other levels.

The creation of the National Peace Accord, which largely focused on day-to-day tensions and crises at middle and grassroots levels of the society (eg: local faction fights, confrontations when angry white racists showed up at black demonstrations, joint monitoring of police conduct which was highly controversial, etc.) made it possible to coordinate among all the levels.  It was often rudimentary coordination to be sure, but enough to enable the country to survive dozens of crises of large and small proportions that constantly threatened to freeze the talks.

Often there is resistance to creating such linkages. “Dialogue” comes to be seen by whoever’s lives are most disrupted by a prolonged conflict as simply a tactic to prolong the status quo and delay addressing the real issues. South African blacks were actively discouraged from any kind of dialogue by some of their leaders from the mid-80s onwards. But as the talks progressed even the skeptics relaxed and withheld criticism of those who engaged. The key is to make it clear that the purpose of engagement is to facilitate and hasten the essential process of change required to bring peace.

By Ron Kraybill, PhD

Will the politicians and generals work out a deal this time? It was the question of the decade as emissaries returned home to Israel and Palestine from the Annapolis peace summit. But if the architects of peace talks review hard-won lessons from peace processes elsewhere, they might discover there are other equally critical questions.

Common wisdom is that getting a settlement among high level negotiators at a bargaining table is the major difficulty in achieving peace. In reality, it is often challenges at other locations around the table that block peace. As in war, success in peace must be pursued systematically on multiple fronts, with strategies that address all levels of the societies involved.

Peace rarely arrives through a simple “trickle down” process from above, it has to be seeded broadly and actively cultivated throughout a society from near the beginning of the transition.

One reason for the success of the South Africa talks of the 1990s is that the politicians who designed them were quicker than most to learn this. A bitter season of killings froze and threatened to de-rail the entire process less than a year after talks had started in 1990. After several months of fumbling, South African leaders in the major parties responded by establishing structures and strategies at local, regional, and national levels to address the threats to peace that now faced every level of the bitterly divided country. They did this while the outcome of top-level talks still hung in a dicey balance, well before agreements were reached about the key issues driving the conflict.

Things had started, as they usually do, with a top-down focus. In February, 1990 President de Klerk shocked the world by releasing Nelson Mandela and unbanning his party, the African National Congress. Hopes for peace rose in April that year when the parties gathered for the first major round of talks. And hopes rose even higher in the following months when the parties agreed on a set of principles to guide the talks.

But the prospect of major change unleashes vast pent-up energies in a society. Human emotions, good and bad, are escalated. People desperate for change press hopefully forward with their dreams. Those who fear change or a repeat of past traumas raise shrill voices of warning. Those hungry for power position themselves to grab what they can.

At the same time, the institutions and social processes that normally keep things under control are weakening. When people believe new structures are at hand, they take the old structures less seriously. In business, education, health care, transportation, human services, courts, policing, local and regional politics, people recognize that whatever was done in the past will change. Those managing these sectors postpone decisive action while they wait for word of where things are headed. Governance and social control almost unavoidably diminish.

Into this gap between raised hopes and reduced social order step a host of opportunists. Many are economically motivated. In South Africa transportation quickly became a warzone as poorly regulated local-level taxi owners competed for routes and customers. Business people, both legitimate and criminal, were quick to recognize new opportunities for sales and services. Real estate speculators began fostering rumors about the future of certain locations as a way to drive prices in their favor.

Political groups of every stripe raised their rhetoric in an effort to win support for their favored formulas. Radicals on all sides stepped up their activities. Incidences of threats, intimidation and violence increased. Some were motivated by present political realities but some seemed to simply be about settling old scores.

By early 1991, South Africans picked up their newspapers at the end of many weekends to frightening news: multiple deaths in faction fighting in Cape Town, dozens killed in raids by local level mobs run by political goons in Natal province, white farmers killed in rural areas by intruders unknown; scores killed and wounded throughout the country in small incidents of violence of unclear origins; police moving in armored vehicles against stone throwers, hundreds of demonstrators tear-gassed, attacked by dogs, and targeted with rubber bullets by police. It seemed the entire country could go up in flames while politicians dawdled in endless talks. I was shocked one Friday evening to realize that every bridge I passed en route to a friend’s house was guarded by heavily armed troops. “It’s war!” I thought.

It was clear something had to be done. The white government made a game try, convening a broad “peace conference” to discuss how to deal with the wave of violence. But they botched it by unilaterally announcing the event as a government initiative, without consulting the other parties. No black leader could maintain credibility in his own community, where his reputation was already in jeopardy if he supported negotiation with hated whites, by participating in a government-sponsored “peace conference”. A classic example of a constructive outcome, desired by many, destroyed by bad process in setting it up! Only white government reps and a few blacks known to be stooges attended.

Violence – and panic - continued to escalate. The politicians clearly were not going to deliver. In this time a handful of black and white business and religious leaders got together and agreed on a strategy: They would convene a conference on addressing the violence under their own joint auspices and invite the politicians to attend. The group was well-balanced, black and white. They knew and trusted each other, and they were well-connected to key political leaders. No one group would gain power or credibility by having the conference convened in their name. Politicians of all backgrounds happily accepted their invitation to a second conference held in June, 1991.

The National Peace Accord that resulted established the world’s largest conflict resolution structure. A dozen Regional Peace Committees were formed made up of respected black and white leaders. A National Peace Committee made up of senior national politicians oversaw the regional committees. Beneath the Regional Committees, dozens of Local Peace Committees were set up in hot areas. More than two thousand training workshops were held, most several days in length, to train people in skills for monitoring violence, negotiation, conflict analysis, and mediation. Hundreds of salaried staff and a far larger number of volunteers served as monitors for marches and demonstrations, as advocates on behalf of local community needs, as mediators to defuse local tension points, and as motivators for peace within their own communities. A media section conducted a media campaign advocating peace. Programs were conducted in schools telling stories of peace and training youngsters in conflict resolution.

The National Peace Accord structure had many flaws, but it played a pivotal role time and again in defusing crises . On dozen of occasions, confrontations that threatened large-scale violence were defused or diverted. The energies and goodwill of a vast network of supporters of peace were harnessed to maintain calm while talks were going on at the top.

Equally important, South Africans at all levels had access to the peace process. In spite of traumatizing events that included the assassination by a white racist of Mandela’s key lieutenant and numerous bloody massacres, enough people were able to maintain hope in the possibility of peace that the talks always got back on track.

As director of training of a conflict resolution organization, I sat with a number of other civil society advisors on the training committee of that National Peace Accord structure. Half the committee were high-level politicians also deeply involved as negotiators in the national talks. I often wondered how they found the time to sit and labor several times a month over the details of training conferences on negotiation and violence monitoring. But there they were. Enough of the key political leadership on both sides grasped that they could not singlehandedly drive the country to peace that there was a constant effort to root the process downwards. Though the politicians focused mostly on the high level talks, they invested deeply in broadening the process to all levels of the nation. As a result, even massive disruptions were never able to halt for long the momentum for change.

South Africa built its transition not only from above but also from within, with active involvement of the civil society throughout the key stages. The beleaguered people of Israel/Palestine deserve no less.

—————————————-

Copyright 2007. May be reproduced, but web versions must point to RiverhouseEpress.com/WordPress

Ron Kraybill, PhD, was Training Advisor to the South African National Peace Accord 1993-95. A professor of peacebuilding and conflict transformation and a consultant to the UN, he has trained leaders at local, national and regional levels in skills of negotiation, conflict analysis and peacebuilding in over twenty countries, including South Africa, Ireland, Sri Lanka, Liberia, and Guyana. Presently he is based in Jerusalem as Senior Advisor on Peacebuilding and Diplomacy for the American Friends Service Committee.

This is the third time for this piece on Paxblog.  Unfortunately it seems more chillingly accurate today than it did when first posted in November, 2004, as the US was launching a major assault on Fallujah.   I leave the original wording which anticipates what will happen in Fallujah.   Just substitute the name of any other city, in Iraq or elsewhere, and you’ll get the picture.

 * * * *

A lifetime in peace negotiations has given me considerable exposure to insurgency movements. The past never fully predicts the future, but it often offers useful pointers. Here is what we can say about those fighting against the United States in Iraq and what patterns of the past suggest we can expect:

1) The majority of those fighting the American forces see themselves as patriots and lovers of their homeland, fighting for the future of their sons and daughters. They are not carefully calculating gains against costs, rather they fight with the passion of those who consider dignity and home to be under attack. Foreigners, by all accounts, are a minority, less than one in five.

2) Their doctrine of resistance is guerilla warfare, whose aim is not to defeat but rather to exhaust the enemy in a protracted war that cannot be won by conventional means. Guerillas seek just enough engagement with the enemy to attract heavy investment of soldiers and equipment. Then they fade, for a repeat in other times and locations.

3) Guerilla warfare advances not through military success but by turning the broad population against the enemy. “We spent a lot of time carefully selecting locations where we felt we could get the army to engage in major action that would really anger local people,” a veteran of a modern insurgency in Asia once told me. “Then we would work hard to build trust with local people afterwards.”

If these patterns hold true in Fallujah and other locations of pitched battle in Iraq, the outcome is likely to look like this:

1) Just enough resistance will be invested in a given hotspot to attract heavy attack and serious damage from the Americans. American troops will always “win”, at the cost of high losses to civilians, homes and public structures.

2) It will be discovered in the days following “victory” that most of the insurgents blended into local populations and fled prior to or during battle and continue their struggle from multiple other locations.

3) Enormous attention will be given in Iraq and abroad to the damage caused by the Americans and the suffering imposed by them at the site of battle. The stories told will be a mixture of significant truth and fabrication. It will be impossible for the U.S. to defend itself against these stories because there will be no denying the core truth of vast destruction and suffering.

4) The extremist wing of the resistance will retaliate against any persons thought to have cooperated with the invading Americans. Average Iraqis will face the exhausting dilemma of navigating between widely despised foreigner occupiers and ruthless “you’re either for us or against us” extremists who have risen to power trying to drive them out. Conventional powers commonly assume that all resistance is alike, deserving to be crushed. “Deadenders,” was the word Rumsfeld used for months to describe a broad range of opponents to the American invasion. This black/white approach strengthens extremists by driving even more moderate resistance into their arms.

5) Voices of moderation will fall silent. The influence of thoughtful people that exists in every society and whose strengthening is critical to any hope for sustainable peace will grow weaker due to intimidation, elimination, and exhaustion. Polarization will deepen; violence as a way of life will become more deeply entrenched in Iraqi society.

6) Following American “victory”, fighting will end in Fallujah or subsequent sites of battle for a number of months. Normal life will gradually return. But after a lull, and after civilians have returned, guerilla attacks will be renewed and the cycle will begin again.

7) In the meantime, a new wave of recruits, incensed at the barbarity of the foreigners, will have joined the insurgents. Conflict throughout the country will continue to spiral upward.

8) Internal conflict among Iraqis will increasingly become a major factor. One reason is the disappearance of Iraqi moderates who might build bridges within. Another is the inescapable dynamics of armed resistance: autonomy and issuing orders becomes a way of life for insurgent leaders. Protracted armed struggle brings money and power and rewards intransigence. Those whose power has arisen in violence rarely yield their resources readily to anyone, including their fellow countrymen.

9) It will be deemed necessary by American leaders – whose internal power has also risen vastly from the threat and wielding of violence – to throw yet more soldiers, weapons, and money into the fray as the violence and chaos increase.

10) Return to step one, at a more murderous and destructive level than ever.

With few exceptions, this has been the pattern so far in Iraq and there is little reason to believe it will not be repeated. The frightening truth is that America is now trapped, having played repeatedly the role most desired for it by guerilla strategists. They could not succeed in demonizing the U.S. in the eyes of average Iraqis without active help and so far American leadership has assisted at every step.

The only way out is to remove all doubt that this is an invasion motivated primarily by American imperial purposes. America must face the truth – our leaders pretended to have global support but in fact had little all along, and made things worse by insisting on controlling everything about the invasion and reconstruction. The price of getting out with any credibility left at all will be bearing the continued costs of stabilizing Iraq, while giving up American control over events and structures there: administrative, economic, political, and military.

The history of conventional military powers directly involved in guerilla warfare abroad suggests loss of control is likely.  In the present situation, things are already far beyond American control and are in fact, moving rapidly towards loss of constructive influence. The big question is how much more pain Americans will bear – and tragically that suffered by ordinary Iraqis will be exponentially higher – before admitting the folly of thinly veiled unilateralism and narrow reliance on force as a tool for change.

Stark choices are at hand: America will either choose a path of genuine multilateralism with the accountabilities political and ethical that come with it, or bleed itself into degradation. The sooner the true sharing of control happens, the more likely it is that others will step in and give meaningful assistance in addressing a problem that threatens a vast region. The longer it takes, the harder it will be to ever recover from the now globally held perception that beneath smooth talk of liberation it is arrogance and selfishness that motivate America. Relinquishing the ability to call the shots in Iraq may seem to some a bitter price to pay. The alternative? In the best case scenario, a decade of war and enduring alienation from most of the world.

———-

Postscript on May 6, 2007

Here is a truth that America is only beginning to come to grips with: the day when this country could rely on military force as the primary source of security are gone.   The tragic misadventure in Iraq has stoked fires of hatred that burn far beyond Iraq.   The ever growing power and compactness of weapons, and the global mobility of humanity mean that the analysis described above is likely to emerge elsewhere.    

We have relied up to now on destruction of those who hate us as a path to security.   Today, this is a manifestly out-dated strategy that only multiplies and strengthens those who hate.  Our only hope for security from this point will come with increasing human security globally, not through military means, but through alleviating human insecurity and suffering.  

Intriguingly, Colonel Petraeus, the new commanding officer in Iraq, appears to understand this.   In his writings he makes it clear that meeting the human needs of local populations is a prerequisite to military victory, and he is now staking the entire war on accomplishing this.  

The truth is that this reality will apply increasingly not just to Iraq but to elsewhere in the world.   The dynamics of modernization, ie: ever more compact and powerful weaponry, ever more mobile populations, and societies ever more polarized by rapid change,  make this inevitable.  Will America’s civil and political leaders also come to recognize this fundamental reality of warfare in our times, and respond with the necesary shifts in priorities required for true security?    

 Click here for a quick overview of ideas for true security:

This essay may be reproduced so long as reproductions contain the following:
Copyright Ron Kraybill 2007. Used by permission of the author and www.RiverhouseEpress.com, a web source of booklets and edocs on peace including essays and a blog on alternative security, a conflict style inventory, and tools for dialogue and group facilitation.

“My judgment is, if we weren’t in Iraq, they’d find some other excuse, because they have ambitions….The best way to protect America is defeat these killers overseas so we do not have to face them here at home.”
- President Bush, commenting on the connection identified by US intelligence experts between US presence in Iraq and the growing threat of global terrorism, in a press conference, September 26, 2006.

In one sentence, the president exposes the fatal flaw in analysis with which he has led his country into a place of unprecedented danger. The biggest threat to security, he believes, is a band of terrorists who seek the downfall of the US, if not the entire western world. They intend to do us in, regardless of our actions. We must destroy them, at any cost, before they destroy us.

Bush is right that there is danger afoot. What he fails to see, and thus feeds, is a far bigger danger: the growing possibility that tens of thousands will join what until recently has been a tiny, marginalized movement of extremists acting in the name of religon.

Think extremism as a small cancer requiring only the right environment and a stimulus to grow. Getting rid of it requires that we be well informed. What is the cause of it? How does it interact with surroundings? What happens when we try to excise it? A surgeon who takes up the scalpel before considering these questions does more harm than good.

What the Bush policies have done is create a receptive environment among millions of Muslims who previously held the extremists in vast skepticism. Into this growingly sympathetic environment, the uncomprehending president’s actions are now scattering thousands of highly energized extremists like the shreds of a metastasizing cancer. His bombs in Iraq, his policies of neglect in Afghanistan, his appearance of being above law and world opinion have given the tiny cancer exactly what it needs to grow rapidly in many new places.

There is an alternative. Like physicians, we need to study the interaction between environment and disease. One hundred years ago, medicine paid little attention to this question. Bloodletting was thought to be lifegiving. Illness was a result of bad agents in the body; excise them.

Eventually science learned to treat disease as more than an isolated object that can simply be removed. It is an entity that exists only in interaction with the rest of the body. This led to far more effective responses. We discovered we could shut down certain kinds of interaction between disease and host, leading to self-demise of the disease. We discovered we could strengthen the body’s immune system, leading to the prevention of many diseases. We learned to do surgery in ways that do not release pathogens into the body, and even then usually as a last resort.

To restore security today, we need to direct more resources to understanding and limiting the interaction between the cancer of terrorism and its environment. This must happen at two levels, above and below the cancer.

We need to give higher priority to strengthening regional alliances and building good will among neighbors. There is no way that we can police the world. Logistically and financially it is exhausting us. Politically, it is alienating us from the entire world. Only regional bodies, backed when necessary by UN forces, can play this role.

We need to invest the billions we are currently spending on violent interventions in the long, slow task of strengthening regional bodies. There are vast grounds on which to do this: trade, water management, transportation, technology, drug and law enforcement, healthcare, education. When regional cooperation is thriving, there will be a strong base for those bodies to stand upon in addressing terrorism.

We also need to direct resources below the cancer, to addressing the fears and desperation of the masses whom terrorists seek to swing in their direction. The goal of bin Laden, after all, is not to take down the US in a single swipe. Rather, as a master of unconventional warfare, he seeks to provoke us into actions that will drive the masses into his arms.

We have all the resources of the world’s largest economy at our disposal to frustrate him, if only we have the wisdom to understand what he is up to. Think how much good will the millions of dollars that buy one fighter bomber could create if strategically used to improve the life of villagers somewhere in the world. It is already far too late in the badly-played Iraq game to get quick results with such a strategy there. But not in most places in the world. And even in Iraq, our rapidly-fading chances for success require us to give high priority to such approaches.

Our president sometimes inspires with his defiant courage to employ drastic procedures in response to life-threatening danger. Unfortunately, virtually all indicators show his procedures of choice are fatally out-dated. The patient is bleeding badly but appears to be awakening from slumber. Will we demand a different approach before it is too late?

By Ron Kraybill, PhD
www.RiverhouseEpress.com

The violence unfolding in the Middle East is a tragedy for all of us. Yet another generation of children who have spent traumatic days cowering in bomb shelters is the last thing the world needs.

Regardless of who may be “at fault”, when people watch bombs and missiles fall upon their home, they think of whoever is raining death from the sky as an enemy. Whatever gains anyone is able to wrest from this situation will be shortlived. Eventually the fear and hatred planted in hearts on all sides will reap a bitter harvest in the form of more conflict with ever more destructive weapons a few years down the road.

I’ve been struck with the emotions that this terrible war stirs among everyone, including peacemakers on all sides. Lora Lucero posted comments to a listserve in New Mexico that capture better than anything I’ve seen the challenge all of us face in a time of severe testing. She writes:

“I’m watching with great sadness as the Middle East (Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq) disintegrates into a cataclysmic war zone, destroying lives, villages & towns, and the countryside for many years to come. I’m also watching with great sadness as the peacemakers here at home are mirroring the conflict abroad with their words. Can’t we find a better way, a more constructive way, to advocate for peace?

There are well-meaning peacemakers on both sides of the conflict, but good intentions do not make an effective peacemaker. To spot a toxic peacemaker, look for the following:

1. An utter refusal to acknowledge anything the other side does as positive.

2. An utter refusal to acknowledge the other side has a legitimate concern in the conflict.

3. A liberal use of absolutes: “Always,” “Never”

4. A liberal use of exaggerated, emotionally-charged adjectives such as “blatant,” “outrageous,” and “unbelievable”.

5. When confronted with some facts which contradict their firmly-held belief, they shoot the messenger.

6. A habit of always speaking of the opposition as monolithic, such as “Israel wants to crush the Palestinians,” as if everyone in Israel wants to crush the Palestinians. Or “Palestinians want to destroy Israel,” as if all Palestinians want to destroy Israel.

7. A view of himself or herself as unquestionably righteous; doesn’t have an open mind to the possibility that he or she may be wrong.

I know it’s difficult to get out of the black vs. white, us vs. them, good vs. bad way of looking at the conflict, but we must if we’re going to make a positive contribution to ending the horrible carnage occurring on all sides of the conflict in the Middle East and Iraq, as well as international conflicts in general.

How many Americans are aware that the most sophisticated tools of modern communication are being used on a daily basis in a vast program of disinformation about this country and its people that is beamed into almost every country on earth?

Every time I travel abroad I see this program at work and witness its results. “I am so grateful for this opportunity to get to know you and your family,” said a Muslim woman in India in 2000. “We thought that Americans have no values, that they are materialistic, and care only about themselves. We thought there is no commitment to children and families, that everyone lives in immorality. It is so wonderful to see that these things are not true!”

Our own self-created propaganda wages daily war against us.
Whence this image of America? If someone had set out to create a powerful propaganda strategy to completely discredit a nation, they could have come up with nothing more effective than the garbage stewed up in Hollywood, marketed abroad and shown daily to billions of global citizens.

Our soaps show on a daily basis in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Nairobi, Bangkok, and thousands of other cities globally. Re-selling these shows makes nice profits for Hollywood.

As Americans, we ourselves are cheapened by their presence in our homes. But at least most of us know that neither we nor our neighbors live in glistening mansions filled with lustful people looking for their next liaison.

Unfortunately most of the world does not know this. When this realization first dawned on me living abroad in the 1980s I was stunned.

People really think that what they see on TV is real life in America? Today, there is no question in my mind. Over and over again, after they have had enough chance to get to know me that they feel free to speak honestly, I have had the experience of people in Africa and Asia saying, “I didn’t realize there are ordinary, decent people living in the US. I thought everyone was…..”

To the world we are Sin City.
Hollywood’s profiteering means that to the world we are Sin City. We create and peddle, people believe, cheap and immoral sensations whose only design is to arouse unseemly hungers. We are unprincipled; materialistic; we indulge ourselves without thought, they believe, in our lusts.

This means that whenever Americans point to high standards or claim to seek the welfare of others, we are eyed with suspicion. People have pictures before their very eyes that, they believe, show who we are and how we live. Why should they trust nice words? Our inclination to lecture others on right and wrong makes us look especially hypocritical.

Worse yet, our vast military network - bases in 60 countries - and our history of frequent use of violence to advance “national interests” - we have dropped bombs in 23 countries since the end of World War II - makes us look like not only an immoral but also a ruthless giant.

Can we blame Muslims, for whom sexual modesty and purity is an important value, for finding it easy to consider us servants of Satan? Luckily, most Muslims oppose violence against America and know the Koran teaches against attacks on innocent civilians. But given the picture of us that Hollywood places on the screens of our globe every day of the year, a percentage are stirred in righteous anger. If anything, it is amazing that there is not more hatred towards us than already exists.

Many Americans are disappointed with the response of Iraqis to our occupation. Why do they not have a little patience, people wonder?

Part of the answer is that, like most of the world, Iraqis have long been skeptical of American intentions. Because they wanted to be rid of Saddam, many hoped for the best when the US invaded. But because their trust was so low to begin with, it took only a few months of errors on our part to convince Iraqis that their long-standing doubts were true.

In an age of weapons portable and powerful, no military force on earth can create security for Americans as long as the majority of human beings believe we are morally corrupt and selfish. Sadly, the truth is that moral corruption and selfishness do exist within us. But could we not at least curb the peddling of wicked exaggeration to the world?

Because we are not trusted at the most basic level of social integrity, the grim truth right now is that any military move we make that is not clearly supported by the majority of the world works against us. Not only do we look immoral, we look ruthless and unaccountable.

What it will take to build sustainable security.
Our security can never rest in futile efforts to destroy with violence every threat that dwells abroad. We cannot, as the saying goes, “chop off the head of the snake” that now threatens. When the majority distrust us, every strike, even “successful” ones, multiples our foes.

Sustainable security will come when people of the world see that we, the wealthiest and most influential nation in history, take seriously the daily well-being of others; when they believe that we care deeply about the ability of their children to get basic healthcare, good education, and jobs.

When the majority see evidence of this - and right now no honest person could point to much - the extremists of the world will gain few followers. In that day, scattered rabblerousers may still murmur and rail against us from the margins of their communities, but the world will handicap and neutralize them far more effectively than our bombs and marauding Special Forces.

In the meantime, could we insist that the entertainment moguls show some responsibility to their fellow citizens and ease off on the disinformation they are peddling abroad?

Copyright Ron Kraybill 2006.
For more essays, go to www.RiverhouseEpress.com

We live in a time of danger and uncertainty. Loud voices call us to act, quickly, decisively, forcefully. Go this direction. No, there….

Which voice to follow?

A question to consider in choosing: Which voices strengthen our inner sense of hope? Which voices play to our fears? Which voices make us more certain that the world is basically a scary place from which we must be defended?

On the other hand, which voices support our inner conviction that more goodness and kindness and beauty and generosity and compassion exist in the world than we often allow ourselves to recognize?

In his recent book, The Left Hand of God (Harper San Francisco, 2006), Michael Lerner suggests that for several thousand years human society has been torn by a struggle between the voice of hope and the voice of fear.

The voice of fear says that all life is a battle. In the end, people are only out for themselves and their own interests. Security comes only by getting an advantage over others. We must either conquer or be conquered, dominate or be dominated, destroy evil people or be destroyed by them.

The voice of hope says that although human beings struggle, at our core we need loving connection with others. We feel most fulfilled when we are needed by others and can generously provide care and assistance. We hunger for respect and are intrigued with differences in others when they do not threaten our own uniqueness. We long to celebrate the goodness of life and consciousness and freedom.

Lerner observes that these two voices vary in volume. One gains ascendancy for a time and the other is ignored. “When the paradigm of fear is dominant, people look at all their experiences through that framework. At such times, politicians who speak the language of fear sound realistic, even profound, while those who talk about hope seem foolish and out of touch.”

On the other hand, when hope is on the rise, voices that were previously dismissed as unrealistic sound visionary and inspiring.

These voices are self-fulfilling prophecies. Fear begets anger. Hope begets understanding. In the years I lived in South Africa I was often struck with how the armed-to-the-teeth fearfulness of whites fed the anger of blacks. Trying to create a safe haven for themselves, whites sent a concrete message with their separate living areas and barbed wire: they cared for none other than themselves.

Fear-based actions sow, nurture, and reap hatred.

But starting in the late 1980s, whites found the courage to join the hopes of millions of black for a better solution and began to take courageous steps based on that hope. In the beginning, the ones with the audacity to hope were few and they were ridiculed by those ruled by fear. The times were dangerous, and there was good reason to be afraid.

But persistence in hope-based acts calls forth the best in others. Gradually, in three steps forward and two backwards fashion, hope won out.

Lerner invites us to do our own research. Ask yourself, he suggests, where would you locate what you see and hear on the hope-fear continuum? Ask the question of every movie and television show, every sermon and speech, every commercial and ad, every piece of legislation, every political demonstration, every theory of human development or spirituality, every rock concert and music performance that comes your way.

I agree with Lerner that our culture is today profoundly oriented towards the dynamics of fear. It is time to renew our grounding in the voice of hope. How?

Hope is ultimately a spiritual awareness, an awareness rooted in a reality deeper than the surface events of a given day or week. To his religiously diverse audience, Lerner offers practical suggestions that can be used by people of many backgrounds.

1. Do acts of kindness, love, and generosity every day, even when you are not in the mood.

2. Let go of a commitment to outcomes. Do acts of hopefulness even when there are no rational grounds to believe that it will all turn out okay. Good outcomes can and do happen even when there is no rational reason to believe they will.

3. Find a friend to share your vision of the world you want. Develop that friendship as a place to share your frustrations and renew your hopes. See that friend regularly and share your own inner fears and hopes and hear his or her hopes and fears too.

4. Pray and meditate. These root our awareness in the eternal. They help us accept the transiency of everything and thus reduce our fear.

5. Use rituals of empowerment. Reading the stories of liberation from Egypt, notes Lerner, helped keep up the spirits of the Jewish people for two thousand years while they endured oppression, exile, and brutality.

6. Join and participate in a spiritual community. In the routines of rest, worship, and celebration, we are reminded of the grandeur of life and creation, and of the deep intention for healing and renewal present in the Source of the universe.

7. Whenever you are giving a talk or trying to influence others in the public arena, ask yourself: does this presentation give enough attention to fostering hope?

Excerpts from Lerner’s book.

By Ron Kraybill
Professor, Conflict Transformation Program
Eastern Mennonite University
March 10, 2006
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Copyright 2006 by Ron Kraybill and Paxblog, a blog by the author on peacebuilding and alternative approaches to national security, found at www.RiverhouseEpress.com. Blog content may be printed or reposted but must contain this credit paragraph.