ISIS hardly seems to deserve empathy. But that depends on what’s meant by “empathy.” In the sophisticated realms of international relations, psychotherapy, and other social science disciplines, “empathy” doesn’t carry the ordinary meaning most people think of when they hear that word. To most people, “empathy” means sympathy, or feeling for. Whereas in the academic and professional worlds, empathize means something like “stand in the shoes of,” or crawl inside the other person’s position, their life experiences, their beliefs, attitudes and feelings. It’s a totally impersonal process at times, much like understanding how a machine works so as to become better able to fix it. For instance, international relations expert and former psychologist, James G. Blight, qualifies this word, as others have before him, by specifying “realistic empathy.” But Hillary Clinton had much more in mind than mechanical analysis when she recently advocated the use of empathy in international relations. She adds, as some of us think she should, that even our enemies, regardless how hateful and murderous, should be treated with “respect.”
It’s easy to get caught in thinking that she’s talking about forgiveness, instead of respect. And it’s easy to dismiss her proposal as weak and even ridiculous. But she’s implying that respect is an essential ingredient of any conflict resolution. Disrespect, or humiliating treatment, only inflames one’s enemies and makes them exponentially more difficult to reach; it can even be argued that dissing actually is a primary cause of relationship problems at any level.
In my world of psychotherapy and as a former prison chaplain, some professionals agree that even some psychopaths are capable of being reached and transformed by what might be called “respectful empathic understanding,” as some other professionals have said. The idea here is that many people who seem insane, or unreachable by reason and appeals to caring, always has a grain of rationality and concern in them that an empathic person can help develop. Of course, even in ordinary relations like in the average marriage, partners who can’t resolve their anger at each other truly believe that the other person is totally unreasonable until they get help from a therapist in understanding each other. Unless you have experience seeing empathy in action in difficult situations, it’s likely you would feel that it can’t work for your embattled. “Therapy can’t work for Joe,” Mary says, “because he won’t listen to reason.” Mary’s therapist proved her wrong.
Likewise, in international relations, Blight has proved his critics wrong in a number of instances. He’s helped mortal enemies who hate the US. reconsider their positions, mainly by consistently understanding in detail the motives and rationales of opponents, never failing to avoid even slightly judging, much less trashing, either side. He did that in 1997 for North Vietnamese and American leaders, most of whom concluded that if they had had face-to-face meetings with the help of a moderator like Blight, they would have realized that neither side had imperialistic aims in South Vietnam. The North only wanted to reunite their country, not spread Communism. And the US. did at heart only want to prevent the hostile takeover of countries for the sake of spreading Communism throughout the world. Blight helped them sustain a mainly, non-judgmental let’s thoroughly look at the facts attitude.
How might “respectful empathic understanding” apply in the case of ISIS?
ISIS explicitly states that Osama bin Laden is, for lack of a more culturally appropriate word, one of their mentors/heroes. His words help us understand what is at the heart of Middle Eastern people’s hatred of the US. One of the best sources for understanding bin Laden is his 1998 fatwa entitled, “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” He had three major grievances against the US. He wrote,
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples. …. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader [US.]-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million… despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation. Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.
“The protracted blockade” he spoke of includes the sanctioning of the mineral, chlorine, which the US. accepts was responsible for the deaths of 500,000 children and other vulnerable persons, usually aged adults. Polluted water was believed to be the cause of their deaths.
It’s difficult not to immediately dismiss bin Ladin’s grievances as laced with crazy stuff, but, as psychoanalyst Bernard Apfelbaum puts it, there is a “hidden rationality” in all problem behaviors, including crazy-sounding verbiage. To get this point, focus on the sanctioning of chlorine. It’s common to think that Bill Clinton’s sanctioning of chlorine during and after the first Iraq War was a necessary evil. After all, the gas form of chlorine when combined with explosives can make a deadly bomb. So, many conclude, there’s simply no issue of empathy here. The Iraqi sympathizers like bin Laden have no leg to stand on. We say, they brought it on themselves, just as we might say concerning the death of a murderer in a shootout with police. And, sure enough, no State Department or other government official expressed any feeling for the victims of polluted water in Iraq. But there’s confusion here.
Because we don’t want to appear sympathetic with Saddam Hussein or bin Laden, and because we feel justified in saving Israeli and Kurdish lives by sanctioning chlorine, we express no feeling for the deaths of Iraqi non-combatants. Maybe we’re subliminally aware that we committed a heinous act against 500,000 innocent people and feel so guilt that we can’t even think at all about their plight. It’s too painful and seems weak to boot..
Unfortunately, it can be persuasively argued that our lack of feeling for innocent victims explains at least a chunk of bin Laden’s fury, as he plainly says. Throughout his fatwah and in other pronouncements, he frequently speaks of the power of the humiliation he feels has been perpetrated against people in the Middle East. Consider also some social scientists’ opinion that near the root of violence is what they call “humiliated fury.” When partners fight, it can seem obvious that they’re incited to violence by a barrage of humiliating words, like, “loser,” “bitch,” and much more.
Perhaps there is no greater degradation than a complete lack of genuine concern for innocent victims. To not even mention their and their families’ and friends’ plight…. The US. could, in that moment of history alone, seem sociopathic to Iraqis and bin Laden, no less than bin Laden does to us. After all, a gross lack of caring is a leading characteristic of a sociopath.
Madeline Albright, the Secretary of State during the early Clinton years when the sanctions were first imposed seemed to at least vaguely sense how terrible was this lack of empathy. David Rieff, in an article in the New York Times, reported that, during the initial controversy about sanctions, she is quoted as saying, ”This is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.” Many years later after the conclusion of the war against Hussein, she expressed regret about saying that. She said, “It was a genuinely stupid thing to say.” She seemed to be trying to mitigate against the implication of heartlessness in her words and perhaps even, by direct implication, apologize. But she never did clearly apologize, even though she seemed genuinely regretful. Rather, she in essence argued against the many critics who believed that the sanctions were criminal and that she was inhuman. Rather than unequivocally express feeling for the plight of the Iraqis, she pled with her critics to feel for her and the administration. She said, ”I wish people understood that these are not black and white choices; the choices are really hard.” Then she did at least acknowledge that what happened to the Iraqis was horrendous. She visited Iraq and sympathized, “What was so terrible for me was that I did see the faces of the people who were suffering—even if I thought then and think now that the sufferings of the Iraqi people were Saddam’s doing, not ours. [Emphasis added.] There’s a terrible price you pay. A terrible price.” Still no mention of the deaths due to the sanction against chlorine.
Yikes. She seemed there to be giving sympathy with one hand and taking with the other. The least that could be said of her comments is that they never directly expressed feeling for the people. And, so far, hers is the most sympathetic comment by an administration representative that I’ve found.
Incidentally, a terrible irony here is that, as many have said, including Rieff, the sanctions actually gave aid and comfort to Hussein. He was able to turn the worldwide public relations battle from his gross murderousness to the murders caused by the sanctions. Rieff explains that he found “an almost universal opposition to sanctions—a stern, unshakable conviction that the 1990’s were a human and economic catastrophe for the Iraqi people and that sanctions were at the heart of the disaster.” Thus the sanctions gave Saddam Hussein some cover, and, as the war against him 11 years later seemed to show, sanctions didn’t and never could bring him down. He redirected all of the punishment of the sanctions toward his people while he lived in luxury along with his top-level sympathizers. I wonder if he could have been as successful in marshaling opinion against us if we had expressed appropriate feeling for the innocent victims, something like, We are mortified and in pain over the loss of life in Iraq due to polluted water. When 3,000 plus of our citizens were killed in 2001, friends, family, and people throughout the US. were spiritually injured by bin Laden’s soldiers’ attacks against us. We were deeply hurt. We were stupid and callous not to realize that Hussein would allow his people to be killed in great numbers. It’s our fault for not anticipating that, and we will go to our graves feel the pain of regret for the loss of life that we unwittingly perpetrated. We cannot expect any appreciation of our awakening to the truth of what happened in Iraq when we blockaded chlorine. We only hope that we can gradually convince the people of the Middle East that we do genuinely care about he plight of innocent victims and even of our fallen enemies. We can be stupid and appear heartless, but we want to be a people that clearly stands for empathy and concern for all people. Perhaps we can someday write those words into our constitution. Finally, we pray for the violence to end.
In light of the sanctions against Iraqi alone, it does seem at least somewhat understandable that, in 2001, bin Laden would want to attack America. And when one adds our almost complete disregard of the plight of the Iraqi people, well, the experience seems enraging. That might be hard to accept if you misunderstand empathy, thinking that it’s about not only caring but, much worse, condoning, forgiving. But it isn’t. Empathy can be only about crawling inside a person’s perspective for the sake of helping to anticipate and head off future attacks. And sometimes, just doing that can ease tensions significantly. But how might have this empathetic view helped us to at least lessen bin Laden’s motivation to attack us?
An apparently insignificant report might help us begin to think about this possibility. It’s been reported that bin Laden said that he respected writers, Noam Chomsky and Michael Scheuer. To people who regard bin Laden as a madman through and through, his respect for two American writers seems beside any point. But within a thoroughly empathic point of view, you at least conditionally take him seriously. Of course, I’m guessing what he precisely thought, but his appreciation of two radical thinkers suggests that he is amenable to reason. So it means that he’s amenable to empathy. I’ll illustrate.
Imagine that in 1993 as it was becoming apparent that the sanctions were implicated in thousands of deaths in Iraq, that a man like Blight, along with Chomsky, were to have gone to bin Laden and engaged him first in a discussion of his grievances, including some of the off-base ones about our seemingly licentious culture. That would have been an opportunity to broaden and deepen his appreciation of American culture. More importantly, Blight, who is the only American who was allowed an extended audience with Russian leaders Gromyko and Khrushchev’s son, Fidel Castro, and leaders from North Vietnam, would ply his empathic skills. In Wilson’s Ghost, the book about the use of realistic empathy Blight co-authored with former Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, Blight helps us understand his method by describing how he engaged former American and North Vietnamese leaders in an examination of the events leading to the Vietnam war.
To help imagine what would happen in a proactive use of realistic empathy, consider the following example of Blight’s work. He helped initiate a project in Iran to try to understand the Iran-Iraq war. He had dinner with, Doroudian, a former general in the Revolutionary Guard, one of the most anti-American and warlike military groups in the Middle East. Blight’s burning question was, Why does this man want to engage in a project of understanding? Doesn’t he already think he knows how to view us? Isn’t he a hard-line ideologue, as in, Don’t confuse me with the facts. Americans’ image of the Revolutionary Guard suggests that none of them would have the slightest interest in understanding us, except perhaps to bolster their negativity against us. But how could that be a primary motivation? They already had mountains of grievances against the US.
Blight said that
Deroudian noted that our project, however the details might evolve, would consist, as he said, “in two conversations at the same time.” People like us would be talking about the history of the war but, in so doing, we would obviously be exploring indirectly a lot of the ideas we have about each other that landed the US. and Iran on opposite sides in the war, and which are still fanning the flames of hostility between our two countries now.
They would be exploring “ideas we have about each other.” Deroudian would be exposed to the complex motivations and forces at work in the US. that culminated in siding with Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war. And Blight and others, including Bill Clinton perhaps, would be expressing realistic empathy to the Iranians. The medium—realistic empathy—would be a major part of Blight’s message. The point is that empathy can breed more effective and, hopefully, more peaceful relationships, roughly analogous to what happens between blacks and whites during the 1960s here in the US. The better we got to know each other, the better we got along. We could see that Joe Jones, Ph.D., wasn’t a dumb, lazy, former slave. And we could see that many so-called “crackers” were fully sympathetic with the cause of civil rights. Familiarity has the possibility of mitigating prejudice and, therefore, dangerous levels of hostility.
In the case of ISIS, it does seem unlikely that the core group of ideologues could be swayed. But think of their many supporters, more and less committed to ISIS’ most extreme ambitions. Most movements get much of their money and other kinds of support from a range of more and less committed people. Lots of non-ideological people supported Malcolm X, despite how extreme some of his ideas seemed. It’s like in cop TV shows. There often an informant who comes forward to rat on a gang leader who’s too violent and dangerous, but often only if the police approach this person thoughtfully, as in, You know the rest of your neighborhood wants this guy taken out, because he’s too scary.
Within the frame of reference of this article, it makes sense to speculate that 9/11 and some of terrorism in general may most revealingly represent a failure of empathy. Our State Department is and always has been steeped in what international relations experts call the “realist” approach, and those officials who adhere to that view tend to dismiss Blight’s position by calling it the “idealist” view. The so-called realists operate within a decidedly non-empathic framework, one that tends to trash our enemies as “evil,” much less dismiss their legitimate grievances. As realist Albright said, the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children and aged people is “Hussein’s fault,” and in so saying, she seemed heartless and, therefore, searingly infuriating.
Given that the realists sometimes fail to prevent devastating conflicts, perhaps we should at least give the idealists an opportunity to head selected gathering hostilities. In consideration of the victims of 9/11, it seems important to wonder what would have happened if, in the early 1990s, Blight and Chomsky had visited and empathized with bin Laden.
John McFadden is an ordained Presbyterian minister, a State licensed psychotherapist, and a freelance writer. He has published articles in the Journal of Drug Issues, Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, and Practice, and the Washington Post Health Section. He appeared on Point Counterpoint and local interview shows and has been a presenter at psychology seminars in the Bay Area. He lives and practices psychotherapy in Noe Valley, San Francisco.
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