Steve Burns: The religion of violence

In an April 2006 New Yorker report on the possibility of a U.S. attack on Iran, journalist Seymour Hersh quotes a former Bush administration official who explained the thinking behind such an attack: "A sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government." The same official added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”

I had the same "What are they smoking?" reaction, and you probably did too. Isn't it obvious that aerial bombardment doesn't weaken the public's support of their leaders, but rather strengthens it? Did the British people respond to the Nazi blitz by overthrowing Winston Churchill? Did the American people respond to the 9/11 attacks by forcing George W. Bush from office? Yet these patently obvious lessons of history are lost on the two most powerful men on the planet, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Bush and Cheney aren't the only ones infected with a near-religious belief in the effectiveness of violence in general, and airpower in particular. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak described the bombardment of Gaza that Israel has begun this week as an "all-out war against Hamas," as if the attacks won't strengthen Hamas' credibility with the Palestinian people as the strongest opponent of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. UPDATE: Haim Ramon, the deputy to Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister told the Times of London on Monday that, “The goal of the operation is to topple Hamas."

Just to understand how counterproductive the Israeli attacks on Gaza will be, just consider the context. In Palestine, there is a power struggle between the Fatah party, represented by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, which still retains control over Palestinian land in the West Bank, and Hamas, which controls Gaza after winning a majority of seats in parliament in the 2006 election. Israel - and the U.S. - support Fatah and aim to weaken and even destroy Hamas. Yet, in response to protests in the West Bank against the Israeli attacks, Fatah's President Abbas sent baton-wielding police against Palestinian protesters as part of an effort to "coordinate security" with Israel. When the attacks are over, which party will command the greatest loyalty from the Palestinian people? And if the answer to that question is obvious to you, why isn't it obvious to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert?

But Olmert's belief - or Bush and Cheney's belief - in the effectiveness of force is not open to rational analysis, and stands in the face of all evidence to the contrary. It really is an article of faith, as firmly rooted as the Vatican's belief in Galileo's time that the Sun orbits the Earth. Possessing massive arsenals which they have squandered billions on, they simply must believe that all this hardware is good for something.

Combined with their faith in the power of force is a faith in the power of humiliation. Recall that earlier quote from Seymour Hersh: "A sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership..." Yes, the demonstration of our power will humiliate our opponents and, once humiliated, what choice will they have but to submit to our will? This thinking was in evidence at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, where humiliation was a common component of interrogations. In Errol Morris' brilliant film about Abu Ghraib, Standard Operating Procedure, he interviews one experienced interrogator who was shocked to find that an Iraqi General he had been been interrogating over a period of several days had been subjected to the humiliation of having his eyebrows shaved off. "I never got any information out of him after that," the interrogator said. The guards at Abu Ghraib never considered the possibility that humiliation might increase a prisoner's resistance rather than decrease it.

So, to our diagnosis of the power-mad, let's add in a willful blindness to the possibility of resistance. The U.S. leadership never expected the Iraqi people to resist the U.S. occupation, Israel never expected Hezbollah to mount an effective resistance to its 2006 invasion of Lebanon, and so on. These men, the most powerful men in the world, are apparently unable to ask themselves this simple question: "How would I respond? How would I feel if my country was invaded? If fighter jets destroyed my home and killed my children? If I was imprisoned without charge, stripped naked, and tortured?" There's really only one possible explanation for this blindness, and it's the inability to see one's opponents, even the populace of a entire country, as human. "They" won't respond as "we" would, because they are something less than us.

How widespread is this willful blindness and quasi-religious faith in the effectiveness of violence? I can't speak for other countries, but here in the U.S. it infects all levels of our media and foreign-policy elite. These elites accuse those of us who advocate for nonviolent solutions of being naive, of failing to understand the world's hard realities. But who is more naive, more cut off from reality, than the person who believes in the universal effectiveness of violence?