Iran Nuclear Deal and the Death of Rationality

We will find out later today whether the Trump Administration wants to continue to abide by the multilateral agreement limiting Iran's development of nuclear technology. All public indications are that Trump will renege on the deal, although predictability has never been this Administration's hallmark. As Trump himself would say, "we'll see what happens".

Assuming that Trump follows through on his threat and withdraws the US from the arrangement, this will signal a major blow to those who believe that US foreign policy can be understood as an exercise in rational choice. There is no way to square this decision with anything resembling rationality as it is commonly understood.

Rational choice involves a few simple steps. It's easy to understand, though incredibly difficult to practice:

1) Set goals, in priority order

2) Evaluate a range of options (preferably, all available options) in terms of:
a) Their probability of achieving the goals
b) Their likely costs

3) Select the option that maximizes gains and minimizes costs

Let's assume in this case that the US goal is to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. This is the stated goal not only of the Trump Administration, but every administration before it. If there is one common element to US policy, this would be it.

The multilateral nuclear agreement is one way of achieving this goal. It has relatively low cost (2), and by all objective accounts it has a reasonably high prospect of success for the time being (1). We can argue about the probability of the latter, but it's somewhere above zero and somewhere below 1.0.

What are the alternatives? This Administration has offered few other options. Two possibilities come to mind:

• Renewed sanctions: The cost to the US of such sanctions is relatively low (2), but the probability of success is also low (1), certainly lower than the existing arrangement. Abandoning the deal means abandoning the constraints in it and the inspections that come with the package, which arms control experts have described as the most intrusive inspections regime ever devised. Israel recently revealed that Iran did in fact develop a program for nuclearization some 15 years ago - during a period of sanctions. Renewed sanctions will do nothing to prevent Iran from developing nukes, and will likely given them every incentive to do so if they think sanctions are a prelude to the next option...

• War: The cost to the US (and participating allies) of a war with Iran is catastrophically high (2). Such a war would almost immediately close the Strait of Hormuz, skyrocketing global oil prices and potentially sending the US economy back into recession. The immediate monetary and human cost to the US military would also be high. Iran is not Iraq - it is large, mountainous, and populated by a fiercely nationalistic people numbering in the tens of millions. The nuclear facilities we would most want to destroy are buried deep under mountains. Airstrikes or missile strikes won't work, and invasion is suicide. The human toll of such a campaign would be catastrophic. Moreover, the odds of such a campaign successfully denuclearizing Iran are extremely low (1), because of the aforementioned mountain bunkers and because in the long run, Iranians will have every reason to want to develop a deterrent to prevent another attack.

Few if any have argued that the current negotiated deal is perfect, and it doesn't address other kinds of behavior (missile development, support for Syria and Hizbollah) that the US would rather Iran didn't engage in. But there are no perfect solutions - there aren't even many good ones. If these are the options on the table, then abandoning the existing arrangement in favor of either sanctions or war is, quite simply, irrational.

The alternative explanation, of course, is that preventing nuclear proliferation isn't really the goal - the goal is regime change in Iran. That does indeed change the calculus, because the existing negotiated arrangement has a zero probability of achieving that goal. Sanctions likewise won't topple the regime, especially as they will be unilateral on the part of the US - Europe, China, and Russia won't join in, so their impact will be low on Iran. The only possible avenue that leads to regime change is war - and even that has a low probability of success, if you define success as "overthrow the existing regime and replace it with one consistent with US interests". If we learned anything from Iraq, it is that our ability to control what happens politically inside a country after we knock over its government is close to zero.

Very few, of course, have accused Trump himself or his administration of acting in a rational fashion. This is a Presidency driven by gut feelings, fear, and the desire to be the anti-Obama. Those things do help explain a decision to abandon the Iranian nuclear settlement. Let's just stop pretending that rationality can explain any of this.

The Iran Nuclear Agreement: Few Good Options

With President Trump apparently about to "de-certify" Iran's compliance with the agreement on its nuclear program, there will be a great deal of discussion about the details - what does de-certification mean, what does Congress have to do, what sanctions can be reimposed, what does this mean for US alliances, etc.

I want to step back from all of that and look at this from a broadly simple negotiation perspective. For all of his vaunted experience as a "dealmaker", it's not at all clear that the President understands negotiation at all, at least not in the international realm.

At issue is Iran's desire to develop, and possibly deploy, nuclear weapons. The incentives Iran has to do so are strong, perhaps overwhelmingly so:

1) The United States, the single most powerful military on the planet, has repeatedly declared the Iranian government to be an enemy.

2) The 2003 Iraq war demonstrated that the United States is quite capable of waging preemptive war, without reasonable pretext, against states it perceives as enemies. Iraq did not possess any significant WMD capability at the time, and the US knew this.

3) The ongoing crisis with North Korea shows a different outcome. North Korea, like Iran and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, is more or less permanently on the US' list of enemies. But North Korea does possess nuclear weapons, and is rapidly developing the ability to deliver them widely. It also possesses a significant conventional deterrent against something the US cares about (South Korea).

4) Israel, Iran's most implacable foe, possesses nuclear weapons and has no significant powers in the region to deter it.

From Iran's point of view, the desire to possess a nuclear deterrent simply to insure the regime's survival is entirely understandable. It is also the case that regime survival tends to be at the top of every country's list of priorities - meaning there is nothing else as important as that goal.

In light of this, if the US goal is to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapons capability what are the available options?

1) Preemptive war, a la Iraq 2003. This option is so costly as to border on the insane. Beyond Iran's ability to close the Strait of Hormuz (thereby shutting off 20% of the world's oil supply), the ability of the United States to successfully invade and overthrow the regime in Tehran is debatable. Iran is large, with a large and nationalistic population, and its geography is varied. It is not Iraq, which is flat, internally divided, and by 2003 had been weakened by 12 years of crippling and universal international sanctions. Oh, and Iran can inflict casualties in Israel and can engage in MUCH worse behavior with regard to terrorism than it currently does.

2) Sanctions. As Trump has pointed out in the case of North Korea, these don't work very well. Sanctions can serve to constrain a regime's resources, but you can't keep the regime from allocating the resources it does have. Iran's economy, even under sanctions, is vastly more robust than North Korea's (there is always a market for oil). There is no combination of economic or diplomatic sanctions which the United States can administer, especially unilaterally, which outweigh the strategic value of a nuclear deterrent to Iran. Hopes that sanctions will cause pain to the people, who might then pressure the regime to change its path, are likewise fantasies. The nuclear program enjoys widespread support among the Iranian population - they have reasons to dislike their government but this isn't one of them.

3) Diplomacy. The only remaining path is to reach an agreement with Iran whereby it agrees to voluntarily forego nuclear development, presumably with significant safeguards and verification of its behavior. In order for any such agreement to be viable, the Iranian regime must believe that the benefits of such an agreement outweigh the benefits of pursuing nuclear weapons. Trump keeps railing about how we "gave up too much" in the existing deal, but I don't know why he thinks we could have given them less and still had them agree to it. Perhaps he doesn't understand the concept of sovereignty, or the limits of the US ability to inflict punishment on the Iranian regime.

Those who are eager to scrap the existing deal either don't understand any of this, in which case they are likely to be very disappointed in the outcome of that action, or they are seeking something else entirely. There has been concern in the past that there are those within the US foreign policy establishment who would welcome a pretext to wage war with Iran, and who might therefore be interested in re-creating the 2003 formula. I can't say for sure what Trump thinks (if, indeed, he thinks anything at all). All I am sure of is that one of these two things must be true.

Talk about "denying Iran all paths to a nuclear weapon" are ludicrous. If North Korea can develop one, Iran certainly can. They have nuclear technology, generations of nuclear scientists and engineers, and the ability to obtain and refine fissile material - all without the help of Russia, which is likely to want to help, at least under the table. Claiming something does not make it so - something this administration seems disinclined to understand.

None of this bodes well for the region or the world. If the Trump Administration follows through on this course of action, we will likely end up with yet another nuclear standoff. Iran may well renounce the NPT altogether, as North Korea did some years ago. We may move closer to the re-creation of an Eastern Bloc, this one based not on Communist ideology but on a desire by a set of authoritarian regimes (Russia, Iran, China?) to band together to balance against the US. The world will not be more peaceful, and nobody will be safer or more secure. But this and future administrations will have yet another nuclear-armed bogeyman to use as a useful foil in domestic politics.

I Was a Stranger and You Did Not Welcome Me

I have written a great deal in the past about fear and the terrible things it drives us to do. I've also written a lot about tribalism and the evils of walling ourselves off in aggressively exclusive communities. (You can look for those terms in the search box in the upper left to find past blog posts).

This past week we have been treated to a case that encompasses both - an Emirati man in traditional dress taken down by local police in Avon, Ohio for the crime of talking on a cell phone outside a hotel.

The fact that the mayor later said that police were "following protocol" and yet claimed that the incident "does not reflect our community" is absurd. Local rules and protocols reflect exactly what kind of community they want. That's what representative democracy is supposed to do. If this is not the kind of community that the citizens of Avon want, their elected officials need to do a better job of translating those wishes into rules and actions.

It is tempting to blame this incident on Donald Trump. Initially, my thought was to write a blog post about this story titled something like "Living in Trump's America". But the reality is that Trump did not cause the paranoia, the fear, or the xenophobia. He's just using it for his own selfish ends.

In the days immediately following the Oklahoma City bombing, before Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were identified and apprehended, Sikhs and Muslims across the country were attacked at random. In other communities and in days gone by it has been Hispanics. Or blacks. Or gays. Or Irish. Or Italians. This is nothing new, though it is no less shameful for that. We have not made nearly as much "progress" as we like to think.

It's easy to single out the frightened 911 caller here, and I'm glad that there may be consequences for someone calling 911 and claiming without evidence that someone is "pledging allegiance to ISIS or whatever". More problematic is the law enforcement response. Cranks call 911 all the time. That doesn't mean we have to provide muscle for their desire to lash out at others.

But beyond the obvious paranoia, tribalism, and xenophobia on display here, I want to point something out to a particular audience. For those of us who are followers of the Christian faith (as I am), and for those in particular who claim a desire for the United States to be a "Christian Nation" (I do not) - in the face of this story I am struck by these words of Jesus from the Gospel of Matthew:

I was a stranger and you did not welcome me (Mt 25:43)

This is the very antithesis of welcoming the stranger. The man was obviously from a foreign land. Rather than greet him with welcome, he was greeted with fear, xenophobia, and force. He was accosted and humiliated, made worse because it was done under the color of law by people who supposedly represent us all.

If you really want your nation, or your community, or the world immediately around you, to reflect the Kingdom of God, then you need to take this kind of thing seriously. It is not in sermons and Sunday services that faith lives; it is in our everyday actions, as simple as making a phone call or greeting a stranger.

The security-minded response - the voice that wrote those law enforcement protocols - claims that "we have to do this", that "this is necessary to keep us safe". And after all, what is the minor inconvenience of one man (he was released shortly thereafter, once it became clear to everyone that he was not a threat) next to the safety of the community?

You are welcome to that point of view, of course. I would make only two observations. First, it is a vantage ruled entirely by fear. If you are going to allow fear to own your decisions, admit to it. I prefer a different path.

Second, you cannot hold this position and simultaneously claim to wish for a "Christian Nation" or a Christian community of any sort. To take the "safety first/security above all" road is to give up on God and Christ entirely. Jesus did not say, "Invite in the stranger after he's been through a thorough background check and has been screened for weapons". 2000 years ago the world was every bit as dangerous, indeed far more so, than it is today. Yet his words are what they are.

We must all choose, every day, between fear and courage, between isolation and connection, between security and vulnerability. These are never easy choices, and there is room for compromise and balance between competing concerns. But we should make these choices mindful that every choice we make remakes the world a little bit, for good or ill. Next time, let's try welcoming the stranger rather than handcuffing him.

Hate is Hate: Responses to the Orlando Shooting

Much has already been written about the terrible shooting in Orlando this past afternoon, and much more will be written and said in the coming days and weeks. A lot of what we hear will be predictable, because we've had this "conversation" a lot of times before. I've written a lot about gun control already; if you want to my thoughts on that subject, type "gun control" in the search box on this blog and have at it. The short form: guns are a terrible means of self-defense, and the answer to gun violence isn't arming everyone else in society.

What I want to offer here is a broader perspective, one that looks at the shooting in Orlando not as simply as a terrorist attack or an attack on the LGBTQ community or a mass shooting, but as another event in the long and frequent chain of human violence.

Viewed from this very broad lens, the specific questions about the precise motives of the shooter or the detailed connections between him and various other organizations become much less important. They matter for this case in particular, but if our intention is to have a dialogue about how to have fewer such incidents in the future then we need to move beyond the specifics and talk about violence.

We tend to be guilty of "fighting the last war" in our response to mass shootings. After Sandy Hook and Aurora, the answer was "better mental health"; after Columbine, "better parenting". After Orlando, some want to use the "terrorist" label to claim that we have a particular enemy (ISIS? Radical Islamism?), and that all we have to do to prevent such attacks in the future is to eradicate that enemy.

All of this, of course, misses the point. We had plenty of shootings (including mass shootings) in the United States long before the current flavors of radicalized Islam came along, and we will likely have more long after they are gone. Many recent attacks (including Sandy Hook, Charleston, and Aurora) weren't conducted by Muslims at all, nor did they have any particular political motive. Yet the action, and the result, was much the same: innocent civilians, going about their daily lives, gunned down by an individual bent on their destruction.

Politicians who offer simple solutions are deluding us, and possibly themselves. There are no easy answers, no "if only I was in charge everything would be better" actions. Crimes of mass violence are at the same time unique and the offspring of a particular set of (very broad) factors:

Opportunity: This is the one factor that we never talk about, because there's simply nothing that can be done. If someone is bent on killing civilians and can manage to hide their plans from law enforcement ahead of time, there will always be opportunities. A sporting event. A dance club. A concert. A shopping mall. A movie theater. An airport. A train station. A school. The fact that we live in community makes us vulnerable. We can tinker with these vulnerabilities at the margins, but only for specific targets and for limited periods of time. To live in society means to live in vulnerability to one another. The key here is to live with that vulnerability, but without fear.

Means: This tends to attract a lot of heat, and not much light. There are many ways for people bent on mass destruction to cause it. Some are more effective than others, and some are easier to contain or implement than others. Homemade bombs are possible, but tricky, and efforts can be made to monitor certain kinds of chemicals in certain quantities to try to prevent another Oklahoma City. Knives and other hand implements can be deadly, but usually in small numbers; it is difficult to imagine an assailant killing 49 people in a night club with a knife.
     Guns come in various types, from small pistols with few rounds to large rifles with many rounds and high rates of fire. Guns get most of the attention because, in the United States, they are the perfect means for anyone bent on causing widespread destruction: easy to acquire, easy to use, widely available, and highly destructive. We already have a few restrictions on firearms - fully automatic weapons are widely restricted from civilian ownership, for example. Further restrictions would reduce the means available for mass killings. It would not eliminate these events, but it would make them both less frequent and less deadly when they do occur.

Motive: This is the arena in which people love to engage in rampant speculation, most of it useless. More often than not (Orlando, Sandy Hook, San Bernadino, etc.), the killers die in the incident, leaving us to speculate afterwards about their motives. What particular ideology or mental illness fueled this particular rampage? We think that, if only we can get the right answer (or say the right words), we can solve the problem.
     This is where we are most at sea. For law enforcement purposes, it matters whether the Orlando shooter was working with others or not. But for the purposes of trying to reduce the quantity and severity of violence in our society in the future, it's irrelevant. We shouldn't care whether this individual was a follower of ISIS, or al-Qaeda, or the KKK, or the Westboro Baptist Church. There will always be ideologies and theologies that justify, even demand, violence against innocents. There is only one thing they all have in common: Hate.

On Sunday night as we were still sifting through information about the shootings, I happened to be watching the Tony Awards and was treated to Lin-Manuel Miranda's moving and emotional sonnet, which he read in lieu of an acceptance speech. The poem is anchored in an anthem of the LBGTQ community, "Love is love", and so it is. But the opposite is also true: hate is hate, whether born of Christian or Muslim ideology, whether directed at women or blacks or sexual minorities or other nations or people of different faiths or members of different political parties.

If you're looking for one root cause to these acts of inhumane violence, here it is: hatred. Hatred of particular groups, hatred of others who are different, hatred of random strangers, even hatred of self. Hatred, as Star Wars reminded us, leads to suffering - for both the hated and the hater.

The thing about hatred is that it feeds on itself. Read, if you can, this Storify compilation of live tweets from a recent rally for Donald Trump. The anger and hatred, as the correspondent reported, were "palpable". Insults, curses, angry words, threats, coming both from the candidate and the crowd - all combined to raise the collective level of hatred far beyond simply the sum total of the individuals. The more anger and fear we immerse ourselves in, the more we hate. The more hatred we encounter in others, the more we hate. And make no mistake - there is hatred inside all of us.

Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us of this many years ago:

The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it.Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

If you want a more modern example, I encourage you to read this speech by the Lt. Governor of Utah. It is moving, it is eloquent, and it makes all the right points.

If we want to have less violence in our society, the answer doesn't lie in defeating an ideology or a religion. It doesn't rest on electing a strong man who promises peace but delivers only anger. It doesn't rest, in fact, on who we elect at all. It doesn't even rest, ultimately, on whether we put more money into mental health, or do better work with terrorist watch lists, or restrict guns - although all of those may be good things to do. The answer lies in us, every day. Every day we face opportunities to love more, to be kind, to come together. And we face temptations to give into fear, to express our anger, to hate someone a little bit more. We together decide which it will be.

Which will you choose today?

Faculty Facing Campus Gun Violence: We Don't Have To Be Afraid

In the wake of the Umpqua shooting, we are once again at the intersection of two of my passions in life: higher education and interpersonal conflict/self defense. Today's Chronicle of Higher Education has a very good piece on how the long string of university shootings is affecting faculty across the country:

As Campus Gun Violence Increases, So Do Professors' Fears

I've blogged recently about how one of the big impediments to a discussion of gun ownership in America is the failure of both sides to understand the others' fears. This article ought to be (but won't be) read by the NRA and anyone who wants to advocate for broader ownership and distribution of firearms, especially by teachers. You can't just hand these people guns and tell them, "There - don't you feel more safe?"

Arming students (or allowing students to arm themselves) isn't going to help either. There were students present at the Umpqua shooting who were armed - and, luckily for everyone, very well-trained. They kept their weapons holstered and concentrated on helping people get to safety. The presence of guns did not alter that course of events at all, even in the hands of "good guys" - although the heroism of some (armed and unarmed) did.

All of this is nothing new - I've written these same things, about different cases and in different words, many times. Here I want to respond to the faculty quoted in the Chronicle article above, because while I understand their fears I have a different perspective on them. Here's a quote from the article:

Many faculty members are thinking about such scenarios with increasing anxiety. They may crack a few jokes at a faculty meeting, or roll their eyes at the latest administration missive of how to stay safe in an "active shooter" scenario, but in the back of their minds there are questions. What would I do if someone walked into the classroom with a gun? Is that student who got angry about a bad grade potentially dangerous? Is my campus a safe place to work?

The overall tenor of the article is: isn't it terrible that faculty have to ask these questions, and isn't it understandable that they're terrified in facing them? My own response is: yes, it is terrible ... there are terrible things in the world, and this is one of them. And, more importantly, while it is understandable that facing these kinds of questions frightens teachers, that reaction is not necessary.

First, a reality check: we live in a world in which interpersonal violence is a possibility. We know from the data that the possibility is remote and, in our corner of the world, getting smaller all the time. That's good, and we should be working to make it an ever-rarer occurrence. We do that not by arming everyone to the teeth - we don't want a world of armed deterrence, we want a world in which conflicts are resolved in other ways. This will always be an asymptotic quest, but we get closer and closer to the zero axis all the time. So given a non-zero probability of being targeted by violence, we can and should declare violence a tragedy while not shying away from addressing it in every way possible.

Second, if we acknowledge that we live in a world in which violence is unlikely but possible then it makes sense to think about what we should do if it happens in our presence. I understand the psychological barriers to dealing with low-probability events, but we do these all the time in other contexts. Schools (in my part of the world, anyway) conduct tornado drills. My university is going to participate this Thursday in an earthquake drill, despite the fact that serious earthquakes in Ohio are almost unheard of. In driver's ed we teach students how to respond if their brakes fail, or if the hood of the car flips up unexpectedly - even though I've never seen either of those things happen in my life.

So we can and should learn to deal with the prospect of violence in our presence in a similar fashion. Understand what we can control and what we can't. Think ahead about the best courses of action. And practice. No skill read about in a pamphlet or listened to in a lecture ever worked. The only way we can be effective at anything is to do it, preferably a bunch of times.

I've written before about the benefits of martial arts training (including here, which remains my most-read blog post ever). I've also pointed out that self defense is a discipline, and as such must be studied and practiced like anything else. The benefit of such learning and practice is not merely that you acquire skills that can be used in an emergency. You also acquire a mindset of preparedness, which is far more important. Any good self defense class will tell you: your most important weapon is your mind.

The questions posed in the quote above, and throughout the Chronicle article, are questions I ask myself all the time. Most of the time when I walk into a classroom or a meeting, I take a moment to assess that space's defensive possibilities and weaknesses (especially in meetings, which often provide opportunities for the mind to wander). I consider approaches and alternative actions depending on various scenarios - who is the attacker targeting? What is he armed with? When do I hide, run, engage? I also evaluate people (students and otherwise) for signs of danger or instability.

For most of the faculty quoted in the article, facing these kinds of questions frightens them. I'm not frightened, not because I'm better or braver than my colleagues but simply because I've practiced. Fear in this case is very much in the eye of the beholder - while dealing with these kinds of questions is challenging, it is not necessarily frightening. We do not have to be afraid; fear is a default condition that can be changed.

There is a deeper level to dealing with this fear. I recognize that my modest skills and training do not guarantee survival 100% of the time in all situations. I may be able to escape, or I may be able to disarm or disable an attacker at close range. I certainly have a better-than-average chance of doing so, if only because the "average" here is very low. But I may also get shot, and I may also get killed. That's the reality.

How I would deal with that reality in the moment I don't know - none of us does until faced with it. But in the calm environment in which I live, I can at least contemplate my mortality. I can think about how I can influence and shape the narrative of events, even if the story includes my own death. "How do I want to die?" is not a question anybody relishes facing. But the stories we remember from some of these events are often from those willing to face that question - the veteran and father at Umpqua who was willing to put himself in harm's way, and while wounded kept repeating that he didn't want to die because it was his son's birthday.

I think there is a fear that thinking about such things will sully us, make us somehow worse people. But I think that's just the rationalization of fear - I think it makes us better people. The closer we get to the really big, important questions the more clearly we can see who we are and who we want to be.

So let us keep working to reduce violence at all levels. Let us certainly not do things - like arming swaths of our population - that will make matters worse. But let us also, in our everyday lives, stop and think about the realities of our world, prepare ourselves for what may come as best we can, and then move on. We will likely not see an end to violence in our lifetimes. But that does not have to rob of us of our peace, because fear is the one enemy we can conquer.

Guns and Safety: The Missing Human Dimension

A case that (on its surface) pits free speech against gun rights has been making the rounds. A female scholar invited to speak at Utah State University cancelled her appearance there after receiving death threats. In explanation she cited Utah laws allowing people to carry guns on campus, and the campus police's inability to regulate the presence of guns at her talk. She also criticized the university for not doing enough to insure her safety.

Since the speaker fits the profile of the Left (a feminist scholar engaged in cultural critique of misogyny in video-game culture) and the thing she complains about is one of the banner issues for many on the Right (the right to carry firearms freely), this pretty much guarantees this story plenty of airplay. And while there will be some thoughtful discussions, for the most part this will generate a great deal more heat than light in the coming days.

In an effort to promote the former and try to avoid the latter, I want to pick up on one particular aspect of the larger argument here: the discussion about guns and personal safety. This is a subject on which I have written quite a few times in the past (do a search for Gun Control or Stand Your Ground on this blog and you'll find plenty of references). Readers will note that I am not a purist on the issue, insofar as I have written that there are circumstances under which the carrying or employment of personal firearms can protect someone.

But here is where a dose of wisdom from my academic field - the study of conflict at the international level - comes in handy. Because "security" is really two things: whether you are secure, and whether you feel secure. It is both objective and perceptual. And these two aspects are not at all the same thing.

Objective security is often knowable only after the fact: you either are attacked or you aren't. If no one attacks you, you are objectively secure. However, you may not feel secure. If you feel that an attack is imminent or even possible, you may perceive yourself as being insecure even when, at that particular moment, you are not being attacked. And that's where the trouble lies.

Advocates of concealed-carry or open-carry rights talk a lot about how guns make people more secure. Setting aside the tactical question of whether, and how often, having a gun will actually help you protect yourself, I have no doubt that for these folks, carrying a weapon makes them feel more secure. So they're being sincere when they talk about guns increasing security - meaning their feelings of security.

The problem is that when you carry a gun, you make people around you feel less secure. You present yourself as a potential threat for lethal violence. When you carry a weapon - especially if it's openly visible - people are likely to assume that it's loaded and that you're willing to use it. If I don't have a gun - or, for that matter, even if I do - that may decrease my security substantially insofar as I am now aware that there is someone in my vicinity who is both willing and able to kill me.

In my field, this is called the security dilemma - efforts to increase my security decrease the overall security of the system, and may make me less secure in the long run. This dynamic is just as real at the interpersonal level as it is among nations. We just don't understand it very well in our individual lives.

Ardent gun-rights supporters tend to respond to this observation with, "well, they shouldn't feel that way" - or "well, I have a right to carry my gun anyway". At that point, it becomes clear that you don't really care about security - yours or anyone else's. You're carrying the gun because it makes you feel powerful, or because it's a part of your identity, or because you feel the need to show "them" (whoever "them" is) what you can or can't do. It's an ego thing.

People who are genuinely interested in security should be able to realize that security is not only individual, it's collective. That when one individual carries a gun, it make lower the level of security in the room. Just ask John Crawford III how that works. Funny - I haven't noticed any NRA members picketing because his 2nd amendment rights were violated.

So if you have genuine concerns about security, that's fine - take the legal steps you feel are necessary to make yourself feel more secure. But recognize that by so doing, you may be making everyone else around you less secure. And while that may not be illegal (in Utah or elsewhere), it is reprehensible. Perhaps what we need to seek is not so much personal security as mutual respect and concern for our neighbors. That's a value I would think everyone (Red, Blue, Purple, or otherwise) could get behind.

Women, Culture, and Self-Defense: What does #Yesallwomen mean for the self-defense community?

There has been a growing conversation on the internet surrounding issues of rape, sexual assault, and how we should deal with these things both legally and culturally. I say "growing" in the sense that the conversation has been taking up more bandwidth lately - driven both by more stories of sexual assault coming out into the open and by ongoing efforts to get institutions, especially colleges and universities, to do something about it. But it is also a "growing" conversation in the sense that it is getting more sophisticated, with more points of view being circulated. I think that this is a good thing, although like all important conversations it is uncomfortable and heated at times.

I wrote a blog post a year and a half ago in response to one of the early public stories of a rape survivor, this one at Amherst College. At the time, I tried to make what I thought was a somewhat novel argument: that the issue was fundamentally cultural and would require cultural solutions, and that men needed to be a big part of those solutions since the people creating the problem are overwhelmingly men. I summarized a lot of these ideas this way:

I applaud and support the conversations, public and private, that women are having about appropriate boundaries, respecting themselves, and being smart in self-protection. What we need along side those are men's conversations: what is appropriate sexual behavior? What does "respect" mean? What other kinds of attitudes and expectations do we carry around that, let loose in the atmosphere, encourage some men to push (and, ultimately, violate) those boundaries? And when guys do violate those boundaries, what do we do about it? (The answer to that last, historically, as been "nothing". That needs to stop.)

That post remains one of my most-read posts of all time. I guess it touched a nerve somewhere.

Fast forward 18 months - in fits and starts I appear to be getting my wish. The other day I read this excellent article on the Daily Beast calling out Nerd Culture and the kinds of narratives it creates that contribute to an "entitlement mentality" on the part of guys - just the sort of narrative that can lead to assaults. Yes, the UCSB killer is an extreme manifestation of that attitude - but the difference may be more one of quantity than of kind.

And since so much of our modern conversation is in Twitterspeak, we now have a pair of competing hashtags: #Notallmen and #Yesallwomen. The former appears to be a rearguard defense by some men who feel ... unjustly accused? tarred with the wrong brush? ... by a conversation that talks about men as the source of the problem. I actually anticipated that reaction in my 2012 post, so I guess I don't find it that surprising. Regardless, the former hashtag spawned the latter, the best discussion of which I found here (I'll leave aside the question of whether the title is appropriate or not; the article is an excellent one).

So far as I can tell, much of the point of #Yesallwomen is an insistence that women want to be treated decently as human beings, by all men. It is an effort to put the onus back on men to change their behavior so that women can enjoy the kind of basic personal security that most men take for granted. And though I used somewhat different language in my earlier article, I wholeheartedly agree.

But while I support the drive to get men to both behave better and to better police each other's behavior, this raises an interesting question for me from another facet of my life: what should happen to the cottage industry of self-defense training courses for women? I've blogged on this subject before, including here (also one of my most-read posts) and here (my highest hit count of all time). I have been supportive of good self-defense training and practice, and have even offered such courses myself from time to time.

So am I barking up the wrong tree? In light of #Yesallwomen and the focus on changing men's behavior, should we be talking at all about women learning to defend themselves against assault? I am sure that some in the #Yesallwomen camp would accuse me and others who teach self-defense of contributing to the problem by focusing on women, rather than men, as the source of the solution.

But as much as I support the argument that the best solution is to change male culture and behavior, I don't buy the notion that giving women self-defense tools makes matters worse. I agree that women shouldn't have to fend off a guy by yelling at him, much less by well-aimed punches and kicks. But so long as there are men who behave badly - and that will be true for some time - I think women are better off having those tools than not.

Moreover, there is a spillover effect from physical training to mental attitude and ability. There are a lot of variations on this theme in the martial arts world; here are two, from very different practitioner/teachers:

The point here is simple: when you gain confidence in your ability to defend yourself physically, that confidence works backwards to all stages of human interaction. The skill to strike, or throw, or disarm, or lock, is not just the ability to do that one thing. It also carries within it the ability to say "no", the ability to draw boundaries, the ability to walk away from a situation long before there is any need to engage in combat.

As I have argued before, this kind of ability doesn't come from taking an afternoon workshop or two. It comes from long and disciplined study. What art you study matters far less than making it a part of your life. But even a little exposure can have a significant impact on confidence and the ability to exert social control, set boundaries, and say "no" at a much earlier point.

So I believe there is still a place in the discussion for the martial arts and a focus on self-defense. Not all women will choose to make this a part of their own solution - although I think many more should consider it. But until we reach the day when #Notallmen becomes #Nomenatall, I will continue to teach and encourage women (and men) to learn to defend themselves, in body, mind, and spirit.

Fort Hood Shootings: Another Lesson in Gun Violence and the Myths of Self-Defense

My friends over at Relations International published an excellent piece today on the tragic shootings at Fort Hood Army Base in Texas. There will be much media hypeover the next few days about PTSD and the military's health-care system and its weaknesses. All of this will, of course, be forgotten within a week's time. RI's piece points out quite rightly that shooting and killing are inherent in military culture, and that Ft. Hood serves as yet another reminder of an age-old truth - violence begets violence, often in strange and unpredictable ways (whether Ivan Lopez was predictable I leave to others to ponder).

Given my ongoing interest in issues surrounding self-defense and firearms, I want to add an additional thought to the conversation. I have written before on the mythology that the current leadership of the NRA* has promulgated publicly about the relationship between guns and self-defense (here, among many other posts - you can track them through the Labels at the bottom of the posts). And I have pointed out that the NRA's "only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun" phrase isn't an argument or an analysis, it's a gut-level worldview that wants to see everything in Manichean terms.

* I am making a distinction here between the NRA's public leadership and its membership, which undoubtedly hold a diversity of views. I have met many reasonable individuals who are NRA members but who do not agree with the leadership of the organization. The NRA itself has a long and complex history, and people have many motives for joining it. It would be unfair to tar everyone associated with it with the same brush. The organization's leadership, on the other hand, is on record as saying and supporting certain things, and is therefore fair game.

For those who haven't already drunk the NRA leadership Kool-Aid, the latest Fort Hood shooting (as well as the one before, and the many other shootings on or near military installations) should provide a cautionary tale. Wayne LaPierre's argument, taken at face value, is that for everyone to be safe we should all be armed. He believes (or says he believes) that the safest world is the world in which everyone has a gun and knows how to use it. In that way, the "bad guys" will be deterred a la MAD during the Cold War, or will be gunned down by "good guys" before they can do too much damage.

The Fort Hood shootings put this hypothesis to the test and immediately demonstrate the failure of this line of thinking. A military base is the one part of the world most like Mr. LaPierre's vision for society. Everybody, or nearly everybody, is armed. Everybody has expert-level training and experience in the use of firearms, and access to them at nearly all times. Everybody practices to maintain that level of training on a nearly continual basis. Many of the people in these spaces also have training and experience in threat recognition that are nearly impossible to replicate in the civilian world.

And yet, even with all of these factors in place, mass shootings can and do take place. Lopez killed three people and wounded many more. Major Nadal Hussein killed over a dozen before he was overcome and disarmed. These are, of course, only two particularly prominent examples - there are many, many more.

For anyone with an open mind and a genuine interest in a secure and safe society, these cases should be enough to re-think a vision that relies solely on the presence of guns to protect us from each other. This also suggests that, so long as the NRA leadership sticks to this line of "reasoning", they cannot really be interested in a secure and safe society.

My suggestion: if the ownership of guns means more to you than actual safety and security, that's fine - you're entitled to your opinions. But the rest of us, the part of society that lives in the real world and values real human lives more than slogans and self-interest, will continue working out real solutions to difficult problems. Perhaps Mr. LaPierre would like to explain to the families of Mr. Lopez' victims how they really were safer for being surrounded by guns.

The Root of Egypt's Problems?

My friend Steve Saideman has recently posted some excellent stuff on what's going on in Egypt, despite his avowed position that he doesn't know much about Egyptian politics. His emphasis on the basic rules of democracy is an extremely important reminder of what underlies democratic politics in any nation. Since I don't know much about Egypt either, I am naturally going to follow him down that road.

One thing I think may be missing from his list is a condition necessary for democracies to work. When we think about democracies and defining them, we think about process - the how of politics. But most people aren't process people, they're outcome people - they care a great deal more about what happens then about how it happens.

People's willingness to tolerate or go along with various sets of process rules tends to hinge on whether the outcomes generated are acceptable. As the aphorism goes, if you don't like the game, change the rules. Egyptians didn't overthrow Mubarak because he was undemocratic; they overthrew him because they were tired of corruption and being randomly thrown in jail and being poor.

This helps explain, by the way, why otherwise fundamentally undemocratic systems that produce acceptable outcomes (Singapore?) are stable. If you're wealthy and have a reasonable amount of freedom in your personal and professional life, it's harder to get you to take up arms against the tyranny of government.

What does this have to do with Egypt? The current inability to form a stable government, and the reason for the military takeover, may relate to an underlying problem: factions within Egypt have definitions of "acceptable political outcomes" so fundamentally divergent that there is no space available for stable politics.

We expect there to be differences of opinion - every society has those. In functioning democracies, those differences are not so severe that different factions refuse to accept outcomes acceptable to the other side(s) and turn instead to revolt and open revolution. Aside from a very small number of fringe elements in the US, even the current state of polarization in American politics hasn't led anyone take up arms, either against the state or against members of the other party. As Steve pointed out, even the contested 2000 election was settled not by the military but by the courts. It's been two generations since we've seen any significant armed resistance to political outcomes.

Contrast this with Egypt today, which is clearly sharply and perhaps irrevocably divided between numerous factions. The Islamists put together a coalition big enough to win an election. But the outcome they wanted was beyond the range of tolerance for other groups in society, who rose up against a "democratically elected" government - a clear case of political outcomes trumping the supposed legitimacy of the process itself. Now that the military has swept the Islamists from power, the latter are starting to resist forcefully as well (if not yet effectively), and it isn't clear that there's enough common ground among the non-Islamist factions to base even a temporary government on.

The logical conclusion to this line of reasoning is a depressing one: Egypt may simply be too divided to have a functioning democracy. If that is the case, all the elections and constitutional conventions in the world won't solve the problem - they simply provide new battlegrounds on which various factions will fight their winner-take-all battles. In that case, military rule may in fact by the only stable solution that prevents the country from sliding into civil war.

The solution to Egypt's crisis lies, as it always does, with Egyptians. The military or various political leaders may be able to help, but in the end democracy there will only work if there's enough overlap in what different people think of as acceptable political outcomes to base "normal" politics on. Given the violence of the last few weeks, it seems that point is a ways off. Until then, I suspect we're in for a period of either protracted instability or prolonged military rule - and despite our own democratic predilections, the latter may be preferable to the former.

The Power of Terrorism Isn't In the Terrorists

Terrorism, and responses to it, have been back in the news lately. Revelations of NSA data-gathering, fresh memories of the Boston Marathon bombing, and the winding down of US involvement in Afghanistan have all combined to put "The War on Terror" back on the radar screen, even if we don't use that term very much anymore.

A couple of days ago, I blogged about what I regard as one of the key questions - not "how much privacy are we giving up?" but "how much security are we getting for it?" The good folks at the Dayton Business Journal were nice enough to republish it as a guest blog column, which has probably expanded the readership significantly. No angry emails or eggs on my window yet, though.

That post sparked a discussion, unsurprisingly, about the balance between how much to "spend" (in dollars or privacy or what have you) in fighting terrorism and what it's "worth". That discussion made me realize that I had stopped a level short in my previous thinking - and that one reason for disagreements about counterterrorism measures is that people can fundamentally disagree about the "value" of terrorism.

In that earlier column, I wrote this:

We don't comb through emails or phone calls for evidence that people are going to commit murder, or sell drugs, or rob banks, or any number of other illegal and harmful activities. And our political system is unable to put even the mildest controls on firearms. So why do we accept this "logic" when it comes to terrorism?

It's easy to point out that we apply different standards to things that are roughly equal in objective facts. Many (not all, but many) Americans are willing to put up with measures to prevent deaths by terrorism that they wouldn't agree to in preventing other kinds of deaths - even other violent deaths. From an economists' point of view, of course, this is crazy - but then, most of the world looks crazy to economists.

What I didn't ask in that previous column is, why? What is there about terrorist violence that makes it weigh more heavily - makes it "worth more" in our cost/benefit calculations? There is no objective answer, of course - different people can and do assign different values to such things. A friend of mine suggested a logic I hadn't considered before:

Terrorism isn't like car accidents - it's an attack on the state and the community. I don't see it as a cost-benefit calculation like bike helmet laws - it's not about the death toll, it's about sovereignty. (emphasis added)

There is, of course, no way of making an appeal to facts to support this argument - it's an argument about values. In particular, it's an argument based on the proposition that the intent or motive behind the violence alters its value, aside from how much damage it causes or to whom.

Violence has long carried symbolic meaning apart from its practical value. It is precisely that point that terrorism is designed to exploit. Terrorist groups lack the ability to cause enough damage to matter in practical military or security terms. Assuming that most terrorist groups have a political goal - change US foreign policy, or bring down the US government, or something similar - they just don't have the firepower to accomplish that by attacking the thing they want to change.

So they attack symbolically and emotionally important targets, either out of a sense of frustration and catharsis (not expecting to really "win" but feeling better because they "struck back"), or in hopes of inducing a disproportionate counter-reaction that advances their cause. In 1957 Eric Frank Russell wrote the novel Wasp in which he elucidated exactly this theory of how terrorism works:

“In given conditions, action and reaction can be ridiculously out of proportion … One can obtain results monstrously in excess of the effort … Let’s consider [an] auto smash-up…. The driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp which had flown in through a window and was buzzing around his face…. The weight of a wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being, the wasp’s size is minute, its strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid. … Nevertheless, that wasp killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap.”

Here's the thing about the power of terrorism and terrorists: it has almost nothing to do with them, and almost everything to do with us. The objectively small amounts of damage terrorists cause loom large in large part because we assign weight to them far in excess of their actual size. In short, terrorists have power because we give it to them.

Now, I readily grant that not all death is equal in meaning. Some death (say, from old age at 95 or 100) is regrettable but expected - even a marker of something to celebrate. Other deaths (say, traffic accidents) are tragic, and so we look for ways to prevent more while recognizing that the world is an inherently dangerous place. Death by intentional violence is in a different category - in cases where one human dies at the hand of another, the malice of the act matters and changes its meaning.

But from my point of view, death by violence is equally tragic whether it's at the hands of a Muslim bomber or a South Chicago gang member. The presence of political motives (or, more often, vague political rationalizations - were the Boston Bombers really trying to accomplish something?) is, for me, vastly overshadowed by the fact that some people were willing, even eager, to kill others. That, to me, is the greatest tragedy.

There isn't really a prescription at the end of this so much as an observation. Terrorists and the violence they commit have exactly as much power as we give them. If we impute greater meaning to violence done by Muslims acting in small groups than we do to violence done by racist or homophobic whites or urban gang members in similar numbers, then of course we will be willing to expend more resources on preventing the former than on the latter. That is, collectively, our choice to make. I hope we can extend our national conversation to this level, rather than relying on sound bites and loud politicians to define those choices for us.

The NSA, Spying, and the Important Question We Aren't Asking

There's a lot of conversation going around about the NSA and recent revelations regarding the US government's massive collection of data, both domestic and foreign. There is speculation about the leaker (Edward Snowdon, apparently a Booz Allen employee), about the nature of the data being gathered (metadata on phone calls through Verizon, plus various other sorts of things that may or may not be foreign in origin), and about the legality and constitutionality of these efforts.

Many have pointed out that this is hardly a new Obama administration thing, that the Bush administration did many of the same things under the PATRIOT Act - which, although this disappoints some liberals, has helped take some of the partisan sting out of things.

These are all good and important questions (except the partisanship thing, which is silliness as usual). And to some degree, this has revived a much larger question: how much privacy are we willing to give up in exchange for security? That's an age-old question of governance critical to any age.

What I find missing from the conversation, however, is the other half of that question. We are focused on the how much privacy are we willing to give up part. What we're not talking about - at least, I haven't seen it yet - is how much security do we get, or even how much security should we expect.

What we're talking about, of course, is security from terrorist attacks. Protecting Americans from terrorist attacks is a legitimate concern of government, just as protecting us from foreign invasion or local crime are. But because terrorism is fundamentally asymmetric, you have to spend massive amounts to get small increases in protection - and even then, it's not perfect. It's never going to be perfect.

A case in point is the Boston Marathon bombing just a few weeks ago. This attack was carried out by what appear to be a pair of rank amateurs. It is almost certain that they used email, cell phones, and other communications before and during their attack. Yet the existing surveillance apparatus - as massive as it apparently is - was not enough to stop two young guys with no experience from blowing up bombs that killed three and injured more than 250.* The net which the NSA and others have cast isn't foolproof.

And this is very much the point. We can spend billions upon billions of dollars, and disaffected 20-somethings will still be able to blow up bombs in public places. We're not going to get perfect security from terrorism - and in the broader context, terrorism is one of the least of dangers in our society anyway (well behind alcohol-induced car accidents, murders, suicides, industrial accidents - there's a host of things that kill more Americans).

So in order to answer the question about how much privacy we're willing to give up in exchange for security, we have to decide how much security do we expect? If the answer is "a reasonable amount, but we know it's never going to be perfect", then the massive data-gathering the government is engaged in is probably a significant overreach. We could obtain the same result with far less effort, and far more privacy.

The problem, of course, is that politicians don't do rational calculations - because we don't let them. Any politician can be vilified, anytime something goes wrong, for "not having done enough". Michael Dukakis was raked over the coals - and ultimately lost his bid for the White House - in part because one criminal was paroled and went on to commit a crime.

Real-world reality dictates that we accept some level of vulnerability, and some number of deaths, just as we accept a certain level of car accidents, homicides, and other things (all of which kill more of us than terrorists do). How many accidental gun deaths committed by children have occurred in the last month?

But political reality - on the singular issue of terrorism (but not road accidents, or gun violence) - says to the politician, you must leave no stone unturned, no action untaken. You must be able to say, "we did everything we possibly could."

As usual, this is not the fault of our politicians - it's our own fault. We don't apply this logic to other arenas in life, else we would be driving on roads with 25 mph speed limits everywhere (imagine the lives we would save!) We don't comb through emails or phone calls for evidence that people are going to commit murder, or sell drugs, or rob banks, or any number of other illegal and harmful activities. And our political system is unable to put even the mildest controls on firearms. So why do we accept this "logic" when it comes to terrorism?

The government will stop this sort of massive spying when politicians are punished for overreaching on privacy but NOT punished every time there is a terrorist incident somewhere. Until then, they will continue to respond to the incentives we give them. And as long as we fail to ask questions about the security side and focus only on privacy, our privacy will continue to erode - without improving our security one bit.



* I am discounting out of hand the argument, made on the fringes, that the Boston explosions were a "false flag" attack planted by the government. There is no publicly available evidence to suggest that this is the case, and no obvious motive or outcome for having done so.

Our Own Ideas About Guns Are Killing Us

A connection of mine posted the following to Facebook today:

I'm sure the people that write these fables (and yes, I don't think this is actually true) think they're being clever. But this is an example of what I wrote about the other day when I argued that Guns Don't Kill People, Ideas Kill People.

I've no doubt that a number of people will read this little vignette and think, "Yeah, right on! That'll show 'em!" They'll feel a warm, emotional glow of self-satisfaction as they bask in reflected self-righteousness. But in point of fact, this is a parable of barbarity. A society that actually worked this way would only be described as barbaric.

I will say, as a side note, that the person who posted this story is a church-going Christian who is proud of his/her faith. I apparently missed the part of the Gospel where Jesus commanded us to shoot thieves in the back.

The barbarity of this response - you stole my purse, therefore you deserve to die at my hand - can be clearly seen both in our own laws and in how we view other societies. In other parts of the world, people are shot or stoned for adultery, or their hands are cut off for stealing, and we call them uncivilized. In our own set of laws, a convicted thief is sentenced to jail, not to death - even the most ardent death-penalty advocates have never suggested that it be extended to purse-snatching.

"Hey," some will argue. "It's just a joke. Lighten up!" But it's not just that I fail to see the humor in jokes about killing purse-snatchers. The ideas contained in humor are serious, and they effect our behavior. Not so long ago, jokes about lynching blacks were widespread in the American South - and so were actual lynchings. Do we find it acceptable to joke about rape? About domestic violence? So why is this funny?

Most of the people who kill with guns feel quite justified in doing so. Yes, some of them are mentally ill - but even they have to get their ideas from somewhere. And many are not - there are thousands of gun murders per year in the US, and in nearly all cases the shooter felt perfectly justified despite being apparently sane. Those feelings of justification don't come out of nowhere - they are a part of our society, woven into our conversations and our collective consciousness, just like the "joke" above making its way around the internet.

If you want to live in a society where you can use deadly force to "defend" yourself any time you like, may I suggest relocating to Afghanistan or Somalia. If you want to live in a society of laws and civilization and a chance at peace, help stamp out these ideas. In the end, getting rid of our gut-level "justifications" for shooting is the only way to move towards genuine peace.

Violence Speaks to Violence

Over the last few days, the headlines have been dominated by tiny groups of people who are primarily talking to each other in the language of violence. While the line between peaceful protest and violent outrage is sometimes fuzzy, it's clear that the airwaves are now being dominated by those shouting in anger. The murder of the American ambassador in Libya and the storming of embassies in Yemen and Egypt have captured everyone's attention - the world stage has been seized by the violent.

This is not only true of Muslims across the Islamic World (although most coverage is now going to protests and the potential for further violence). Here in the US, the voices that have been heard most loudly are those that lashed out in anger or disdain (as the Romney campaign did in its initial reaction to events) and, paradoxically, those that created the offending movie in the first place. The President, the Secretary of State, and a host of others have been forced to respond to this agenda of violence, anger, and hate - in the midst of the microscope that is a presidential campaign.

We are, by and large, listening to the violent and angry, and then turning to our leaders to ask "what are you going to do about it?" In so doing, we are missing a fundamental truth and we have lost our own voice in the maelstrom.

The truth we're missing is that, although violence and anger are loud, volume does not mean size. The number of people involved in making the film appears to be remarkably small - and based on news reports, some of those didn't understand what the film would ultimately be about. There appears to have been a very small handful of people whose vitriolic hatred of Islam pushed them to make and release this video. Theirs is a violence of word and voice, if not bullets and fire.

Too, the crowds that have mobbed and attacked US embassies overseas may in fact be relatively small groups of people. The group that attacked the US embassy in Sanaa, Yemen numbered a few hundred in a city of two million. Reports have emerged of others in Yemen, Libya and Egypt who are ashamed of their countrymen, including some moving photos of an anti-violence rally in Benghazi. These voices are not as loud as the voices of anger and violence - but they may well be more numerous.

There is, of course, a third group: those that sympathize with the violence (on either side), that harbor the anger and support those who lash out. We don't know how large this group is, either. The lines are not clearly drawn. But I have seen enough anti-Muslim snark, even among my own FB contacts, to know that there are those who to some degree or another approve of the hatred behind the video. These are the "you're either fer us or agin' us" types whose anger is cloaked in righteous indignation, which often serves as a justification for violence or coercion.

In this kind of environment, violence and anger rule the day. They seize everybody's attention and become the dominant means of dialogue. Violence speaks to violence, while those who want peace are caught in the middle, silenced by the din.

I think that if we're really interested in peace, we have a responsibility to say so. We must first examine ourselves, and make sure we're not falling into the "fer us or agin' us" trap. There are peace-seeking people on all sides - if we want to be among their number, let us first make sure that we're not inadvertently feeding the violence and anger in our own interactions.

Next, we should find a way to speak on behalf of peace. The media probably won't listen - anger and violence sell papers and ads far better - but we should do it anyway. In particular, we should speak on behalf of peace to those around us - to our friends, our neighbors, our co-workers and fellow church-goers, our FB friends, our twitter followers - wherever we have a voice that someone listens to.

Speaking for peace also means listening. We seem to believe that other people will listen to us if we shout loud enough, or are clever enough in our snark - even though we ourselves never listen to such people. If we really speak on behalf of peace, we are willing to listen, to reflect, and to honor and respect others' voices. If a desire for peace unites us, that is enough ground on which to stand in conversation.

We should do this not because speaking for peace will silence the violence and anger, but simply because peace needs a voice. We don't know where our words will travel, or what effect they will have. But we know what will happen if we are silent. If no one speaks peace to the violence and anger around us, the violent and angry will have their way and their wars. We can do better. At the very least, we should try.