The Silver Lining

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If the brutal and tragic agony of Syria today has one small glimmer of hope, it is that the great powers are completely stymied, blocked, paralyzed in their ability to resolve anything by military action. Were this 1914 and had we possessed nuclear weapons, the Syrian situation might have led to a war that ended the world.

But now we can see the old realpolitik tactics, supplying arms to the son-of-a-bitch that we thought of as at least our son-of-a-bitch, which never really worked anyway, completely revealed in all their emptiness. So why is this a silver lining? Let us not oversell. The complete inability of tribes and religious rivals to resolve their conflicts in Syria hardly bodes a future without war. History has not ended.  Potentially there are terrible conflicts ahead, especially over scarce resources like water and arable land.

But there is a possibility that the great powers, first of all the United States, can begin to play a different, more constructive role, a role of war prevention.  To do that, we must begin from where we are, where we are as a planet, and reconceive our national interest. Along with everyone else's, it is utterly connected to and dependent upon such non-military realities as that fish stocks in the ocean are close to exhaustion, or that the carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere has now surpassed 400 parts per million, or that global population is expected to continue to rise to between 11 and 17 billion people before it levels off. These are not problems with military solutions.

In this context, the cost of the American-led wars of the past ten years, based in a gross overreaction to terrorism combined with the misconception that terrorism could be eliminated solely by military means, has been a colossal lost opportunity for the U.S. Instead we could have invested much more in making the challenging transition beyond fossil fuels, or strengthening the food infrastructure worldwide—and we still could do that. Imagine having taken the cost of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and spending it instead simply giving outright decentralized solar and wind energy, medical help, and education to people in the developing world. It is at least an even bet that this would have been a more robust preventative of terrorism.

Looming behind our thinking about conventional military force is the issue of nuclear war. Here again the amount of money spent for zero increase in real security is appalling, and the emptiness in the rhetoric of national leaders thunderously hollow. With the advent of the computer modeling of nuclear winter back in the 1980s—that only a small percentage of nuclear weapons detonated could cause worldwide climate change, massively shutting down agricultural systems—the whole theory of nuclear deterrence collapsed into dust. A remaining issue is the possibility of a terrorist entity acquiring a nuclear weapon. The only solution to both issues is to budget not for building or renewing weapons, but to forge treaties to reciprocally bring down the numbers of weapons possessed by the nuclear powers—and to secure existing nuclear materials. This includes pushing for the entire Middle East region as a nuclear-free zone. The alternative is mass extinction, which will include the United States.

The recent disciplining of a group of U.S. military personnel in charge of nuclear ICBMs who had become unacceptably careless with the strict protocols around these weapons underscores the reality that the danger lies as much in the weapons themselves in combination with human frailty as it does with who possesses them. The U.S. and Israel threaten Iran if it crosses a red line, but our double standard, along with the universal bad combination of fallible people and a world-destructive energy, is there for all to see. It is a kind of miracle that disaster has not happened—so far.

On the nuclear level, the obsolescence of war has long been crystal-clear, though world leaders continue to pretend otherwise. The situation in Syria provides an instructive example of that same obsolescence on the conventional level.  It allows any policy-maker who possesses some genuine compassion for the children there, for everyone there, to say: we cannot help by selling arms to any one party, because we don’t know in whose hands they will end up. We cannot help by invading.  All war is civil war. All war is obsolete for meeting our real challenges as a human family. Therefore the first step, the best step, even if it is only a humble beginning, is to ponder: what else could we do that might be creative and helpful?

Erik Erikson's "Golden Rule in the Light of New Insight" Revisited

Sixty years ago the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson gave a talk in India on the Golden Rule, a formulation that occurs, with some variation, in all the major religions. Judaism: “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to you fellow man.” Islam: “No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother what he desires for himself.” Christianity: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Erikson’s theme was the creative potential of mutuality—between spouses, parents and children, doctors and patients, teachers and pupils, even between nations. Mutuality, Erikson asserted, is a relationship in which partners depend upon each other for the enhancement of their respective strengths.  The curiosity of a student elicits from the teacher the skills for transmitting the excitement of learning in a way that benefits both teacher and student. 

In the case of nations, fear of Hobbesian chaos if leaders relax their futile race toward military superiority makes it difficult to encourage mutuality. Ruthless power relations turn the lifegiving spirit of mutuality on its head: do not even think of trying to destroy me because if you do I will destroy you. This paranoia rationalizes the unabated manufacture of ever more destructive weaponry, irrespective of sensible policy goals, by ever more powerful corporations. As the vulgarism derived from the Golden Rule puts it, those with the gold make the rules. The ersatz American idea of mutuality (adore us, obey us, give us your oil) has often resulted in tragedy—or tragic farce, viz. Mr. Cheney asserting recently that given the chance to do it all over, he wouldn’t change a thing.

Is there anything that we have learned about the context of international relations in the years since Erikson gave his talk that might make his paradigm of mutuality not only more relevant but also more realistic?  Can the Golden Rule become more persuasive than gold?

First, establishment strategists schooled in pitiless power politics like Henry Kissinger have come to the reluctant conclusion that nuclear weapons cannot serve as a useful tool for furthering anyone’s national interest.  Kissinger’s boss Richard Nixon wanted to use them against North Vietnam, but was dissuaded lest other nuclear powers be drawn in.  Fortunately we were mature enough to accept defeat rather than suicidal escalation, and that restraint has continued. It may be a sign that we are gradually maturing beyond the folly of war altogether that most American wars since Vietnam, since Korea in fact, have been inconclusive stalemates.

When American, Israeli and Iranian diplomats, or their proxies, sit down to talk, do they simply threaten each other? Or do they hypothesize together what will inevitably occur down the time-stream if they fail to establish the basic trust upon which mutuality can be built? Is it possible for them to help each other see the possibility of shared survival goals despite the chasm of divergent motives and stories? Can they acknowledge how other nations have already gone through the futile process of arming themselves to the point of being able to pound each other’s rubble, only to arrive, a few months before Erikson’s long-ago talk, at the Cuban Missile Crisis? Do they share with each other the reality that the detonation of only a few nuclear weapons has the potential to cause nuclear winter, endangering not just specific parties to conflict but the planet as a whole?

The second basis for mutuality even between enemies, following upon the realization that anything else leads to nuclear extinction, is the model of mutuality found in nature, pressed upon us by all the ecological revelations and challenges that have arisen since Erikson spoke. Humans exist only through their mutual relationship with the air they breathe and the food they consume, with the sun that fuels photosynthesis, ocean currents, wind and rain. Mutuality, whether or not we decide to make it our conscious goal, is our essential condition.

Adversaries have the option to build mutuality upon these two principles: first, war in the nuclear age solves nothing and has become obsolete, and second, at every level from the personal to the international, we know now how deeply interdependent and interrelated all humans are with each other and their life-support system. These two realities have come down upon us a thousand fold since Erikson posited mutuality as an ethical touchstone, renewing and deepening the implications of the universal Golden Rule. These realities can help guide contemporary diplomats from all nations through the dilemmas that raw military power cannot address. Threats become less effective than initiating people-to-people exchanges or giving the “enemy” fully-equipped hospitals, gestures of good will that lessen fear and build relationship.  Such initiatives are exponentially lower in price than war itself. As Erikson put it:

Nations today are by definition units of different stages of political, technological and economic transformation . . . insofar as a nation thinks of itself as a collective individual, then, it may well learn to visualize its task as that of maintaining mutuality in international relations. For the only alternative to armed competition seems to be the effort to activate in the historical partner what will strengthen him in his historical development even as it strengthen the actor in his own development—toward a common future identity.

Finally, Erikson’s “common future identity”—after we understand that we are first of all a single species before we are Persian or Jew, Muslim or Christian—requires the acknowledgement of a further mutuality, the mutuality of earth-human relations. Our very survival, let alone our flourishing, depends upon cooperation to strengthen the living systems out of which we came—in order to strengthen ourselves. The Golden Rule, priceless beyond gold, calls us to swear on the lives of our grandchildren not only to treat our enemies as we would wish to be treated, but also the earth itself. 

Nuclear Emptiness, Nuclear Hope

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Schultz, Kissinger, Perry and Nunn, those quintessentially establishment figures, have just posted in the quintessentially establishment Wall Street Journal their fifth editorial since 2007 advocating urgent changes enabling the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons on planet Earth.

Computer modeling tells us that if even a small fraction of the world’s nuclear arsenals are detonated in a war, doesn’t matter where—could be Pakistan-India, Israel-Iran, U.S.-Russia or China or Iran—the amount of soot thrown skyward could curtail agriculture on the planet for a decade—effectively a death sentence for all.

So why do we hesitate? Are these weapons worth the money they are sucking away from our schools and firefighting equipment and bridge repairs? Why are Russian and American nuclear missiles still pointed at each other on high alert?

Working backward from the ultimate bad outcome of a nuclear war, no matter how it started, by a terrorist action or a misinterpretation or an accident or even a deliberate attack by one state on another, as we contemplated nuclear winter and no food, would we still divide the world cleanly into “goods” and “bads,” or would we realize that the fears and tensions engendered by the weapons themselves led to a system over which we did not exercise the preventive controls for which Kissinger/Nunn/Perry/Schultz advocate?

We need to acknowledge how our minds function—both the minds of the “goods” and the minds of the “bads,” because we all possess a limbic brain, a fight or flight response that goes back to our saurian ancestors. 9/11 paranoia led us “goods” to cross the red line beyond which lies the immorality of torture. But all of us also have a part of our brain that evolved later, a part that can make rational decisions based in common survival goals. That’s the part of the brain Gorbachev and Reagan and George Bush Sr. used to end the madness of the cold war between the U.S. and the dissolving Soviet Union.

A few weeks ago at a Maine conference on the Middle East, Lawrence Pope, an American career diplomat, dared to assert some hard truths. “I would argue,” he said, “that it does matter that there are virtually no Foreign Service officers in policy positions in the State Department anymore, and that at the White House, it is the military intelligence complex that reigns supreme. The Arab Awakening cries out for an active American diplomatic role. I wish I were more optimistic about the ability of our militarized institutions to adapt to this new world. As a government, we are better at flying drones, recruiting agents, and indulging in patronizing fantasies about nation-building than we are at dealing with free men and women.”

What is missing is not only diplomatic initiative, but something in our own hearts that can recognize free men and women when we see them, without wishing to control them—or their oil. In the context of nuclear paranoia, it is difficult to focus creatively upon war preparation and upon peacebuilding at the same time. They represent two disparate kinds of creativity. Establishment leaders assert we need both, in the form of diplomacy backed up by overwhelming force.  But as Einstein said, you cannot solve a problem on the same level of thinking that created the problem.  On the paranoid level, to a hammer everything looks like a nail.

The work of dismantling not only the nuclear weapons themselves, but also the enemy thinking that tempts the primitive parts of our brains, is endless. Maybe we are the good guys and Iran’s leaders are bad guys. But even as we become more alienated from each other and move closer to war, we both know that war will not resolve our differences and will only result in tragedy. The 80 million people of Iran have little to say about it. Because we’re supposedly more democratic than Iran (though hundreds died in the streets of Iran in 2009 demonstrating a yearning for democracy), we ought to be able to think more outside the nuclear fears that seem to box in our policy options.

Instead what we have is secret violent initiatives on both sides—tit for tat. We insert a virus into their uranium-refining centrifuges that causes the centrifuges to spin out of control. Someone, maybe us, maybe Israeli intelligence, is assassinating their nuclear scientists. Iran in turn arms surrogates like Hezbollah, or attacks computers in Saudi Arabia. Fears and stereotyping intensify, in a kind of proxy of the potential nuclear war no one can win. Bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would slow the impetus of proliferation but will not stop it. Terrible resentments would be exacerbated in the Persian/Arab/Muslim world, with unforeseen consequences down the time-stream.

Dialogue with adversaries should be based less on living up to U.N. agreements (Iran is hardly the first to break those when it chooses) than on shared realities. Nuclear winter helps us to see nuclear weapons as a subset of planetary environmental challenges like climate change and the shared systems of pollution in the ocean, soil and air. These make it impossible not to acknowledge common survival and security goals that have no military solution. The people we disagree with are as real as we are. Our own security and theirs are interdependent, however much we despise their prejudices or clandestine activities. We share the big transnational challenges, and we share limbic brains that, when threatened, revert quickly to default settings of “us-and-them.” 

Our nation was founded by Europeans who came here to transcend colonialism. Even as the Old World was giving up its colonies, we became a country that unconsciously revived colonial domination, rationalized by the assumption that our job is to bring democracy to the unwashed masses, or, failing that, at least colonize their oil. We could start by penitently acknowledging colonialist misdeeds like the oil-motivated interference of the United States and Britain in Iran’s democratic process in the 1950s, which we can bet Iranians have not forgotten. Doing the inner work of recognizing our own shadow-side would allow us to access the creative peacebuilding skills available to “free men and women” everywhere. Beyond “us-and-them,” we face the nuclear cul-de-sac together as one human species. It is hopeful that someone as pitilessly realistic as Henry Kissinger realizes that there is no way out but abolition.

Hard Power, Soft Power, and the Power of Good

Mark Helprin’s 2012 novel, 'In Sunlight and in Shadow', tries to articulate as noble as possible a justification for the tragic violence of war. The novel is set just after World War II, so it is not surprising that the rationale is based in the Churchillian mind-set of the campaign to defeat Hitler. In the novel, an older veteran argues: “How many millions have to die, Harry, before we stop worrying about unintended consequences?”

Harry, a younger vet, responds: “What if all nations decided to kill off what in their eyes was mortally dangerous leadership? It would become a Hobbesian world.”

“The world just lost 50 million dead. Is that Hobbesian enough? Politeness can be a form of collaboration, or suicide . . .You have to play it by ear, as you know, as you must know, having fought your way through Sicily, France, Holland and Germany, your responsibility is not to be morally pristine, but to preserve the maximum number of innocent lives. How many men have you killed?

“Too many.”

“Yes, and probably most of them were as innocent as you. . . . You know that, and yet you had to kill them, and you did, because all in all, in the gross and scope of it, scores of millions are alive now who would not have been, or who would have been enslaved, had Germany not been defeated. Children by the millions, Harry, they are the reason you killed men. Now you are forever morally impure, but Harry, if only by the weight of the flesh and blood in the balance, you’re purer than those who refused.”

This interchange strikes home because it is just how we might imagine our nobly impure presidents and generals think, conveying a sense of what allows them to sleep at night as our drones sleeplessly patrol—allows them to shed tears for children in Newtown but not for those in the dusty, half-starving villages of Afghanistan or Yemen. Prevention rationalizes preemption, and its inevitable collateral damage.

Even the difference between the civilian-encompassing firestorms of Dresden and the surgical precision of modern destruction fails to quiet our unease. Nor, surely, does the technological line of progress that says we can deploy a drone to assassinate, so why not, even if we fray the tenuous bonds of law and moral decency.

Nobly impure intentions enforced by drones are no longer enough. If they were, Afghanistan would not be the war-weary, corrupt, drug-saturated place it has become today, and we would not be seeing so many suicides among our vets. Our campaigns to bring democracy to Vietnam, or to preempt a potential Hitler in Iraq, did not turn out so nobly.

The doubts troubling Helprin’s young veteran have gradually magnified between 1945 and the present to the point where we can no longer avoid seeing our complicity in the Hobbesian totality. Our own carbon footprint helps the sea rise over low-lying Pacific atolls, or floods impoverished Bangladeshis. It is our own country that possesses the most nuclear weapons and sells the most conventional weapons and has the biggest military budget and occupies the most bases overseas.

The unintended consequences that the older veteran in Helprin’s novel might wish to disregard for the sake of his vision of the greater good can no longer be set aside as worth the price of war. Instead, we have become disagreeably familiar with blowback, where the “solution” makes the problem worse—as seen over decades of Western interference in Iran and Iraq, or Soviet and American meddling in Afghanistan. The blowback from targeted assassinations is already occurring as innocents are killed, resentments mount, and fresh recruits offer themselves for further mayhem.

And as more and more nations possess nuclear weapons, any modern conflict, even one provoked by stateless entities, could lead, as it almost did lead in 1962, to global apocalypse. Above the endless cycle of violence loom ultimate unintended consequences, like nuclear winter—the mother of all blowbacks.

The answer is not merely “soft power,” which still involves, by gentler means than war, co-opting others to do what we want. One possible model, one that could bring some balance into our overwhelmingly militaristic foreign policy, might be called “good power.” Rotary International provides a model of what this power for good might look like. Rotary has 32,000 clubs in 200 countries. It’s based in people-to-people relationships. It sets high goals and plods stubbornly toward them, like their worldwide and almost achieved anti-polio initiative. It makes friends and elicits the sincere gratitude of those to whom it provides crucial aid. Why is it not “realistic” to deemphasize our ironclad military fist in favor of a helping hand, with the understanding that an increase in the security of any nation increases our own?

Getting to Know Us: A Memo to U.S. Adversaries

 

One of the first things you need to know about us is how difficult it is for us to tolerate ambiguity—especially when untangling our own motives. An example was our second invasion of Iraq. After 9-11 we felt an itch to retaliate against a clear enemy. Because we could not pinpoint one, we scratched the itch by inventing a false enemy— conveniently, one with lots of oil under its sand—and going to war against it, to no one’s great benefit.

That endeavor revealed a lot about us at this moment in our history, though similar themes can be found in our past.  We have been all too certain, like some of you, that we are exceptional, that wrongs done to us justify our flouting international law, and that violent military force is the way to get our way. Though we are a young country, much of our story is steeped in hyper-violence: our treatment of native peoples, the horrors of the slave trade, the callous use of napalm on Asian civilians. Though we are not alone in our chauvinism, we Americans don’t care to look at the dark side of our own intentions and deeds: our interference in the domestic affairs of Iran in the 1950s, our casual and pervasive brutality during a long and pointless war in Vietnam, the lies that led us into Iraq, the gradual drift into torture, and now extra-legal assassination by drone.

Though we are a country that has been quite successful tolerating and even celebrating ethnic and religious diversity within our borders, we are also endowed with an ongoing racist strain which manifests in deep fears of the “other,” fears so deep some of us indulged in paranoid fantasies about our first black president being Muslim. But even that very smart president has been sucked into our majority paranoia: that the only way we can really ensure our nation’s safety is to dominate the entire earth, including below the seas and above the air.

Our recent history involves a lot of the tail wagging the dog. Our enviable prosperity is based in an addiction to the sale of arms, weapons that tend to get used and kill people that we don’t believe are quite as real as we are. It is also based in our addiction to oil, which distorts our policies toward nations rich in that diminishing resource. We may support an Arab Spring for some, but oil-rich dictatorships with terrible human rights records, like Saudi Arabia, get a pass. Phalanxes of our generals assume that the best way to advance through the ranks is to chalk up some successful combat experience. You have learned that it does not take all that much to set this juggernaut moving against you, because a subtle bias toward unnecessary war comes built into our economy, our culture, and our politics.

Those politics are corrupted by powerful lobbies that make it dangerous to voice self-critical positions. Many American citizens, and not a few Israelis for that matter, share your unease with the Israeli government’s settlement policy, the not so subtle attempt to permanently change the “facts on the ground” in the Palestinian territories.  The cycle of violence in the region assures that extremes on either side demonize each other, delaying the inevitable compromises that are the only alternative to another holocaust, this time a nuclear one. The settlements have become emblematic of enemy stereotyping between the multiple worlds of Islam and the “West,” ratcheting up global tensions around who has nuclear weapons and who does not.

The reality that ought to inform this discussion is the fact that if only a small fraction of anyone’s nuclear weapons are detonated, the entire planet could be plunged into nuclear winter, rendering worldwide agriculture inoperable for a decade—the starting point for realizing that all war has now become obsolete as a way to resolve our many conflicts.

On some level we know how much more good the obscene sums we have spent on projects like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter could do if they were reallocated to directly meeting human needs for education, for medicine, for clean water, for decent jobs. Because these are in such short supply in your world, some few of you are driven helplessly toward a violence that rationalizes the “collateral” killing of innocent civilians—just as we make similar uneasy moral compromises in the use of drones in a futile cycle of revenge. Our equivalent to your suicide bombers are not only the drones, but the hundreds of our soldiers who commit suicide because they cannot live with what war has done to their hearts and minds.

Before he was shot down at another violent moment of our history, our martyr Martin Luther King Jr. had begun to talk about the relationship between our wars abroad and our inequities at home. But his solution was as radical as any extremist’s: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” The tactics of non-violence are the secret strength with which not only our own country can overcome its contradictions and hypocrisies, but the quickest way, in the long run, that you will gain the freedom and justice to which you aspire, without bringing the American behemoth down upon you.

When you insist on thinking of the United States as Satan incarnate, bear in mind that Dr. King is a representative American consecrated with his own holiday, and millions of us still carry his torch of hope. His non-violence shows the way out of the echo chamber of fear that entraps much of the planet—whether the callously dominating violence of the modern superpower or the desperate helpless reaction of the terrorist.  Lasting change will come from neither of these extremes. It will come when we, we the human species, begin to fully address the adversaries we all share—climate instability, nuclear winter, world-traveling diseases—which make our adversarial differences pale to nothing.

All War is Civil War

Everyone has a stake in issues like the prevention of nuclear war, and indeed of conventional war, like the potential war between Israel and Iran or the U.S. and Iran, wars that would only delay, but not resolve, conflicts that portend nuclear confrontation down the time-stream. It’s hard not to have an interest in the present troubling rightward swing in Israeli politics (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/21/130121fa_fact_remnick) because it shows a hardening of differences between Israel and the Palestinians over Jewish settlements, a “local” conflict with regional and global relevance.

As an ordinary citizen, I’ve never studied international relations or participated in negotiations, but I’ve met a few diplomats. I once had a conversation with a man who had served the U.S. in an African country. I was astonished at his crude and unapologetic bigotry. It was very difficult to imagine this person making a good-faith effort to understand the interests and cultural frames of reference of his assigned country. Later I had the opportunity to get to know Robert White, Carter’s ambassador to El Salvador, who was as judicious and thoughtful as my earlier acquaintance had been patronizingly colonialist.

Another thoughtful figure I got to know in the 1980s, John Mack, was not a diplomat but a psychiatrist with a passion for exploring the thought-processes of diplomats or generals trying to represent their countries’ interests. Dr. Mack won a Pulitzer for his brilliant biography of T.E. Lawrence, the British soldier who tried to influence events in the Middle East during World War I using his extraordinary comprehension of Arab language and culture.

Mack argued in a later paper written in response to the horrors of 9-11 (http://johnemackinstitute.org/Deeper_Causes_2003_06_IONS.pdf) that it was crucial in the nuclear age that we understand the motives of the “other,” in contrast to President Bush’s simplistic formulations, such as “they hate us for our freedom.” In the years since 9-11, Mack’s orientation has only grown more important, and ought to be a requirement of any diplomat’s training.  A brief excerpt from his paper gets to the heart of the matter:

The dualistic mind is not by nature self-reflective and, inasmuch as it attributes good to its own motives and actions, it will find the opposite of good in the other.

Negative or aggressive ideas and feelings that are not consistent with self-regard must be pushed away, or projected outward and attributed to the enemy. A vulnerable and frightened public can all too easily be enrolled into this dangerous way of thinking. Psychologists, social scientists, spiritual leaders, and political professionals (as well as government and other institutional leaders who understand this basic truth) have a responsibility to do whatever they can in speaking and writing to change the public conversation so that the role of one’s own group in the creation of political conflict can be acknowledged and examined, and new possibilities brought forth to create a genuine global community. . .

Then we can begin to look at how the mind deals with differences, and is prone to the creation of enemies, especially when our very existence appears to be threatened. Then we can begin to look beyond mere tolerance to true knowing of the other. Only the mind that has recognized and integrated and transcended its primitive dualistic habits can begin to identify with the suffering and rage of geographically distant people. Only then can we see the aggression and ignorance that underlies our dominance and neglect, and perceive our own role in the creation of victims far from our own shores.

When U.S. diplomats sit down with their Iranian or Israeli or other counterparts, do they set a context for discussion based in this depth of mutuality, or in dualistic alienation? Either a nuclear war that no one can win will occur somewhere ahead, or all parties will build on their mutual interest that such a no-win does not occur. This shared knowledge of stark choices precedes trust. Trust in fact can only be built out of this context, because it is the common reality for all seven billion of us. In this sense, international relations based upon deception and threat, from whatever corner, have become oddly empty, obsolete, and irrelevant. More relevant is the kind of diplomacy that actively seeks to strengthen the security (the real security of nourishing food, clean water, and meaningful work, not the pseudo-security that comes who possesses the most arms) of adversaries in the certain knowledge that only what strengthens everyone’s security strengthens our own.

Four foundational understandings that give ‘”enemies” something to talk about with each other: First, even a relatively small nuclear exchange could lead to the well-known phenomenon of “nuclear winter,” affecting not just the parties in conflict but everyone else on the planet. Second, environmental challenges posed not just by nuclear winter but also by climate change and vast systems of pollution in the ocean, soil and air make it impossible not to acknowledge shared survival and security goals that have no military solution. Third, the people across the table are as real as we are. Our own survival and theirs are interdependent, however much we disagree.  Fourth, parties to any negotiation of conflict on earth share everything even if we forget it in moments of heat. We share the big transnational challenges, and we share limbic brains that, when threatened, revert quickly to default settings of “us-and-them.”  But it helps us stay human with each other if we acknowledge that reality.

How refreshing if the next revelation of secret Wikileaks cables showed that diplomats understood the real context of their country’s self-interest: we’re all in this together.

Maya

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Maya is the name of the determined protagonist of Zero Dark Thirty who pursues Bin Laden to his death. Controversies generated by the film include whether torture was essential to the success of the mission, whether the producers were given special access to the CIA, and whether the film amounts to propaganda that excuses illegal methods of countering terrorism. Kathryn Bigelow has been accused of wanting the film to be seen as both documentary and fiction, not unlike the way Rush Limbaugh wants to be seen as both as a cultural power broker and mere entertainer.

Zero Dark Thirty, along with Ben Affleck’s film Argo, can generate some useful reflection upon American methods for achieving security in a dangerous world. Both films pander to crude stereotypes of malevolent, swarthy-skinned, bearded extremists. They intensify the “us and them” paradigm that suffuses our thinking about a region of the world going through paroxysmal changes. Argo begins with a brief montage that acknowledges the U.S. role in the creation of modern Iran: how the C.I.A. interfered in Iranian elections in the 1950s and installed the Shah, causing blowback equally as tragic as that which began with Osama being with us against the Soviets (during their Afghan War) before he was against us (leading to our Afghan War).

Argo’s reduction of Iranians to brutal thugs is countered by the supremely subtle and human Iranian 2011 film of director and writer Asghar Farhadi, A Separation, in which an Iranian couple must decide whether to move to another country to provide opportunities for their child, or stay in Iran to care for a family member with Alzheimer’s; a work vastly higher in quality than either Argo or Zero Dark Thirty. Ironic that a film of that title has the capacity to bring together Iranians and non-Iranians to share a poignant exploration of universal human themes.

The two American films celebrate our ingenuity, courage and perseverance against adversaries. But both films demand that we look more deeply into the dominant narrative that produced them. While these are “only” films, Zero Dark Thirty points us back to the painfulness of the events out of which it came, illuminating the questions: how and when can the “war on terror” come to an end, and how will we know when it does? Just as Argo points us to the question of how to prevent a war between us—or Israel—and Iran, a war that would resolve nothing.

Osama bin Laden was apparently motivated to attack “the West” out of revenge—the ancient paradigm of an eye for an eye. In an extensive 2002 letter to the American people printed in the British publication the Observer, Osama laid out his specific justifications for horrific violence against innocents.

He began by citing passages from the Koran that give permission to Islamists to fight “disbelievers.” Immediately this sets up a pathological context, because it contains what philosophers call a performative contradiction: he proclaims Islam as a universal religion, but his vision is radically exclusivist. He believed that a universal God is on the side of pure Islam against impure or non-Islamists. Sadly, not a few Christians have been known to think along similar lines.

Osama goes on to say that he and his colleagues are fighting the U.S. because the U.S. supports Israel against Palestine. He is explicitly anti-Semitic: to him the creation of Israel is a crime, implying no willingness to accept a more inclusive, multi-ethnic vision of the region’s future.

When I spoke at a Rotary club in a large city a few years ago, I said that however horrific Osama’s crimes were, it was important to hear his rationalizations and understand his frame of reference; important to consider what effect actions of our own, like stationing troops on bases in Saudi Arabia, had upon extremists; and important to bring murderers to trial as ordinary criminals rather than to exterminate them. Not all of Osama’s justifications for violence were based in irrational fantasies of revenge. He raised issues, like the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq as the result of U.S. sanctions, or our double standards about whom we allow to have nuclear weapons and whom we do not, that have also been raised by patriotic and loyal Americans. A number of listeners to my talk stood up and walked out.

Our decision to assassinate Osama was not an act of restorative justice. Killing him would not have brought back to life those who perished on 9/11. It was an act of retributive, consciously decided, cold-minded payback. In the intent eyes of our heads of government as they followed the actions of the Navy Seals, eyes that included a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, it was possible to see the blindness of an eye for an eye that makes the whole world blind.

In the nuclear age, this lack of moral imagination becomes a great deal more important than the issue of how entertaining or truthful are the products of Hollywood. Our planetary misery and fear will never decrease by an endless cycle of revenge and counter-revenge. A pathological level of revenge is built into the very deterrence that rationalizes the possession of massive nuclear arsenals—the mother of all performative contradictions: a revenge-cycle that could kill us all, as it very nearly did in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

Shouldn’t any sane narrative of our response to terrorism include a few less drones that create more terrorists than they kill, and a few more initiatives of reconciliation between the West and Muslim regions?  It is past time to set aside, from the trillions we spend on weapons and war, a few millions for a Department of Peace.

Otherwise we are fooling ourselves—moving deck chairs around on the Titanic. “Maya” is the Sanskrit word for illusion.