On War and Peacemaking: An Interview with Dr. Pauletta Otis
By Bennett Graham on 11 August 2006
IGE: From an outsider’s point of view, we’ve seen all kinds of successes and failures from the military in Iraq. Lots of successes, but then we’ve also had issues like Haditha and Abu Ghraib –- instances that have drawn attention to how the U.S. is treating the culture of Iraq, a country that places a great deal of importance on religion but has also seen its fair share of religious extremism. What do you think are the primary causes for these instances, these blow-ups that the media are focusing on? Let’s focus on Haditha for now: What was the primary cause of that instance?
PO: Well, this is where I reserve a bit of judgment. These young men have not been found guilty yet. Notice I’ve skipped the word innocent, because we don’t know if that’s true either. Now some public reports are that they killed civilians. And by other reports — media reports, not legal reports — a grenade was thrown into a room in the process of chasing people who were guilty of a crime, or seemed to be guilty of a crime in a war zone.
The broader question is: In any war, what causes young men and women to do things that are wrong, ethically, morally, and legally? Now Christians have a couple of viewpoints on this. One is that war, in and of itself, is ethically and morally wrong. That’s one perspective. The second is that war is ethically and morally and legally wrong except to prevent a greater damage – an important principle in just war theory. In this theory, just acts in the conduct of war – jus in bellum – are strictly proscribed by law if the parties in the war are state-sponsored armies. They are accountable for those moral rules. In a non-state-sponsored military force (i.e. terrorists, etc.), however, rules of war are slipperier because they’re not written down like our code of armed conduct.
So to get more directly to the question, if you look at this at an individual level of analysis, where you’re asking, “why did that man shoot that civilian?”, or “why did that man put an IED (improvised explosive device) in the road?”, the answer will entail a combination of psychological factors, social support factors, and religious factors. But ultimately you’re talking about motive to commit harm on a perceived enemy — civilian or otherwise. At the group level of analysis, culture and religion are supporting variables for explaining why people commit acts of violence. Cultural and religious codes of conduct often teach against violence, but other group dynamics sometimes encourage people to commit acts of violence that go against both the legal code and their religio-cultural code — two codes that should correspond but don’t always. There’s another factor of combat stress, which means after you get into stressed situations for a long time, individuals may be tempted to go far outside the lines.
The truth is that in war we always have atrocities because war is nasty, brutal, horrible; no one that comes back from two or three deployments is going to be untouched by the sadness, the sorrow, and the horror of war.
One of the problems that we’ve had in teaching culture and religion in pre-deployment situations is that we tend to say if you understand the people, if you respect the people, if you respect their religion, you respect them as children of God, you can expect to have a relationship with them. Yet I would suggest that people in a military uniform will always be seen as an outside intervention force. An American man in full battle rattle, carrying a gun and wearing war paint, is frightening—and that separates people, even if soldiers are smiling and taking off their sunglasses. So it sets up a conflictual interaction. The second part of that is that if you’ve painted a school for a village, if you’ve fed the children, if you’ve provided inoculations, if you’ve provided security, and you’ve left your own home, your own wife, your own children to do that, you have made sacrifices, personally and professionally, to contribute to the well-being of strangers. You’ve crossed the street like the Good Samaritan. If you suspect that one of those villagers has put an IED in the road, destined to kill your buddy, you can feel extremely betrayed, not only that no one said thank you, but they’ve bit the hand that fed them. They’ve hugely complicated the problem—but war is hugely complicated.
The American public has a hard time understanding this complexity, in part because we have lost our fear of war. And in some way we ask the military to do things which the rest of the civilian population in the United States is unwilling to do or even see.
IGE: What would be an example of something the U.S. populace is unwilling to see or do?
PO: We have very few pictures of the dead, dying, and wounded in American media because the American public is reputed to have low tolerance. So where on European television, Chinese television, or Iraqi television you can see the body parts of children, we do not see them on American television. If these are our practices and we have some responsibilities of any kind for the war that is in Iraq, it’s time for us to grow up and look sin, death, and destruction in the eye.
Therefore people of faith outside the military have a responsibility not just to work towards a withdrawal from Iraq but also the responsibility for what we might call “militant peacemaking,” which is getting in the face of an enemy and saying ‘What’s your problem?’ What can I do to help?’ ‘How can God pull us together to solve the problem with your country, your people, your children, your wife, your family?’ And that is the role of IGE and other organizations.
IGE: Do you think that there are any specific lessons from the Haditha case or Abu Ghraib, instances where the military had issues with confronting the enemy in a cultural setting, that transfer over to a place like IGE? Do you think there is anything that IGE might do that would correspond to those kinds of mistakes?
PO: Your question about IGE and intercultural mistakes is interesting because all cultural interaction is fraught with communication problems. What we say is always heard differently from what we mean. Everyone that’s been married knows that.
The key to intercultural understanding is twofold. First, give respect for what the other person means, not necessarily what he says. Second, listen twice as much as you talk. Americans are very bad at that. Academics are the worst. But people of faith have a benefit there, because if we believe that we are all responsible to a supreme being, we add a second area of responsibility that starts on the premise that we are in this world together, under the authority of God, and we must do the right thing or we are accountable for it. So in some respects, when you deal with Muslims, Christians, and Jewish people, at least, all responsibility goes to a supreme being; regardless of the name, the concept is the same. Working through other difficulties, then, is usually just a matter of time, listening, paying attention, and fixing things you know how to fix.
We know that most terrorists will say the reasons that they commit acts of terror are related to social injustice. God could not possibly have wanted such distance between rich and poor, between desert and fertile soil. Someone has to be responsible for it. And in the terrorists’ attempt to make things right on earth, they incur the wrath of others and perhaps even the wrath of God because of the methods chosen, not because of the motivation. It’s part of our responsibility to change the method and allow decision-making, which is what we call democracy. Economic development is what we call justice. And being of one heart and mind is what we call a religious premise for dealing with each other.
IGE:I was reading through your article in the Review of Faith & International Affairs from 2004 (“Responding to Religious Violence: Love, Power, and a Strong Mind”), and I was interested by your fear-versus-love argument in regards to modern violence and wondered if the means for solving this social justice problem is dealing with the fear of that injustice?
PO: By love I don’t mean “kumbaya” naïve feeling. I’m talking about active agendas to correct some of the human-made mistakes that people make. The fear part comes in because we’re always afraid of “the other,” afraid to get too close to them. And fear and hate are the same biological reaction in the body. Fear, hate, and anger have the same sort of bile attached to them. Love is hard-headed – soft-hearted, but hard-headed. If you truly love someone you know how to create not an emotional bonding but an action bonding.
IGE: When soldiers like the ones in Haditha are sacrificing and trying to show love to the Iraqis through their actions and are betrayed, is that the point when that fear is invoked?
PO: That goes back to whether we do it for the love of God or the love of other people. Now the Bible says that you love God, therefore you love other people. If you do acts in order to be loved, they will always backfire. If you do acts merely out of your own willpower and your own ideas, they will backfire.
IGE: How are you training soldiers differently on the premise of loving people? When all of the plans start going awry and their love is not accepted, how do you teach a soldier or an IGE field representative to keep loving?
PO: What we try to do is to teach them to do the right thing for the right reason. The right reasons include: because the commander told you to; because it’s U.S. policy and it’s good for the United States; because it’s the law; because it is ethically, morally, and responsibly correct. We cannot go into scripture and say “Ephesians 2:15 tells you.” There is a proper legal separation of the organized church and the doctrine of the U.S. military organization. American people are very religious but we cannot take church doctrine and simply say “do it,” because the military has many different kinds of religious people in it. That would be one way to get ourselves into a lot more trouble here than we are in Iraq.
IGE: What is the basis for “morally, ethically right?” How do you teach “moral, ethical righteousness?” Is that basic American civil religion, natural law?
PO: I’m not sure where individual young men and women learn it. But please note that at Abu Ghraib we had some guilty people, but we also had a young man who was basically responsible for exposing the whole affair. When people asked him why he did it, he responded that he wasn’t raised like that. It’s an individual’s character, their family, their society, what they believe to be right and wrong, and the courage to stand up for the right against all odds. He was put into protective custody because many people thought that he had betrayed the service. And I think he is one of the few heroes of our time simply because he had the courage to say what he thought was right.
IGE: In closing, what’s your vision of the role of IGE in the near future? Why is it worth sitting down and having this conversation?
PO: The leaders of IGE may not agree with my characterization but I think IGE is an organization of militant peacemakers. By militant peacemakers, I mean those people who are willing not just to sing kumbaya, do good things, talk touchy-feely, let’s all hold hands and pray, but the people are willing to get in faces and say ‘What’s happening here?’ ‘What’s really going on?’ ‘How can I help solve your problem before you become so angry you want to hurt someone else?’ That is true security, and it’s people like IGE and others who believe that the security of the world is part of their responsibility. I find the leadership of IGE is something I can subscribe to. I like the people working here, I like their idea of diplomacy, and it’s an active agenda. It’s not sitting in a Washington office, watching the world go by. It’s getting out there and doing it. That’s militant peacemaking.
Last updated 12 January 2009