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Why Aren’t More Nebraskans For Peace?

Hendrik van den Berg
UNL Professor of Economics

In the New York Times of April 28, 2007, columnist Nicholas Kristof revealed several documents that confirm what a Swiss diplomat told the press some months ago, namely that between 2001 and 2003 high-level officials from Iran and the U.S. met to negotiate the normalization of relations. These negotiations apparently continued right on past President Bush’s January 2002 “Axis of Evil” speech. Then, in May of 2003, the U.S. suddenly ended the negotiations by simply not showing up for a scheduled meeting in Geneva, standing up the waiting Iranian delegation without any official regret.

The documents posted by Kristof on his New York Times website include the talking points for the negotiations as proposed by Iran and the revisions suggested by the U.S. The talking points include a set of principles that, quite realistically in my view, could have led to an agreement that satisfied the interests of both Iran and the United States. But, apparently, the Bush/Cheney Administration was not interested in peace. The abandonment of the talks by the U.S. after first encouraging their progress may have been the result of infighting within the Administration. However, there is little doubt that the misplaced encouragement of moderate voices in the Iranian government to agree to an accommodation with the U.S. ended up strengthening the hands of the more extreme elements in Iran when the talks came to nothing. The current president of Iraq, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power after negotiations for the normalization of Iran-U.S. relations were abandoned by the U.S. Since then, Ahmadinejad’s shaky popularity within Iran has been repeatedly propped up by U.S. threats against his country, and in each case, Ahmadinejad has returned the favor by uttering various threats against the U.S. and its close ally Israel.

In short, not long ago peace between Iran and the United States was a very realistic possibility, but we now face the more likely prospect of war. How likely is war with Iran?

“All Options Are on the Table”

There have been multiple reports on the plans for an air- and sea-based attack on Iran, prepared by our very own StratCom as part of its new offensive mission array. Recently, our military conducted a show of force in the Persian Gulf with an expanded fleet in various military exercises. White House officials openly threaten to attack Iran, claiming that “all options are on the table,” including nuclear weapons. Actually, U.S. aggression has already begun in the form of incursions into Iran by U.S. special forces and by the direct funding and arming of opposition groups within Iran. Any reasonable description of these groups would recognize them as ‘terrorists.’ The news media also have reported that human piloted and unpiloted U.S. spy planes routinely fly over Iran.

The likelihood of a U.S.-initiated war against Iran is also reflected in the Administration’s campaign to build anti-Iran sentiment among the American public. This campaign is aided by the same unquestioning and superficial reporting by the U.S. media that we saw leading up to the invasion of Iraq. The similarity between Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction and the constant suggestions that Iran is close to producing an atomic bomb should be obvious. Especially ominous is President Bush’s recent remark that we will have every right to attack Iran “if they gain the capacity to produce an atomic weapon.” Notice that these words leave completely open what capacity to produce a weapon means or who will decide whether that capacity exists. A surprising number of members of Congress of both parties openly state similar anti-Iran sentiments. Claims that Iran is directly involved in killing American troops occupying Iraq (as military spokesperson Brigadier General Kevin Bergner did in early July) have become routine. We even hear accusations by high-level military personnel that Iran is supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, a group we know it bitterly opposed just a couple of years ago. Naturally, continual allegations by the administration and our military leaders that Iran is supplying the bombs that are killing U.S. soldiers in Iraq elicit much emotion from the public at large.

These allegations of Iranian aggression against the U.S. are not really very credible, of course. It is well known that the great majority of attacks on U.S. soldiers are by Sunni insurgents, and it is unlikely that radical Sunnis would deal directly with the government of Shiite Iran. The media seldom report the nationality of the bombs and arms used against U.S. soldiers, except when an Iranian piece of equipment or explosive device is found. How many bullets, bombs, and weapons used against U.S. soldiers come from Saudi Arabia, China, Russia, Pakistan or Israel for that matter? Wouldn’t it be interesting to know how many U.S. arms and explosives have been used against U.S. soldiers by insurgents in Iraq. We certainly know that many U.S. soldiers are killed by Iraqi military trained and equipped by us. Yet, the administration and the military keep ramping up the accusations against Iran, and the media seldom, if ever, put these accusations into perspective.

Most telling of the passivity and incompetence of the U.S. media was their coverage of the historic meeting between Iran and the U.S. in Iraq on May 28 of this year. You may recall that this meeting was widely hyped as a first step in discussing how Iran can help to restore order in Iraq. The Bush/ Cheney Administration used this meeting to show that it was pursuing a ‘diplomatic solution,’ as so many pundits, opponents and foreign leaders had urged. Few people questioned the wisdom of the chief U.S. negotiator, Ambassador Ryan Crocker, when he emerged directly from the meeting to rant to reporters that, oh yes, the meeting went fine, but first Iran needs to stop supporting the insurgency in Iraq. The Iranian delegation followed standard diplomatic procedure and made no immediate statements about either the content of the meeting or what they thought of their counterparts. Media reports focused only on the U.S. threats toward Iran by Crocker after the meeting. There was absolutely no suggestion that the U.S. ambassador’s behavior may have been in appropriate or undiplomatic. Perhaps this was yet another attempt by the U.S. to undermine Iranian interest in diplomacy. Or was it just an attempt by the Administration to build a justification for war? In any case, the focus of the media on the ambassador’s allegations rather than the actual negotiating session suggests that the media will probably unquestioningly repeat the familiar Administration line that ‘We tried diplomacy and it didn’t work!’

Reversing the Slide Toward War Is Difficult

The question we in the peace movement need to ask is: What can we do to counter the slide toward war with Iran? Obviously, we cannot directly force the U.S. aircraft carriers out of the Persian Gulf. So a common objective of the peace movement is to influence public opinion in the hope that popular pressure will prevent the administration from launching a war against Iran. Shouldn’t this be an easy task, given that peace makes so much sense and war is so costly? Actually, moving public opinion against war is very difficult, and this is why the continual allegations of Iranian aggression against the U.S. in Iraq are so dangerous.

Given human nature, the constant barrage of anti-Iran rhetoric can easily overwhelm the best efforts of the peace movement. Recall that after months of demonizing Saddam Hussein, equating the opposition to war to being ‘French’ and mocking U.N. inspectors as keystone cops who couldn’t see the weapons of mass destruction that were sitting right there in Baghdad, there was little anyone could do to undermine the public support for invading Iraq. Today, we can no more expect a majority of Americans to discount the unsubstantiated threats, allegations and outright lies about Iran and accurately assess the potential costs of war than they were willing to question weapons of mass destruction. The fact is that leaders seeking support for war have basic human psychology on their side.

The Psychology of War

According to Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University (Nobel Prize, 2001) and Jonathan Renshon of Harvard, “a bias in favor of hawkish beliefs and preferences is built into the fabric of the human mind” (Foreign Policy, January/February, 2007, pp. 34- 38). First of all, people exaggerate their strengths: Research shows that 80 percent of us believe we are above average. For the same reason, generals are biased toward believing they will be victorious in war, and leaders will be biased toward believing their decisions to send those generals to war are the right thing to do. The population is always ready to follow those leaders and their generals, sure of victory. ‘Bomb them into the stone age,’ they shout confidently, truly believing that a few sorties of U.S. bombers will quickly accomplish such a feat. Combining the ready support of the public with our leaders’ inclination to overestimate their power to shape events, it simply does not take much to take us into a war that reasonable people should have seen as a disastrous quagmire.

Also biasing the case for war is the finding from psychology that people exaggerate the evil intentions of people they view as their adversaries. A little reflection of our own behavior makes that clear. Back in high school, weren’t we all convinced that the people sitting in the stands on the other side of the football field were not as good as we were? Go team! Beat the bums! Recall, also, how eager we were to accept the idea that Saddam Hussein was ‘evil,’ while we conveniently overlooked the fact that we had armed him to fight against Iran in the 1980s, that we, the United States, had intentionally caused the death of some half million Iraqi children with our enforcement of trade sanctions that cut Iraq off from the most basic medical and food supplies, and that if there were still weapons of mass destruction in Iraq we had probably supplied them. Now, few people or the media ever question the suggestion whether Iran really is such an ‘evil’ country. We simply ignore the fact that Iran has not invaded any other country; it has signed and adhered to more international agreements than the U.S. has; and, according to Kristof, it was quite willing to negotiate the normalization of relations with the United States just a couple of years ago.

Kahneman and Renshon bring out another important psychological finding, which is that people are instinctively distrustful of negotiated solutions. Humans tend to discount the importance of any concession made by others in a negotiation, especially by people we perceive as hostile to our interests. Kahneman reports an interesting experiment in which a sample of Israeli citizens were asked their opinions on a peace proposal. One group of Israelis was told that the proposal was made by the Palestinians; another group was told that it was an Israeli proposal. Overwhelmingly, those who were told the proposal was a Palestinian one replied it was biased in favor of the Palestinians. The majority of the group of random respondents that was told it was an Israeli proposal thought it was ‘evenhanded.’ Hence, the Administration’s campaign to brand Iran as ‘evil’ not only prepares Americans for instinctively supporting any future war against Iran, but it also undermines negotiations to avoid such a war in the first place.

Finally, psychologists have also uncovered overwhelming evidence that people routinely dwell on immediate problems and ignore major problems that affect our lives in the long run. Evolution ‘hard-wired’ us to focus on the short-run because, well, if our ancestors had failed to quickly react to the bear threatening them at the mouth of their cave because they were too preoccupied thinking about whether they had stored enough food to get through the next winter, we would not be here today. The oblivious long-run visionaries were eaten by bears and did not live to have descendants and thus did not pass on their genes. In the case of Iran, we desperately need people to focus on the long-run consequences. Unfortunately, though, we have to accept that humans are more likely to join the mad rush toward the cave mouth to confront the alleged arrival of a bear.

So, How Do We Achieve Peace?

Nebraskans for Peace faces the challenge of countering the drumbeat toward a war with Iran. If that drumbeat continues, human psychology suggests that most Americans will sooner or later succumb to the war fever. Those who value peace must, therefore, work very hard to counter the tendency of people to overestimate how successful any military action against Iran would be, to exaggerate the evil Iran really is, to discount the potential gains from peaceful negotiation and interaction with Iran, and to ignore the long-run cost and futility of war.

In a perverse way, it helps to have the current reality of Iraq to remind Americans that our military might does not guarantee success. In 2003, when we decided to invade Iraq, the deaths of over two million Vietnamese and 50,000 Americans justified by a non-existent Gulf of Tonkin incident were but a distant memory. However, the fact that John McCain, a leading candidate for president of the U.S. in 2008, can enjoy wild cheers from his audience by singing “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann” shows how strong the psychological biases for going to war against alleged enemies still are even as we see daily reports of chaos in Iraq. The reports of the alleged role of Iran in the current Iraq quagmire is clearly intended to tilt the balance from resistance to more death and destruction toward animosity against Iran.

We can also contribute to peace by showing how costly a war with, specifically, Iran would be in terms of human lives and long-term human welfare. Iran’s population is three times that of Iraq. And, Iran’s army is more powerful than Iraq’s army was in 2003. It has the ability to disrupt oil traffic in the Persian Gulf, with devastating consequences for the entire world economy. An obvious question to pose to anyone prone to supporting a war against Iran is: What would it accomplish? More to the point, what could such a devastating war accomplish that could not be accomplished through peaceful negotiation and trade? After all, Kristof showed that the negotiations that we abandoned were clearly moving toward dealing with the very same issues that now lead Administration officials to threaten war. And it is the U.S. that seeks to cut off trade with sanctions; it is clearly not Iran that wants to deprive us of the peaceful acquisition of oil through trade.

The peace movement’s most important task may be to keep reminding Americans that the campaign the Administration is mounting against Iran is nothing other than a sinister play on Americans’ worst instincts. We should often bring up the claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the Gulf of Tonkin, or the unproven explosion of the Maine in Havana Bay a century ago. Americans have been bamboozled into senseless wars many times before.

Educating Our Leaders

You could easily argue, based on what we have discussed in this article, that the evolved and hard-wired behavioral tendencies for people to let their emotions carry them into battle will doom any efforts to push people to think seriously about peace. However, there is another very encouraging recent discovery from the fields of neuroscience and psychology: People can learn to behave differently.

Experiments show that the human brain reacts very differently to an unfamiliar problem than it does in the case of known problems. Human behavior is therefore guided by a learning process that involves the brain reorganizing itself. For example, one recent psychological study noted that pilots learn to fly by their instruments even though the emotional and automatic processes of the brain cause their eyes to seek visual orientations. Experienced pilots ‘learn’ to immediately focus on their instruments while novices look outside first before remembering that they can more accurately guide their airplane by using their instruments. Neuroscientific studies of the brain effectively confirm what we have known for a long time, and that is that training, practice, repetition and experience are important behavioral determinants. Just like experienced pilots have learned to look at their instruments before looking out the cockpit window, people can learn to think about how to achieve peace before they grab for their weapons.

In the case of war and peace, we can use history, personal experience, and social scientists’ understanding of how societies flourish to educate people to think of peace first. We can learn to choose the peaceful alternatives that provide humanity with the greatest long-run well being. A good example of how to educate people to favor peace over war is Germany, a country severely criticized by the Bush/Cheney Administration and the media for not joining the “coalition of the willing” in Iraq. Yet, wasn’t it wonderful that a country that was once synonymous with war now has a population that is adamantly anti-war and pro-peace? This is not a weakness, but an incredible accomplishment achieved through a national educational and learning environment explicitly designed to minimize the human tendency to go to war. Germans have achieved a government that shows little inclination to go to war by, first, coming to grips with past mistakes and, then, reforming national institutions so that those mistakes are less likely to happen again. So far, the education effort has been successful, and Germany has taken the leadership in unifying a Europe that had seen almost continual wars for centuries.

Here in the U.S., however, we are a long way from coming to grips with our past mistakes. Within the past few weeks, we have heard many U.S. politicians, even those who we look to for ending the Iraq occupation, praising the troops and blaming the Iraqis for the chaos in their country. Hillary Clinton said it perhaps more unashamedly than anyone else: “The troops have done their job; it is the Iraqis that are not doing their job.” By so blatantly blaming the victim for the consequences of our aggression, we are clearly not yet ready to take the first step toward peace, which is the admission of guilt for starting and continuing to pursue an ill-advised war. For us in the peace movement, it is clear that our task of changing U.S. attitudes toward war, peace and our relationship to the rest of the world is still in the beginning stages. Nebraskans for Peace must remain fully engaged in advocating peaceful negotiation and responsible international citizenship. We all need to write, phone, and talk to our government officials, news media, and community leaders on a regular basis.

A war with Iran is looming.