Opinion Editorials, February 2010

 Perpetuating Violence:

The US Wars Continue

By Curtis F.J. Doebbler

ccun.org, February 1, 2010

 
Almost a decade after the United States began its violent “war on terrorism”, the war continues without an end in sight. The fighting has hardly unabated and the US seems to be taking its battle to an ever expanding theatre of war.
 
The recent claims and threats by Osama Bin Laden, the person the US claims is behind the “war”, only emphasise the failures of the efforts made. These efforts have been predominately based on a commitment to using violence to combat violence.
 
Violence has been used on both sides of this “war”. The 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States were only one salvo in a long running battle of violence in which the US has outshot all it opponents in aggregate, millions of times.
 
The superior firepower of the US is founded on an ever-increasing military budget that is greater than the rest of the world’s military spending combined. The “war on terrorism” has only inspired more military spending and the accompanying profit making and profit taking by those who produce the instruments of violence.
 
NATO and the international community, led by the United Nations, have joined the frenzied gallop into violent battle by turning to the use of force to combat violence. Most recently the UN appeared to jeopardise its own humanitarian obligation to the Haitian people by calling on the military to deliver the much-needed aid to desperate civilians.
 
When the UN turned to the military to protect aid convoys in Bosnia and Herzegovina more than a decade ago, humanitarian workers who had not come under attack previously suddenly became the targets of violence. It would seem that the UN has learned little from this lesson.
 
NATO is similarly engaged in Afghanistan to try to restore peace and order after the US illegally used overwhelming military force against the Afghan people who were, and remain, some of the poorest in the world. A similar strategy is being followed in Iraq where US forces continue to de facto occupy the country, having saddled the indigenous people with a government imposed under occupation and unable to maintain even the most basic aspects of security for the people.
 
It is incredible that despite the ongoing litany of failure of the use of force to confront violence, the international community still turns to force as its weapon of choice to combat violence. The idea that violence begets violence — sometimes expressed as the concept of a “spiral of violence” — is not new.
 
Mahatma Gandhi popularised the argument that individuals can only achieve real peace in a nation-state through non-violent means. The founder of the peace studies movement, Johan Galtung, argued since the 1970s that the only way to true peaceful coexistence between states is through non-violent action. At the same time, those who have analyzed — and often used — resistance to government authority have also recognised that the state’s violence usually leads to violence by non-state actors.
 
For example, in 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr characterised the use of violence by non-state actors by describing a riot as “at bottom the language of the unheard”. To understand those who turn to violence as doing so because they have been excluded from other forms of participation, and because their claims have been ignored, is not to support violence, but to realise how we might better end violence.
 
Today’s world is one of gross inequalities. For example, most of the world’s wealth benefits only a few (the majority of people in the world live on less than two Euros per day) and most people in the global South have a significantly higher chance of dying before reaching the age of most people in the North. These inequalities create an environment in which injustice can be used to inspire individuals to use all necessary means, including violence, to try to achieve justice.
 
The idea of combating injustice has its roots in as diverse modes of thinking as the teachings of humanism, Islam, Christianity and Confucianism. It is also the logic behind the incitement to violence that is found in Bin Laden’s words. Even the most naive reader of the latest Bin Laden statement can see that he is not calling for gratuitous violence but that he is basing his call to violence on the international community’s failure to ensure justice for the Palestinian people.
 
The Palestinian people have been living under the violent and oppressive occupation of the Israeli authorities for the better part of a century. To ignore this violence, which has been perpetrated with either the complicity of the international community or the active participation of some of its members, such as the US government, actually endangers international peace and security. By ignoring the causes that lead to violence we also ignore the most effective means of ending violence.
 
To the overwhelming majority of people in the world, calls for justice for the Palestinian people are legitimate. By consequence, when Bin Laden uses this cause to rally proponents of violence against the US, his calls — whatever you or I might think of them — will appear legitimate to a great many people. It is thus dangerously arrogant to focus the effort to end violence on violent means, while ignoring the causes that are used to justify violence.
 
This is even more so when any sensible person could turn to the practice and pronunciations of the same states that claim it is necessary to combat violence with violence. Israel and the United States, to name just two such states, were both created by a legacy of violence against the indigenous peoples who inhabited the territories upon which they were founded.
 
Moreover, if one looks to UN resolutions (the world body that effectively created Israel and of which the US is a founder), its plenary body, the General Assembly, has repeatedly adopted resolutions that justify the use of force (violence) to achieve self-determination by peoples subject to a foreign and oppressive occupation.
 
Undoubtedly there are those who will argue that these resolutions do not really allow the use of force by non-state actors, but this is a minority opinion, not the view of most of the people in most of the world. In any event, actions often speak louder than words and the example set by Western governments has been one of turning to violence both for state building and to perpetuate their own existence. These efforts seem to be classic examples of how the spiral of violence can become self-perpetuating. They are without doubt examples of how violence begets violence.
 
Perplexingly they are not the only way, but rather the way the international community led by Western powers — especially the US — has decided to act. In making this choice the US has created a divide between states representing the overwhelming majority of the people of the world and those who have accumulated the greatest amount of benefits from the resources of our planet over the past 200 years. This division characterises as diverse subjects as human rights, the seas, self-determination, development, economic and financial policy, and climate change.
 
Increasingly, people who have been left out of the forums of the richer, more powerful countries are turning to violence because it maximises their ignored voice in ways that are not otherwise possible. Common sense would suggest that the way to arrest this deterioration into a spiral of violence is to address its causes. Although this is not what the international community has chosen to do, it could make this choice.
 
Instead of giving hundreds of billions of Euros to financial institutions that contribute to maintaining structural imbalances between the rich and poor, this money could be channelled to ensuring that everyone has enough food and adequate shelter.
 
Instead of paying billions of Euros to the makers of military equipment this money could be redirected to ensuring that people everywhere have adequate access to healthcare.
 
Instead spending billions of Euros to build higher security walls or install more complex security systems, this money could be used to ensure access to education for all people.
 
Instead of spending the billions of Euros to pacify countries by the use force — something that has not worked very well — this money could be redirected to educating people to use means other than violence to combat violence.
 
All of these possibilities exist and they could be the focus of the international community’s action to end violence if the will existed among our diplomats and leaders. There is nothing sacrosanct about the strategy that has been chosen. The fact that the chosen strategy is not working is perhaps the best argument for change.
 
Every one of the possibilities mentioned above correspond to goals that our leaders have commonly agreed should be provided for, as rights afforded to each and every person on the planet. Many leaders have indicated their agreement by entering into legally binding commitments; others have made moral commitments in instruments like the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) Declaration.
 
Furthermore, the resources to accomplish all of the possibilities suggested above already exist. A noted American economist who formerly championed unbridled free market capitalism, Jeffery Sachs, has estimated that all the MDGs could be achieved before the 2015 deadline — by which, as things stand, they are currently unlikely to be achieved — by the international community investing less money than the US government spent on bailing out banks and financial institutions last year.
 
The MDGs call for combating the scourge of poverty, eliminating hunger, ensuring universal education, providing for environmental sustainability, enhancing gender equality, fighting HIV/AIDS, improving child health, and lowering maternal mortality. Achieving these goals all around the world would do more to ensure international peace and security than the use of violence could ever achieve. Failure to address these basic needs of people contributes to justifications that can be used to inspire people to turn to violence in the struggle for justice.
 
By focusing on the message of violence, we do a disservice to ourselves by ignoring the causes of those cries and shouts. We become as much a part of the problem as those commonly referred to as “terrorists”, and we do so with even a lower degree of legitimacy because we have other means we can readily turn to rather than violence. Unfortunately, to date, we just do not seem to have the will to do so.
 
Unless the leaders of governments can muster the courage to address the causes of violence, over which they have control, they, rather than those who they call “terrorists”, should be the most feared purveyors of violence. Moreover their efforts to delegitimise violence by weaker non-state actors are likely to fail. The failure to ensure all human beings the basic necessities of life when we have the means to do so is a form of violence and one of the most serious forms of oppression. We should not forget what the Roman Senator Tacitus observed about 2000 years ago: “A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man.”
 The writer is an international human rights lawyer and professor of law at An-Najah National University in Nablus, Palestine.