Keep it simple, silly

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Playing chicken


"We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye... and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost." I never understood why this quote from Rev. Jeremiah Wright was so controversial. With somewhere around 120,000 civilian deaths in Iraq; 16,000 in Afghanistan; hundreds more in drone strikes over Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia; and a total of over 10 million foreign deaths as a direct result of U.S. military and economic interventions since those nuclear blasts in Japan, it’s totally understandable that there could be people out there who want to kill us.

Certainly, many of these interventions may have been justifiable, and could well have prevented further loss of life; but when it’s your son, your daughter, your father, your husband, your brother, your sister, your wife or your mother that you bury, it’s mighty hard not to sense some desire for revenge. And 10 million deaths add up to a lot of repressed vengeance; sooner or later, some of it is bound to be released—or, as the Rev. Wright put it—some of our chickens are going to come home to roost.

It doesn’t make it right. But neither does our rationale make the death of other innocents right.

So how do we make it right? We can play a childish game of tit-for-tat all we like, but this is never going to stop until someone is big enough to admit they’ve done some wrong. If we’re big enough to take on the role of global police, then it could be that we’re big enough to take on the role of global peacemaker. If we don’t do it, who will?

But how? And how can we expect others to follow our lead? And won’t this make us look weak?

While answers to questions like these may be hard to find, one thing is certain: it won’t be easy. Others won’t follow our lead: the seeds of vengeance have already been planted and will continue to spread—for a while. Some may well see us as weak, while others will respect us for our resilience.

But how?

Here are just a few suggestions that could send the message we’re making an effort:

1.       Take the lead from 12-step programs. Acknowledge that we have an addiction to military muscle (we’re responsible for 39% of the world’s military spending—as much as the next 11 biggest spenders combined—which looks like an addiction from where I sit). Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. Note the word ‘fearless’. Even if others don’t recognize the courage it takes to do this, we can. We don’t need to be apologists; we just need to be fearless. Make a list of all persons we have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all. Ten million deaths, many more injuries, and everyone else affected by them, adds up to a lot of people, but we could at least identify groups of people. Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others (including ourselves, of course). This is where the hardest, richest and most rewarding work really begins. It worked with the Marshall Plan and the Japanese post-war economic miracle, so it can work again. Continue to take personal inventory, and when we are wrong, promptly admit it. Notice how counter these steps are to current diplomatic methods, or even to our instincts? Notice how much success A.A. and its sister programs have had? There could just be something to this.

2.       Close Guantánamo. This would be a huge statement. If reading Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel’s description of his experience in the hunger strike at Guantánamo doesn’t stir some sympathy in you, it’s probably time you asked yourself when you lost your humanity, and how that is serving you. In short, the torture hasn’t stopped. Even without the force-feeding and the beatings; 11 years of confinement without trial, with limited outside contact, and with no clear end in sight is torture enough. Try putting yourself in such a position. Even on death row, you know what’s coming and why you’re there. Two days after his inauguration—on January 22nd, 2009—President Obama signed an executive order to close Gitmo. More than four years later, it still holds over 160 prisoners, many of whom have been cleared for transfer. Certainly, there have been many seemingly insurmountable obstacles to doing this, but we need to find ways to overcome them. This one action alone would show that we’re making an effort to change the way we’re seen in the world.

3.       Stop profiling. The Muslim world could be forgiven for believing we are closet racists. While the abovementioned prisoners languish in suffocating conditions in Cuba as untried ‘enemy combatants’, we rarely, if ever, treat other terrorists the same way. Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh, Joe Stack, Eric Rudolph and Wade Michael Page all belong to an extensive list of domestic terrorists who were each responsible for at least as much destruction as the Tsarnaev brothers, and all were either tried in civilian courts or died before that option was possible. Yet the moment Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—a U.S. citizen—was identified as a foreign-born Muslim, many pundits and politicians were calling for him to be tried as—you guessed it—an enemy combatant. Meanwhile, former informant Craig Monteilh tells us the FBI’s anti-terrorism strategy “is all about entrapment”. While we maintain such double standards, we make ourselves look both fearful and xenophobic to the very types of people we target (read: Muslims). And while we target them, they will target us—and we happen to be a very big, stationary target—which makes us pretty easy to hit.

4.       Get out of other countries’ business. At least where we can. Drone strikes and similar operations—both overt and covert—do us few favors overseas. We can never hope to kill every last remaining potential terrorist, and our attempts to do so will only encourage more. If we know where these people are, we know how to keep an eye on them. Let’s trust our ability to do that, while investing more in diplomacy and nation building, and less in weapons of mass destruction. Give the insurgency inciters as little to feed on as possible.

5.       Wear it. While law enforcement does an excellent job at preventing the bulk of terrorist attacks on American soil, every now and then another Tsarnaev will slip through the net. It’s inevitable. When it does happen, we need to stand tall and respond without malice or fear, as has largely happened in the wake of the Boston bombing. The more we are able to do this, the easier it will be for the world to see that terrorism is one strategy that will never work on us.

6.       Talk. These incidents—no matter how misguided—happen for a reason. What is that reason? Stopping for a moment to ask is always a good idea. We may not like what we hear, but we can still listen and take in what is relevant. As Jane Goodall has said, “Change happens by listening and then starting a dialogue with the people who are doing something you don't believe is right.” At no point can we agree that people attacking us is right. At every point we should ask why.

I recall a bumper sticker that said we are making enemies faster than we can kill them. We can reverse that trend. The ideas here are not new, nor are they comprehensive. But we need to start somewhere, anywhere—for the sake of our peace of mind, for our country, for our children, and for the families and friends of all the people this country has touched for better or for worse—and in this increasingly global environment, that’s nearly everyone (and mostly for the better!).

Because, until we do take the lead on peacemaking, we’ll just be playing chicken.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Jamie, Nicely said!
Another aspect to this: the Boston bombings, while inexcusable and horrific, were only one small sample of what happens on a daily basis in Iraq, partly - or maybe largely - as a result of US policies, and drone bombings in some village somewhere look much the same to the survivors as the carnage in Boston did to those who were there. I actually wonder how many Americans have considered this.
Jonathan

3:31 am, May 01, 2013

 
Anonymous Penny Lee, Australia said...

Right on! as some of us old-timers used to say.
This is well stated Jamie, some excellent points.
And I believe that vast numbers of people feel the
way we do. It's just that so many politicians have
convinced themselves that putting blind faith in
military advice is the way to go. Let's support our
politicians to be brave enough to take a different
path. Most of them want to lead their countries
effectively, but they find that it's just not as easy as
they thought it would be when they got themselves
elected. It requires courage, humility and care for
other fellow human beings beyond what they are
used to experiencing.

Whilst all aspects of modern warfare are horrific,
use of drones to kill people is a particular evil we must stop.

To everyone who cares and wants peace, blessings!

5:40 am, May 01, 2013

 

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