This article invites readers to join an effort to improve international understanding among competing groups in conflict by helping document the common beliefs and misunderstandings that drive conflict, thereby making it easier for (a) supporters of all sides to understand their opposition, and (b) their leaders to resolve the conflicts nonviolently by improving rule of law.

To what extent does the outcome of any conflict, especially armed conflict, rely on the actions of people not initially involved? How much do changes in the level of commitment, desertions and defections contribute to the outcome? And how much do the tactics used during a conflict contribute to the evolution of the level of democratization and economic development after the official end of a struggle?

One answer to the post-conflict question was provided by the analysis of all the major governmental change efforts of the twentieth century conducted by Chenoweth and Stephan: Among the over 300 major governmental change efforts they found, violence generally promoted tyranny, while nonviolence helped build democracy.[1]

More research is needed to understand the evolution of group identity in conflict and how that contributes to the prospects for peace, prosperity and democracy beyond the official end of a conflict.[2]

Under what circumstances would you do what you see your opposition doing?

This may be the single most important question in almost any conflict:

If you cannot see circumstances under which you might do what you see your opposition doing, you probably don't understand what drives your opponents. Worse, what you do in “self defense” may be counterproductive because of that misunderstanding.

Sun Tzu: If you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.

Examples

US War in Vietnam

Former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who left office in 1961, said in his 1963 autobiography that he had never communicated with anyone knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs [including Vietnam], who did not agree that the Communist Ho Chi Minh might have gotten 80 percent of the vote if elections had been held there at the time of the fighting [leading to the defeat of the French in 1954].[3]

This was the universal expert consensus.

It was rarely if ever reported in the mainstream US media of that day, presumably because it would have offended the people who controlled media funding and governance.[4]

H. R. McMaster said in (1997) Dereliction of Duty:

The war in Vietnam was not lost in the field, nor was it lost on the front pages of The New York Times, or on the college campuses. It was lost in Washington, D.C. ... [It was] a uniquely human failure, the responsibility for which was shared by President Johnson and his principal military and civilian advisors.[5]

An alternative view is that the power of confirmation bias is so strong that the mainstream media in effect create the stage upon which politicians read their lines. If this is accurate, it suggests that US presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson may have believed that they had few options to do much dramatically different from what they did in Vietnam.

For example, US Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican, captured the nation's attention in 1950 with unsubstantiated claims of Communists working for the US State Department under President Harry Truman, a Democrat. In 1952, McCarthy accused the Democrats of "20 years of treason" for having lost China to Communism and have been excessively friendly toward the Soviet Union during the previous 20 years. In December 1953, after Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, had been President less than 11 months, McCarthy complained that Eisenhower had not been sufficiently aggressive in eliminating the Communists from the US government, still without evidence, complaining of "21 years of treason". President Eisenhower presumably noticed the absence of media coverage of what he regarded as the universal expert consensus on Vietnam. In that environment, one can imagine that Eisenhower knew he might have difficulty getting reelected in November 1956 if a Communist had won an election in Vietnam earlier that year. If that's accurate, it could explain why Eisenhower may have taken steps to ensure that no such election was held, effectively blocking the implementation of that part of the Geneva Accords of 1954.

A decade later, only two members of the US Congress voted against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave President Johnson a blank check to escalate the war in 1965. Both were defeated when they next ran for reelection; one was defeated in the primary.[6] In Dereliction of Duty, McMaster acknowledges that President Johnson was worried that if he appeared to soft on Communism, he could lose the 1964 presidential election. He therefore pushed the US military Vietnam and the Gulf of Tonkin to support raids from South Vietnam against the North, hoping to provoke an attack, which he could then denounce as "unprovoked". There had apparently been an actual confrontation on August 2, which Johnson chose to ignore. That was followed on August 4 by an incident that involve the US Navy firing ordinance at false radar images without an attack. Johnson denounced the August 4 incident as an "unprovoked attack", which was followed by the almost unanimous approval by the US Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.[7]

To restate, to what extent was the US War in Vietnam due to (a) a "dereliction of duty", as McMaster claimed, or (b) the political environment created by the media, or (c) something else?

The War on Terror

The justification for the War on Terror seems much flimsier than the rationale behind the Vietnam War. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union (now Russia) and the People's Republic of China were (and are today) large and powerful countries, though not as powerful as the mainstream media in the US made them out to be.

US government documents declassified 2016-07-15 establish that US government officials knew as early as 1999 that members of the Saudi royal family and employees of the Saudi embassy and consulates in the US were involved in the preparations for a major terrorist attack. This documentation included an America West flight that made an emergency landing in Ohio in 1999 when two Saudis tried to break into the cockpit.[8]

So why did the US not declare war on Saudi Arabia? Why did it rush to invade Afghanistan and Iraq instead?
The general theory discussed in the Wikiversity article on "Confirmation bias and conflict" suggests that major advertisers, people who controlled substantial funding for the mainstream media in the US, had great business relations with the Saudis, and did not have good business relations with the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Beyond that, a 2008 RAND study on "How Terrorist Groups End"[9] establish that the military is the least effective response to terrorism (7 percent of 268 terrorist groups that ended between 1968 and 2006) while negotiations and law enforcement were most effective.

So why didn't the US treat the suicide mass murders of September 11, 2001, as a major crime, and not as a justification for war?[10]
An answer consistent with the history of foreign interventions by the United States is that US international business interests seem to prefer authoritarian regimes to democracies, and they control major advertising budgets. This gives the mainstream media in the US a conflict of interest in honestly reporting on anything that might offend key decision makers in these major advertisers, as suggested in the Wikiversity article on "Confirmation bias and conflict".

There is no sense of proportionality in The War on Terror: Except for the single year 2001, more Americans have died in an average year drowning in bathtubs, hot tubs and spas than have succumbed to terrorist attacks.[11] But we don't declare war on bathtubs.

How do perceptions in conflict get so distorted?

The Wikiversity discussion of "confirmation bias and conflict" explains how perceptions in conflict get so distorted:

  1. Everyone prefers information and sources consistent with preconceptions.
  2. The mainstream media everywhere profit from this to benefit those who control media funding and governance.

That Wikiversity article suggests we can overcome these and similar problems by (1) resetting our preconceptions to believe that our opponents in almost any conflict know things we don't, and (2) looking for media that will help us understand those differences and creating such alternative media when we can't find information that makes our opponents seem rational.

Developing the needed alternative information

To make it easier for people to get information that makes their opposition look human, we need an “International Conflict Observatory”. This can start with volunteers producing documentation of “Why they hate us” on Wikiversity to help each side understand their opposition in the world's major conflicts.

Volunteers can help with the following:

  • Identifying major conflicts.
  • Finding good documentation of the positions of each major party to conflict and posting summaries those positions to Wikiversity to help each party understand their opposition better. This can make it harder for xenophobes be successful and can make it easier for more sensible leaders to pursue more useful and less counterproductive approaches to conflict.
  • Identifying major research organizations that produce good quality documentation useful for such analyses.
  • Identifying major advocates for better policies among the different major parties to conflict and helping those nonviolent advocacy groups promote more effective (and less lethal) approaches to conflict.
  • Helping the most valuable research organizations and advocacy groups obtain increased funding for their efforts.

If you think you can help with this, first create a Wikiversity article on the conflict that most concerns you, if one does not already exist; make sure it includes [[Category:Conflict observatory]].

Alternatively or in addition to this, add comments, questions and / or suggestions to the “Discuss” page associated with this article.

Wikimedia Foundation and managing conflict

The section on "Articles on contentious issues" in the Wikipedia article on "Reliability of Wikipedia" cites research documenting the effectiveness of Wikipedia in getting people with very different perspectives to collaborate in producing a narrative of a physical reality they share for which their constructed realities are very different and a source of conflict.[12]

Discussions of well documented aspects of a particular conflict could be handled on Wikipedia. Other aspects might be rejected on Wikipedia as violating their rule against original research. Such discussions could be hosted on Wikiversity, at least initially. If the volume of this type of work became sufficiently large, it might be spun off into a separate project.[13]

See also

Evolution of conflict

Notes

    1. ↑ Erica Chenoweth; Maria Stephan (2011), Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Columbia University Press, Wikidata Q88725216.
    2. ↑ Spencer Graves (26 February 2005), The Impact of Violent and Nonviolent Action on Constructed Realities and Conflict (PDF), Wikidata Q58635572.
    3. ↑ Dwight D. Eisenhower (1963), Mandate for Change: The White House Years 1953-1956: A Personal Account, Doubleday, Wikidata Q61945939, p. 372.
    4. ↑ It may also have offended the audience for the media, but that's only because any such claims were totally inconsistent with all the other information that audience was getting. See Confirmation bias and conflict.
    5. ↑ Paul F. Braim (1997), "Book review: Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam", US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters, 27 (3): 162–81, ISSN 0031-1723, Wikidata Q104828616.
    6. ↑ The two “no” votes were Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska. Gruening lost to Mike Gravel in the 1968 primary. Morse lost to Bob Packwood in the 1968 general election.
    7. ↑ H. R. McMaster (2 September 1997), Dereliction of Duty, Harper Perennial, p. 352, Wikidata Q5262519, esp. p. 124.
    8. ↑ For a summary, see The 28 pages. For the document declassified on 2017-07-15, see Wikisource:Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities Before and After the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001/Part 4 (Declassified).
    9. ↑ Seth Jones; Martin C. Libicki (2008), How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qa'ida, RAND Corporation, doi:10.7249/MG741RC, ISBN 978-0-8330-4465-5, JSTOR 10.7249/mg741rc, Wikidata Q57515305.
    10. ↑ Noam Chomsky (2001), 9-11, OL 71728W, Wikidata Q4645527.
    11. ↑ Alejandra Fernandez-Morera (26 February 2018), "Someone drowns in a tub nearly every day in AmericaExperts blame alcohol; others suspect homicide", Seattle Post-Intelligencer, ISSN 0745-970X, Wikidata Q60226981.
    12. ↑ See also "confirmation bias and conflict".
    13. ↑ I would hope that it would remain a a Wikimedia Foundation project for several reasons. Most obviously, the success of such a project depend essentialy on Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources while treating others with respect. More subtly, the Wikimedia Foundation has earned a reputation and an aura for being relatively honest and safe. Parties that believe they benefit from conflict would almost certainly work in deceptive ways to destroy a project like this. Such efforts would likely be more easily managed as a Wikimedia Foundation project. The project could more easily be destroyed if it were separate.
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