Tag Archives: Mideast

Good guys and bad guys

Nearly 30 years ago Robert Fulghum wrote a best-selling book entitled “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.” While I did not read the book, much of the wit and wisdom became part of popular culture at the time. In a similar vein, when I was in elementary school, we learned about good guys and bad guys. In our recreation periods, we played games, taking the roles of one or the other, in Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, and Yankees and Rebels. Neither role was uniformly bad or good—it was a matter of perception—everyone took turns at both roles in the game. However, we did learn that there were good guys and bad guys in the world, and we learned that it was not always easy to tell which was which.

There is much in the last year to which that lesson applies. One example is the ongoing Syrian Civil War, which has victimized hundreds of thousands of civilians, who have been wounded, raped, and driven from their homes by the combatants. At the outset Syria was a majority Sunni Muslim country ruled by a brutal Shia Muslim (Alawite) dictator. The armed opposition was largely Sunni. Among them were some relatively secular Sunni elements as well as the Al-Nusra brigades (aligned with Al-Qaeda) and ISIS (broken off from Al Qaeda). All of these groups use captured weapons, many captured from recipients of US suppliers.

Here is an example where there are so many bad guys, it is hard to know where to help the good guys, if there are any. We tend to favor secular groups. It is unclear whether those groups are adequately trained and motivated against a minority regime fighting to stave off ethnic and political disaster as well as two religiously ideological groups opposing it. It is unclear if they would be as attractive to us in power. For a time we wisely stayed out of the conflict until ISIS began beheading people on YouTube. That got our attention, although it did not change the relative morality of any of the actors in the region. Indeed, our ally, the Saudi monarchy, routinely beheads dissidents, but prudently, not on YouTube. At the same time, the ISIS group is taking territory not only in Syria but in the Sunni regions of Shia Iraq, largely because the central government has not reached out to include the residents of those regions. As a result, we are once more wading into the morass created by our invasion nearly 12 years ago.

The US domestic headlines have been dominated by violent encounters between police and civilians, often with unarmed civilians being killed, many of them African-American. A large part of the population has chosen up sides, pro or anti-police, pro or anti-African-American. Unlike children, they rarely get to play for both sides. Because we did play for both sides as children, we learned the world was not as Manichean as we thought. Adults should be wiser, seeing even more shades of gray than children.

In the Middle East, none of the multiple sides is as good or as bad as we might like to think. In the US neither police nor civilians are as good or as bad as would like to think. To me the bad guys are the ones using guns to shoot at people, whether civilians shooting at police or police shooting at unarmed civilians. It is not the presence or absence of a uniform in an American city or on a foreign battlefield that tells who the good guys are.

So, my wish for 2015 is that overseas we pull back a bit, realizing our limits even to discern the good guys from the bad guys, much less do much about it. Indeed, sometimes we are the only good guys so we should put our efforts elsewhere. And, in the US I hope we will start holding the bad guys accountable, civilian or police. The rest of us, the good guys, police and civilians, deserve that.

Resolving Differences

We come with strongly held but divergent points of view. Although we both have right on our sides, we often fail to see the merits of the opposing view. Nonetheless, we remain focused on a favorable outcome, recruiting allies, using available means of communication to push our agenda. We are strong and tough, and winning is not the most important thing—it is the only thing.
Now, tell me: am I describing a social media thread, an American election campaign, the latest hostilities in the Mideast, or your last business meeting?
As I have watched the latest round of violence unfold in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it occurred to me how symbolic it is of human failure to communicate and cooperate in a wide range of settings. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians have strong emotional and historical ties to the land they are disputing. That these ties are in part based upon different religions makes their claims both more emotional and more central to their identities as individuals and as peoples.
It is also clear that if they found a way to cooperate and live in peace, the political boundaries they are fighting about would become less and less important over time, as economic ties and networks, social networks and business relationships supplanted political and religious stands in the importance of individuals and groups.
What is lacking in their relations, what is so important to our own, in business and personal relationships are these:
1. Even when we disagree we need to find ways to move the process towards the ultimate goal of agreement. By continuing to build Jewish settlements in the West Bank, by continuing to lob rockets and build tunnels under the Israeli border, both the Netanyahu government and Hamas are failing to move in the right direction.
2. We need to recognize that the other’s point of view has merit. If the Israelis and Palestinians really recognized that fact, it would be much harder for either to inflict violence, violence that they currently seem quite eager to inflict.
3. We need to recognize the humanity of the person facing us—dreams, disappointments, joys, sorrows, challenges, all of it. It might be an individual or a nation, but our opponent brings human needs to the encounter, and those needs have to be recognized for a negotiation to move forward.
4. We need to carefully listen if we are to accomplish these goals, to determine the way forward, to hear the part of the opponent’s view that has merit, and ultimately to hear the humanity of our opponent.
5. Only then can we reach out with a win-win solution, which is the only kind of solution that works in business.
We cannot solve the problem of war in the Middle East, but we can all do a better job in our personal and business relationships—especially if we wish to avoid the poor example set for us by Netanyahu and Hamas.