Conflict Resolution
I've been privately wrestling with this question for some time: "Is it possible to resolve conflicts peacefully?" Put another way, "Are war, insurrection, civil strife, whatever you want to call it, necessary?" Is it possible to resolve antithetical points of view fairly for all and without violence?
Well, of course it is, I think to myself. All we have to do is agree to sit down and talk through our differences. All we have to do is be willing to listen to others and work with them to resolve the conflict peacefully. That sounds good and right, and it seems like it ought to be doable. In practical terms, though, it doesn't seem to be possible to get to the stage where (a) we sit down to talk with our enemies, and (b) we are willing to listen to our enemies. In practical terms, neither of these activities happen very often.
Take the Israelis and Palestinians. The late Yitzhak Rabin and the late Yasser Arafat had to overcome a lot of distrust even to sit down in Olso, Norway and negotiate a peace framework. They did it in secret over many months, and when word of it was made public there was a great hue and cry on both sides. Eventually, Rabin was murdered by an Israeli citizen who couldn't bear the thought of a cowardly peace with the enemy.
If he wanted to, I don't think President GW Bush could negotiate with Osama bin Laden to end terrorism. The politics would overwhelm him or anybody who tried to make peace with the architect of the 9/11 attacks. It's very clear that bin Laden wants something from the US. It's equally clear that we Americans can't get past the fact of the coldly calculated murder of 3,000 people. We want, not without some justice, punishment for those responsible.
What does bin Laden want? He has said a lot of things, some of which are contradictory. Perhaps he wants nothing less than to remake the world into his vision of what it should be. Without some discussion where we hear what he really wants can we know.
Then, of course, there is the question of whether we would want him to have what he wants. I'm not sure I want to live in a world that is the vision of an Islamic radical. On the other hand, I don't want to live in any of the worlds envisioned by Christian radicals, either.
And here I arrive at the crux of the problem as I understand it. We can't always sit down with our enemies. We can't always engage them in dialog, either because we won't or they won't. The differences we see, or they see, are insurmountable. President Bush would be impeached if he even attempted a dialog with bin Laden.
We need our enemies. They validate our values by their opposition to them. We value freedom, for instance, and we see in bin Laden's apparent call for pure Islamic governance more examples than we really need that what he wants is antithetical to how we defined freedom. And he sees in our definition of freedom much that is antithetical to his vision of an ideal world. We believe, and he seems to have demonstrated, that he will kill to achieve his vision. That behavior is hardly dialogue inducing. We believe we must kill him to prevent him from killing others, killing us. And most especially we believe we must kill him to kill is vision before his vision overwhelms ours and kills our values.
Once a conflict reaches this point, it cannot be resolved peacefully. So the trick must be to keep conflicts from rising to this level. But to do this, we must recognize when a conflict is coming into existence and resolve it before it becomes a clash of world views that cannot be compromised. So, when could we have done that with bin Laden? I'm not sure we know. I'm not sure anybody knows.
I think back to the American Civil War. I've read a lot about that conflict and about the events that led to it. The seeds of the Revolution were planted in the Declaration of Independence. To win its approval, the non-slave colonies had to compromise on the language to achieve the unanimity that was needed to get the Declaration approved by all of the colonies in attendance. That compromise carried over into the creation of the US Constitution, and that compromise was tested and retested in the decades that led up to the split in the republic in 1861.
Eventually, there was no more room for compromise. The two competing world views refused to coexist together. For the abolitionist, slavery could no longer be tolerated anywhere. It was an affront to human dignity everywhere. To those in the slave states, abolitionist sentiments could no longer be tolerated because they threatened an individual's and a state's right of self-determination. Once it reached that point, war was inevitable, and the seeds were there from the beginning.
Everything is not amenable to compromise and peaceful resolution. That is the lesson of history.
Well, of course it is, I think to myself. All we have to do is agree to sit down and talk through our differences. All we have to do is be willing to listen to others and work with them to resolve the conflict peacefully. That sounds good and right, and it seems like it ought to be doable. In practical terms, though, it doesn't seem to be possible to get to the stage where (a) we sit down to talk with our enemies, and (b) we are willing to listen to our enemies. In practical terms, neither of these activities happen very often.
Take the Israelis and Palestinians. The late Yitzhak Rabin and the late Yasser Arafat had to overcome a lot of distrust even to sit down in Olso, Norway and negotiate a peace framework. They did it in secret over many months, and when word of it was made public there was a great hue and cry on both sides. Eventually, Rabin was murdered by an Israeli citizen who couldn't bear the thought of a cowardly peace with the enemy.
If he wanted to, I don't think President GW Bush could negotiate with Osama bin Laden to end terrorism. The politics would overwhelm him or anybody who tried to make peace with the architect of the 9/11 attacks. It's very clear that bin Laden wants something from the US. It's equally clear that we Americans can't get past the fact of the coldly calculated murder of 3,000 people. We want, not without some justice, punishment for those responsible.
What does bin Laden want? He has said a lot of things, some of which are contradictory. Perhaps he wants nothing less than to remake the world into his vision of what it should be. Without some discussion where we hear what he really wants can we know.
Then, of course, there is the question of whether we would want him to have what he wants. I'm not sure I want to live in a world that is the vision of an Islamic radical. On the other hand, I don't want to live in any of the worlds envisioned by Christian radicals, either.
And here I arrive at the crux of the problem as I understand it. We can't always sit down with our enemies. We can't always engage them in dialog, either because we won't or they won't. The differences we see, or they see, are insurmountable. President Bush would be impeached if he even attempted a dialog with bin Laden.
We need our enemies. They validate our values by their opposition to them. We value freedom, for instance, and we see in bin Laden's apparent call for pure Islamic governance more examples than we really need that what he wants is antithetical to how we defined freedom. And he sees in our definition of freedom much that is antithetical to his vision of an ideal world. We believe, and he seems to have demonstrated, that he will kill to achieve his vision. That behavior is hardly dialogue inducing. We believe we must kill him to prevent him from killing others, killing us. And most especially we believe we must kill him to kill is vision before his vision overwhelms ours and kills our values.
Once a conflict reaches this point, it cannot be resolved peacefully. So the trick must be to keep conflicts from rising to this level. But to do this, we must recognize when a conflict is coming into existence and resolve it before it becomes a clash of world views that cannot be compromised. So, when could we have done that with bin Laden? I'm not sure we know. I'm not sure anybody knows.
I think back to the American Civil War. I've read a lot about that conflict and about the events that led to it. The seeds of the Revolution were planted in the Declaration of Independence. To win its approval, the non-slave colonies had to compromise on the language to achieve the unanimity that was needed to get the Declaration approved by all of the colonies in attendance. That compromise carried over into the creation of the US Constitution, and that compromise was tested and retested in the decades that led up to the split in the republic in 1861.
Eventually, there was no more room for compromise. The two competing world views refused to coexist together. For the abolitionist, slavery could no longer be tolerated anywhere. It was an affront to human dignity everywhere. To those in the slave states, abolitionist sentiments could no longer be tolerated because they threatened an individual's and a state's right of self-determination. Once it reached that point, war was inevitable, and the seeds were there from the beginning.
Everything is not amenable to compromise and peaceful resolution. That is the lesson of history.
posted by Tom | 9:01 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home