Why Is Our Best Option Invisible?
Nonviolence and the Iraq crisis
by Glen Gersmehl
Lutheran Peace Fellowship
Despite the dangers outlined by Colin Powell in his presentation to the U.N. Security Council, the majority of Americans still feel uncomfortable with a U.S. war against Iraq. As Christians, our difficulty with a violent response is rooted in the explicit and often-repeated teachings of Jesus.
The tremendous risks of war—to our soldiers, to the Iraqi people, to our economy, to the war on terrorism, to U.S. relations with our allies and the Muslim world—have received serious if sporadic media attention. But it is striking that in all these months, only a tiny handful of articles or editorials have offered more than a few sentences exploring a realistic alternative to military action that goes beyond diplomacy.
As important as diplomacy is, it represents just one dimension of that alternative, just one type of power aside from military power. Consider this: In just the past 20 years, a third of the world has experienced change brought about by nonviolent movements, successful beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. They succeeded against some of the most ruthless regimes of the 20th century: Marcos in the Philippines, apartheid in South Africa, Ceausescu in Romania. Most were completely nonviolent on the part of the participants.
If you stretch the time frame back 50 years to include the liberation of India, the U.S. civil rights movement, and even the anti-Nazi resistance in Denmark and Norway, the number of people affected rises to two-thirds of the world’s population. “All this in the teeth of the assertion, endlessly repeated, that nonviolence doesn’t work in the ‘real’ world,” as Walter Wink emphasizes in his path-breaking book The Powers That Be.
Think about it: The most successful route to “regime change” in our time has been absent from the public debate about Iraq! Before we take another step toward war, we owe it to ourselves, the Iraqi people, the war on terrorism, and the world community to explore that option. A crucial place to start is to examine the misconceptions and distortions of nonviolence that get in the way of our grasping its true strength and potential. Here are a few:
1. Military power isn’t the only kind of power. It is hard to respond to challenges like Iraq or terrorism if our principal concept of power is military power, dominating power, “power over.” Nonviolence is not passivity or weakness but an entirely different form of power, reflected in such phrases “power with” or “moral power” or Gandhi’s preferred term, satyagraha: “truth force.” While the popular view of nonviolence centers on its morality and integrity, it is equally about power, about changing things. Nonviolence takes as much discipline, leadership, planning, and creativity as the use of lethal force. It also offers a much broader menu of tools and tactics than those available to military options.
2. When your only tool is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. If you have any doubts, just follow the money: The 2003 U.S. federal budget again provides more than 200 times as much money to the military as it does to all our nonviolent responses to conflict combined—U.S. contributions to peacekeeping operations, State Department conflict resolution efforts, and U.S. Institute of Peace research and training programs. Even if you add all the money the United States spends to address the root causes of violence in the world—programs like the Peace Corps and development aid—nonviolent methods don’t receive even 2 percent of the money spent on military options! (Far from being extravagant, the United States trails every industrialized nation in the world in per capita spending to address root causes of violence such as hunger and extreme poverty.)
3. The mythology that “violence works” has been cultivated at every turn in our national life. The United States gained its independence through the Revolutionary War, right? Maybe not: John Adams and other leaders understood that our freedom was mostly won by nonviolent means before the fighting began. The colonists used many nonviolent tactics such as organizing resistance to oppressive British measures like the Stamp Act); boycotting symbols of our economic dependency such as British cloth, and WTO-style guerrilla theatre like the Boston Tea Party. But the war gets all the credit and has been used ever since to justify military actions that would have been unthinkable to colonists—remember, they even chose not to have a standing army.
4. Contrary to the popular view that military power may be crude but at least it works, U.S. military action throughout history has been notably counterproductive. Think about countries in which the United States has intervened directly or through others since World War II: Iran, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and through the French in Vietnam in the 1950s; Vietnam, Laos, and Indonesia in the 1960s; Chile, Cambodia, and Angola in the 1970s; Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and Iraq’s war with Iran in the 1980s; Iraq and Colombia in the 1990s. Such interventions have so often proved counterproductive that the CIA coined a term for it —blowback. (The word became the title of a revealing book on the problem by Chalmers Johnson, a Reagan Republican.) Even wars considered “successful” have often caused serious future problems.
5. Military action is frequently portrayed as patriotic and the product of our highest democratic ideals when, in fact, it is profoundly undemocratic. It is a truism that leadership in military units is not democratic, but we mean more than that. War and militarism invariably undermine progress toward democracy—on both sides of a conflict. Moreover, spending on defense generally comes at the expense of social programs. For example, one cost of the enormous levels of U.S. arms sales is that we have often contributed to instability and insecurity in conflict areas around the world.
6. War tends to foster and provide an excuse for authoritarianism; it is nonviolence that is democratic. While many Americans expected that the “war on terrorism” would lead to increased government surveillance, both citizens and civil liberties experts have been dismayed at the intrusive new powers now in the hands of the military and law enforcement. These effects of militarism—reducing democracy and fostering authoritarianism—also work to undermine what makes the alternative effective: the democratic social cohesion that takes nonviolence beyond the merely symbolic gesture to being, in Desmond Tutu’s words, “a force more powerful.”
7. There is an unconscious double standard in comparing military action and nonviolence. When a few people are injured or killed or there are complications in a nonviolent action or movement, it is quickly asserted that nonviolence doesn’t work. Yet a war can kill tens of thousands of people and produce horrendous problems and no one says, “This proves violence doesn’t work!”
8. Don’t wait until most of the opportunities to use this alternative are already gone. When people ask: “How would nonviolence deal with Hitler?” they are usually thinking “in 1939 or 1940.” The real question is “What should the world have done in 1931, 1925, and 1918?” When we address conflicts in their earlier stages, we also strengthen our ability to craft creative responses to the more difficult question of what to do when a Hitler has risen to power. Fortunately, despite the similarities between Adolph Hitler and Saddam Hussein, their relative power in the world and their region is vastly different.
The alternative of nonviolence alone offers the possibility of achieving our goals in Iraq without the terrible costs and uncertainties of war. We Christians have an additional reason in the explicit, often-repeated teachings of Jesus; e.g. “You have heard it said, an eye for an eye, but I say, do not react violently against the one who does evil” (Matthew 5: 38-39). Theologian Walter Wink offers an illuminating understanding of this passage as a call for Christians to follow Jesus’ Third Way—neither violence nor passivity, but disciplined resistance to evil as demonstrated by Jesus, and later Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Desmond Tutu, Dorothy Day, and many others. As Christians, as citizens, and as a nation, we urgently need to explore the power and potential of that alternative.
The “Invisible Option” in Action
There is an alternative in Iraq beyond the false choice of war versus passivity or appeasement. But that alternative has been all but invisible in the debate about Iraq because of misconceptions and distortions. The section below examines more than a dozen insights that nonviolence offers for a more effective response to Iraq. These can be grouped into three categories. The first includes examples that leaders and newspapers in every part of the world have been trying to convey to U.S. political leaders with mixed success.
1. What can we learn from government activity? Shelves of books and reports have been written to assemble and pass on the lessons that the United States and other countries can learn from recent history about how to deal with dictators like Saddam Hussein. Here’s short list of such insights of particular relevance to Iraq: Use restraint; excessive force backfires. Work to discover the roots of conflict and to craft ways to interrupt, rather than feed, the “cycle of violence.” Support the groups within Iraq that are working for justice and human rights. Don’t create enemies; in particular, don’t make it any easier for a dictator like Hussein to rally support from citizens whose real interest is in throwing off their shackles not defending their oppressor. Seek broad international support. (It seems the United States did so only to pave the way for military action.) Use and strengthen international institutions to give legitimacy to our response and to erode support for Hussein. Put at least as much resources and attention on preventive as on corrective measures—thus, a top priority should be programs to reduce hunger and extreme poverty and encourage sustainable development. In short, work to stop dangerous activity and support democracy and human rights, not force a war that creates more problems than it can ever solve.
But government action can only take us so far. Here’s the next step:
2. What can we learn from social movements in challenging situations? History books and political leaders, including our own, tend to emphasize the activity of presidents and generals rather than citizen action in shaping history. Yet in virtually every historical era and in every part of the world, nonviolent movements have succeeded in bringing about major change, including “regime change” of governments every bit as brutal as that of Saddam Hussein. They employed strategies and tactics that many governments seem to prefer not to be widely understood. They utilized forms of power that in effectiveness are comparable to military power but without its limitations. Here are a few examples:
The Danish and Norwegian resistance to Hitler implemented a variety of strategies that had this in common: withdrawal of support from the Nazis. Strategies included strikes by workers, public boycotts, defiance by teachers, and sabotage. By the end of the war, Nazi leaders were cabling Berlin to urge that the Germans withdraw—the costs of staying outweighed the benefits. While thousands of protesters were imprisoned or killed, casualties were far fewer than armed resistance would have caused.
The “People Power” movement in the Philippines successfully toppled the dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. This nonviolent “regime change” was made possible by extensive training in the theory and methods of nonviolence. There are many organizations that could share information and training on nonviolence among the majority that dislikes and is oppressed by the regime of Saddam Hussein (a task made easier by the internet and various mass media).
The opposition to the 1991 coup attempt in Russia faced ruthless generals commanding 4 million soldiers and tens of thousands of tanks, planes, and artillery. Yet 100,000 unarmed citizens were able to surround the Russian parliament building, protect Boris Yeltsin, and prevent the coup from succeeding. Resistance leaders had studied the Philippines and other examples.
The end of apartheid in South Africa was delayed for years by African National Congress violence but ultimately was achieved by what Desmond Tutu called “a force more powerful…” (which later became the name of an award-winning PBS film series and book on nonviolence in the 20th century). Outside groups and governments helped with media coverage, diplomacy, nonviolence training, and economic pressure—all relevant in Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s regime is even more dependent on the sale of oil for its survival than South Africa was on trade.
In the Americas we can examine the nonviolent strategies that all but won the American Revolution before the fighting began, or the successful overthrow of 11 Latin American presidents between 1931 and 1961. The U.S. civil rights movement offers dozens of examples of nonviolent strategies and tactics, often in very hostile conditions. Movements advocating for the environment, Central America, farm workers, and economic equality refined additional tactics. Yet few Americans have grasped the nature and power of such nonviolent strategies in our own country and hemisphere.
One could cite many more examples—Gandhi in India and the East European revolutions of 1989 are two of the more well-known. In each case, success came not to the side with superior military power but to the side with genuine popular support and the ability to grasp the power of organized, creative, committed nonviolent engagement. Such examples also illustrate this reality: Political leaders, even dictators, derive their power from the people, and there are more ways to withdraw that power than to command it. Can we get creative?
3. How about a global nonviolent peace force? Many organizations around the world (including at least a dozen in the United States) are expanding third party intervention beyond peacekeeping to nonviolent intervention, “peace building,” and conflict transformation. They are gaining expertise in the specifics of training for, organizing, leading, and implementing nonviolent action. Reporters and scholars alike have applauded the effectiveness of groups such as Peace Brigades International and the Christian Peacemaker Teams engaging conflicts in the Middle East, Colombia, Mexico, and elsewhere. Their accompaniment is credited with saving the lives of local leaders, supporting indigenous organizing, providing mediation and conflict resolution services, and bringing international attention and pressure to end government abuses.
In addition, several groups in the United States are working on full-fledged alternatives to military action along the lines of Gandhi’s Shanti Sena or Badshah Khan’s Peace Army. The most ambitious is Nonviolent Peaceforce, which is well along the way to fielding a force of several hundred people to be expanded to several thousand in a few years. They will be well trained in nonviolent intervention, with full logistical support, able to intervene in conflicts anywhere in the world. If such efforts received even a tiny fraction of the funds allocated for military options, they would demonstrate what we’ve seen in virtually every part of the globe and in every historical era: that nonviolent citizen movements can bring about lasting change, against even ruthless opposition, instead of just adding one more turn in the cycle of violence.
After World War II, top Nazi military leaders were interviewed systematically and at great length to assemble and record the lessons that could be learned. A striking outcome was that the Nazis reported having an easier time dealing with the violent resistance of the partisans in Yugoslavia and France than the nonviolent strategies in Denmark, Norway, and Romania. The first problem in considering this spectrum of alternatives to military action in Iraq is that Americans are wedded to stereotypes and misunderstandings that nonviolence is weakness or passivity. We need to make a conscious effort to set aside those myths in order to grasp its potential as “a force more powerful” than war. A force that has brought fundamental change in countless large-scale cases throughout history. A force that has brought tyrants to their knees.
There are a dozen good reasons to oppose a war with Iraq: The Iraqi people have suffered enough and would bear the brunt of military action. It is not in the U.S. interest to start a war considered unjust by most religious leaders and opposed by the great majority of people in both allied and Arab countries. Preemptive use of force sets a dangerous precedent. U.S. military action is likely to spark more terrorism, make us less safe, and encourage further ethnic and racial prejudice and hostility. War with Iraq diverts attention from addressing root causes of conflict and terrorism like extreme poverty and hunger. It distracts and drains funds from other priorities like the economy, schools, health care, and the environment. To all these reasons we can add this: There is a practical, tested, creative alternative to war. And it’s a more Christian option.
We owe it to ourselves, the people of Iraq, the stability of the Middle East, and our standing in the world to put the brakes on the U.S. rush to war. Let’s spend the coming weeks discussing and reading about the history, depth, and effectiveness of the nonviolent perspective on power and conflict. Let us urge our schools, libraries, churches, and community groups to show “A Force More Powerful,” the award-winning video series that examines nonviolence around the world. And let us together, as a democratic people, insist on a more effective, more ethical alternative than war with Iraq.
4. Nonviolence at home. More than 30,000 Americans have signed the “Peace Pledge” promising to take action, including civil disobedience, if the United States moves toward war with Iraq. Groups are forming across the country. In early December 2002, The Seattle Times reported that 2,000 Seattle-area citizens gathered for half a day to organize nonviolent resistance to this war. A few looked like ’60s hippies; most looked like the nurses and teachers, students and office workers, parents and patriots they were. They reminded me of Henry David Thoreau, who went to jail in 1846 for refusing to pay the tax levied to fund the U.S. war with Mexico that he considered immoral. When a friend asked why he was in jail, he replied, “Why are you not here!”
Glen Gersmehl (ggersmehl@hotmail.com) serves as national coordinator of Lutheran Peace Fellowship. Earlier versions of this essay appeared in The Peace Chronicle and the Journal of Lutheran Ethics.
For an annotated list of sources and recommended reading on a full range of issues raised here, visit: