Where Do We Go From Here - David T. Ives

Where do we go from here!
I remember watching the images of the World Trade Center collapsing on TV and a friend of mine saying that the world would never be the same again. It turns out that many people around the country were thinking and saying the same thing. I have often wondered what this attack would mean for the future directions of our policies as a nation and our values as a people and, indeed, how we make decisions to intervene in any situation around the world, whether it be a military or economic or educational intervention or a choice for no intervention at all.

I remember reading articles about the Taliban and their involvement in Afghanistan immediately after the 9/11 attacks and most people in the United States did not know where Afghanistan was located and had to look it up on a map. The same thing occurred when we decided to go to war in Iraq even though the United States had intervened militarily in the region in 1991, an intervention called the Gulf War.

Not only did we not know the geographic location of a country to which we would commit billions of dollars without much thought and analysis, but we did not know the language nor much about the culture nor did we take into consideration the historical and political development of the country nor did we know much about the religions in the country.

Indeed, of the several hundred people working at our embassy in Iraq, only 6 spoke Arabic with any degree of fluency. Unfortunately, we often implement military solutions to problems overseas without spending the necessary time and effort to prevent conflict by investing in infrastructure, education, and health systems and taking the time to understand the challenges on the ground. This would include, in my mind, understanding the religions of the country and how they interact, the role of women in the society, the history of democratic traditions in the country, the perception of the country’s population towards the United States, the stratification of that country’s society, and the nature of the centers of power in that country to name only a few of the considerations that must be taken into consideration before any intervention of any type should be considered. Indeed, we have a lot to learn from our anthropologist friends in terms of how to assess an environment before drawing any conclusions or attempting to be of help.

An example of what I am talking about was portrayed in the movie Charlie Wilson’s War starring Tom Hanks. It was a movie about how the United States supplied and advised the Taliban and others fighting against the troops of the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan throughout the 1980’s. When the victory was finally won in 1989 and the Soviet Union left Afghanistan, our government thought that was it and any other expenditures of money for things like building schools and training teachers and health needs were essentially eliminated from our foreign aid for Afghanistan.

In my opinion, we therefore could have sowed the seeds of our conflict in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the region through our lack of investment in schools in Afghanistan. We may have won the war there against the former Soviet Union but we lost the peace. The Taliban had an open field in which to work in Afghanistan since 1990 when we left shortly after the Soviet Union did and we did not take advantage of the fact that Americans were very popular in Afghanistan and that Afghans wanted to have good schools for their children after decades of war.

The same thing happened in Central America where the Schweitzer Institute spends a lot of its time and effort. After the civil wars there ended in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, the United States cut most of their aid to the region because a military solution had seemingly been reached. Indeed, my friend the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and two time President of Costa Rica, Dr. Oscar Arias told me that he felt that the region was almost completely abandoned in terms of non-military aid to Central America with the arrival of a relative peace by the signing of the Peace Treaties. Although this abandonment is not the only reason, there has been a steady increase in emigration from these countries to the United States and there has been an increase in the drug trafficking throughout the region as this is one of the few opportunities to become wealthy. Both of these problems have exacerbated the problems of poverty and increased the amount of violence in the region.

One of the biggest problems I see in our relationships with other countries is the idea of American exceptionalism. I have heard many of our political candidates, especially on the right, assert that the world needs American leadership, that we alone seem to have the inherent right to lead other countries and that America has become less exceptional under our current administration. Such a position is arrogant and leads us to make unilateral decisions without consultation with our allies or to ignore their opinions entirely even if our friends give their opinions. While I have criticisms of our current administration, I do think that their basic instinct is correct which is to consult with our allies often and be a part of solutions as in Libya and to thoroughly assess the situation before an intervention, especially a decision as serious as the one to go to war or to retaliate, something I would avoid like the plague.

When I was growing up into manhood, the idea that the west or the democratic world was fighting against the evil ideal of communism was a quite prevalent position to take in the United States. My Dad, when he was angry, would sometimes say that the only good communist was a dead communist. A communist was that dreaded other off in another world who was trying to undermine democracy and eliminate religion and God. Then on my first visit to Brazil when I was 16, I actually met one. He seemed to have the normal amount of legs and arms, a big head of hair that I was jealous of, and there were no horns growing out of his head. I got to thinking that perhaps other communists were actually human beings also and slowly, I changed and started wondering if the stereotypes I had heard in my closed society about black people were true and then it just snowballed. It culminated for me in my work with the Schweitzer Institute whose basic philosophy is something called Reverence for Life, that we are all life struggling to survive on this planet and that anything that has what Albert Schweitzer called a will to live should be regarded as sacred. For Schweitzer, that meant plants, animals, and humans all had the desire to live and should be regarded with awe. When we view other humans with awe, it becomes very hard to kill them.

I am also very interested in a concept called the Responsibility to Protect which is being promoted by the United Nations. It comes from the former Secretary General of the United Nations Kofi Annan and his experience as the person in charge of the UN peacekeeping operations in Rwanda and Burundi around the time of the genocide that occurred there. In his capacity as the head of UN Peace Keeping forces, SG Annan tried to get over 100 countries to help out in some way, but not one country including the US offered any help. As a result of 800,000 people dying, Kofi Annan initiated a process at the United Nations in which he asserted that when a country cannot or will not take care of its own people, then there is a moral obligation to protect those people despite any claims of national sovereignty. I was the only North American to sit in a meeting of all Spanish speaking diplomats from all of Latin America organized by the Arias Foundation in Costa Rica. Each diplomat had to get up and state their opinion about this idea of a moral obligation to protect endangered people in their own country and each in turn turned to me and said I beg your pardon, I don’t mean to insult you, but I am worried about the history of intervention in my country by your country. When they were done enumerating the incidents of US intervention in their country, they all turned back to me and said that they hoped that I would excuse them for their remarks. Nevertheless, most countries thought that under the right conditions, intervening in another country would be necessary and that a number of countries, not just one no matter how exceptional, should make the decision to intervene in the affairs of another country. Haiti was mentioned as an example of a failed state where intervention is necessary and nowadays, Somalia is mentioned as another failed state where thousands of children are right now starving to death. This idea of a Responsibility to Protect should be given thorough consideration in the coming years and I hope it passes the United Nations soon.

Where I hope we go and that some of us learn from 9/11 is the need to learn where these countries are located, engage with others, learn about their cultures, make friends, listen to differing opinions, to avoid military interventions at almost all costs, and support humanitarian projects that take the opinions of locals into consideration, and indeed, are even designed by locals, not just the elite in a country. I would propose that we do that continuously no matter who might disagree with us and treat the populations and representatives of all countries that politically, philosophically and theologically, they are exceptional.