Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (53 page)

On September 27, 1951, German chancellor Konrad Adenauer delivered a much anticipated speech at the Bundestag, the German national parliament, acknowledging that “the Federal Republic and with it the great majority of the German people are aware of the immeasurable suffering that was brought upon the Jews of Germany and the occupied territories during the time of National Socialism. The overwhelming majority of the German people abominated the crimes committed against the Jews and did not participate in them.” Although this symbolic concession to Jewish sensibilities was only halfhearted—because, in fact, the majority of wartime Germans at least acquiesced to Nazi actions—it was enough to start the reconciliation process between Israel and Germany.

Symbolic gestures don’t always stand alone, unhinged from all material considerations. Rather, they often help to recast a moral frame that determines the scope and limits of possible material transactions and negotiations.
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Consider, in this regard, attempts by Israeli and Palestinian negotiators to reach agreement following the 2000 Camp David summit. Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak had expressed readiness to state regret for the suffering of Palestinian refugees who fled or were expelled during what Israel calls its War of Independence and what Palestinians call the Catastrophe
(al-Naqba’)
and to perhaps accept shared responsibility but not primary responsibility (as Palestinian leaders insisted). Bill Clinton was further prepared to declare publicly the need to compensate and resettle refugees, without requiring Israel to accept refugees into its own territory or to acknowledge responsibility for their sorrow.
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At Taba, in January 2001, the Palestinian delegation responded positively,
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but the timing was wrong. Clinton was ceding power to George W. Bush, and Ehud Barak was about to be replaced by Ariel Sharon. The new leaders wanted to revise the decisions of their political rivals.

Another important lesson from this case is that without the acceptance of responsibility, apologies don’t work. For Palestinians, Israel’s continued settlement activity has been inconsistent with steps made toward realization of Palestinian rights, including acknowledging some responsibility for the 1948 “Catastrophe” and recognition of the plight of Palestinian refugees. For Israelis, in turn, the Palestinian Authority’s failure to prevent armed attacks on Israeli civilians had been inconsistent with Palestinian overtures of recognition of the right of the Jewish people to an independent state in the region. This resulted in distrust of the other’s sincerity by both sides. Symbolic gestures provide openings only if consistent actions follow.

An apology should be consistent with one’s own core values while simultaneously demonstrating sensitivity to the values of others. A good example why this is necessary is Japan’s repeated apologies for atrocities committed in World War II. China dismissed Japan’s apologies and practically froze relations between the two countries when Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi visited the Yasukuni Shrine, a shrine that honors Japan’s 2.5 million war dead but also includes fourteen convicted top war criminals.
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In 1995, Japan set up the Asian Women’s Fund to pay out money to former “comfort women,” victims of its sexual slavery practices in countries occupied in World War II. But the Japanese government stressed that the money came from “citizens,” and not from the government itself, arguing that postwar treaties absolve it from all individual claims related to World War II. The governments of Taiwan and South Korea rejected payments from the fund, accusing Japan of failing to take clear moral responsibility in “atoning” for its treatment of the women.
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Likewise, a qualified apology can be seen as worse than none at all. Take, for example, the U.S. administration’s apology for the abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq. In May 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld offered his “deepest apology”to “those Iraqis who were mistreated.”
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He then went on to claim that mistreatment was not the fault of U.S. policy, purpose, or principle, but of a few wayward soldiers whose behavior was “inconsistent with the values of our nation, inconsistent with the teachings of the military, and it was fundamentally un-American.” The qualifier—a few wayward soldiers—resulted in an angry dismissal of the apology by many in the Arab and Muslim world,
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a dismissal amply justified by subsequent revelations about U.S. policy permitting water-boarding
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and other forms of torture.
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THE DIFFICULTY OF RESPECTING THE OTHER

Understanding sacred values abroad requires some empathy, even with enemies, with the “who we are” identity aspect that is often hard for members of opposing cultures to understand. Consider America’s pacification of postwar Japan. Many in the wartime U.S. administration believed the Japanese emperor to be a war criminal who should be executed. But wartime advisers, such as anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead, as well as psychological-warfare specialists in General Douglas MacArthur’s command,
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argued that preserving, and even signaling respect for, the emperor might lessen the likelihood that the Japanese, who held him in religious awe, would fight to the death to save him. Moreover, his symbolic weight could be leveraged by the occupation government to bolster pro-American factions in postwar Japan.

Sometimes the symbolic value of a gesture that is weighty to the parties directly involved may seem trivial to an outside party. If France allowed Muslim women to wear headscarves in public schools, which is now prohibited, beneficial effects might reverberate across the Muslim world. For most Americans, it’s a no-brainer. The problem is that in France, unlike in the United States, signs of physical and religious distinction in school are viewed as affronts to the defining value of French political culture ever sincethe French Revolution, namely, a universal and uniform sense of social equality (however lacking in practice). “The only community is the nation,” declared former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin
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—an uninterrupted national sentiment that dates to 1762 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
Social Contract.
The only two moral entities widely recognized in France are the individual and the state.
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This example shows that recognizing one another’s sacred values isn’t transparent, even for allies and for members of societies that seem similar in so many other ways. More important, it illustrates that recognizing and showing respect for another’s core values is really possible only if doing so doesn’t entail compromising one’s own core values.

RATIONAL VERSUS DEVOTED ACTORS

Ever since the end of World War II, “rational-actor” models have dominated strategic thinking at all levels of government policy
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and military planning.
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Rational-actor models have always had serious deficiencies as general models of human reasoning and decision making because human behavior cannot be reduced purely to rational calculation. But in a confrontation between states, and especially during the Cold War, these models proved useful in anticipating an array of challenges and in formulating policies to prevent nuclear war. Now, however, we are witnessing the rise of “devoted actors,” such as suicide terrorists,
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who are willing to make extreme sacrifices that use a logic of appropriate-ness
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(I choose something because I think it is appropriate for perceived rules or to what I consider to be my identity)
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rather than the logic of consequences (I choose something for its anticipated consequences).
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This is also evident for the most tenacious conflicts that are grounded in cultural and religious opposition, rather than those based primarily on political competition for resources.

The assumption that adversaries act according to cost-benefit logic is standard in risk assessment and modeling by American diplomatic, military, and intelligence services. “Look at the National Security Council’s composition, which determines the direction of U.S. foreign policy,” said Richard Davis, a former director of terrorism prevention at the White House Homeland Security Coun-cil.
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“It is institutionally structured within a narrow intellectual frame weighted to consideration of practical costs and benefits in terms of our national economy, law enforcement, intelligence, and military. There is only limited provision for missions of health, education, or human services that represent our values.” Indeed, the U.S. National Security Strategy document explicitly states a commitment to “results-oriented planning” that focuses on “actions and results rather than legislation or rule-making.” It embodies a clear focus on practical consequences rather than on moral principles whose consequences may be indeterminate.

Political leaders often appeal to sacred values as a least-cost method of mobilizing their constituents to action,
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of enforcing policy goals,
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and of discrediting adversaries (for example, when U.S. politicians accuse one another of disregard for “the sanctity of marriage” or of usurping “God’s gift of life”). What works as sacred in one society is often entirely ineffective and mundane in another. When Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad publicly embraced and kissed on the hand an elderly woman who used to be his schoolteacher, Iran’s ultraconservative
Hizbollah
newspaper intoned: “This type of indecency progressively has grave consequences, like violating religious and sacred values.”
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Contrast the Iranian example with the kissing expected of American candidates on campaign tours. A gesture that calls forth a rallying cry to protect sacred values in one culture is utterly innocuous in another.

Many policymakers, however, argue that all so-called sacred values are only “pseudo-sacred,” because in a world of scarce resources, there is always room for trade-offs:
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People cannotreally devote all of their time, energy, and life to upholding any one such value. Even apparently irrational behaviors arguably reflect rational calculations of the holdout’s long-term interests, however incomprehensible those interests appear to others.
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Consider the angry resistance of the impoverished Lakota Sioux to offers of hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation for the Black Hills, of which the U.S. government has claimed ownership since 1877.
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The Sioux say that claims on their land are claims to their identity as a people.

In these and other examples, the actors may be described as “holding out” for greater benefits, such as eternal glory over worldly greed, whereas, for them, glory is a more rewarding and hence more rational outcome. But we only obscure the issue by giving post hoc interpretations of any seemingly irrational behavior (in the sense of immunity to material trade-offs) so as to fit a rational-actor model. No explanatory power is thereby gained.

Recently a group of Holocaust survivors traveled to Majdanek death camp in Poland on what they considered a sacred mission to search for mementos of those killed by the Nazis. “We’ve spent a million dollars so far to find rings worth maybe a hundred dollars retail,” said an organizer of the expedition. “But the objects tell a powerful story. There is no way that a modern person can understand the experience, but looking at an object … its rescue gives us all an opportunity to connect with the people here and their sacrifice.”
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Again, one might rationally construe these actions as calculated for securing a sense of collective identity or mitigating emotionally costly guilt or grief, or whatever. You can always interpret behavior as a rational choice after the fact. That may describe, but won’t explain, anything.
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It’s true that sacred values are sometimes used as self-serving “posturing” or part of some strategy for economic or psychological benefits.
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Politicians will exploit sacred values for their own material interests or some greater future gain, such as enhanced personalprestige and votes. Nevertheless, the seeming intractability of certain political conflicts and the reality of violence associated with these conflicts, such as suicide bombings, compels scholars and policy makers to pay greater attention to the nature and depth of people’s commitment to sacred values. Our leaders seem to understand the importance of such values at home, but not abroad.

DAMASCUS, DECEMBER 2009

In December 2009, a delegation of the World Federation of Scientists, led by Lord John Alderdice, went to Damascus to meet leaders of Syria and Hamas. The objective was to gain insight from our interviews to create new theoretical and practical frames for negotiation and cooperation. I asked the Israeli leadership what questions they might have for our delegation, and my colleague Bob Axelrod and I delivered their answers back to Israel’s prime minister.