Can Admitting a Wrong Make It Right?

http://www.newsweek.com/id/200135
Christopher Dickey
Can Admitting a Wrong Make It Right?

To address the future of the Middle East, Obama must look to the past.
Jun 1, 2009 | Updated: 3:02 p.m. ET Jun 1, 2009


When the president of the United States of America stands before a huge crowd at Cairo University and makes his long-anticipated speech to the Muslim world Thursday, will he say that he's sorry? Will he, for instance, offer to make amends for the blind support some of his predecessors have shown for Israel's occupation of Arab lands? Will he ask forgiveness for the CIA coup in Iran that overthrew a democratically elected government there in 1953? Will Barack Obama try to talk directly to the people and apologize for the many decades Washington has spent supporting Arab dictators, including the one who rules in Egypt, the country where he is speaking?

Probably Obama will say none of these things, and wise voices argue that he should not. "Discussions of who is going to apologize for what and how the apologies are going to be worded and what they're supposed to convey is a prescription for getting sidetracked, bogged down and producing more antagonism," former U.S. national-security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinksitold me a few weeks ago.

There would have to be reciprocity, after all. Will we hear the Iranians apologize for their long history supporting suicide bombings, and the holding of American hostages in Tehran and Beirut in the 1980s? Or their training and equipping of militias that killed many American troops in Iraq? Would the Palestinians regret the repeated slaughter of innocent Israelis in blatant terrorist attacks?

You see the problem. Yet there is a body of evidence to suggest that the most vital element in Middle East peacemaking may lie in questions of language and symbols–what social anthropologist Scott Atran calls a "moral logic" based on "sacred values." And sometimes what that boils down to, essentially, is saying you're sorry. As Atran sees it, this is not really a theological question. It's more fundamental than fundamentalism. The need for dignity and respect—a craving for recognition and vindication—is at the heart of the region's most intractable conflicts.

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In fact, all sides need to quit looking at their moral standing as a zero-sum game in which any concession to others is an admission of moral failing on their own. And this is the kind of lesson Obama likes to teach. So, in his speech Thursday he may lay out a detailed strategy for peace, but the core message is likely to be more subtle than a discussion of which settlements should be stopped and what acreage traded in the West Bank, or how many centrifuges should be allowed to spin nuclear gas into enriched uranium in Iran. In his memorable speech on race relations in the United States during the campaign last year, Obama told African-Americans that "moving beyond our old racial wounds" meant "embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past." His core message to all sides: "Your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams."

That is likely to be the tone of Obama's address to the Islamic world (and Israel) as well. It's often said that two wrongs do not make a right. But in the Middle East today, admitting the wrongs on all sides may be the only way left to start to making things right.

© 2009

Eleanor Roosevelt speaking honestly with angry students in India about racial problems in the US and so forth.

Yes, I think his speech will be a huge help. And efforts for militant Islamic groups to distort this will reveal them for what they are.

It's all good.

And I think the speech will be honest but won't dwell on every country's perceived problems. I think it will be much more forward-looking, what we can do to improve our relations, not dwell in the past.

This doesn't have a lot to do with him.

move on.

offer an alternative future. He can even say the past history is regrettable and that much bad will has been created by it. Countries need to work internally to change and grow without having to beg for what their past leaders have done.

Should Angela Merkel apologize for what Hitler did? No. But the German people did take a good hard look at their past and how it came about and have taken steps to see that it never happens again.

and acknowledge that they fucked up. There are various ways in which this requirement can be met.

You can't change anything unless you acknowledge that the way you did it before was wrong.

Is that all it takes? No way but you have to start somewhere.