At heart, especially at the start of a brand new year, I am an optimist. Life is good. But when I saw the headline of a commentary in The Post the Sunday before Christmas asking, “Is peace on Earth even possible?,” my answer was a pessimistic no.
That’s why, whether addressing a contemporary challenge like defeating the Islamic State or the age-old challenge of finding a path to peace for Israelis and Palestinians, I wouldn’t bet a dime on our success. Not that we shouldn’t try; if we don’t have our hand in the game, some other power will replace us and the world it shapes will likely be even worse. But I have precious little hope. Which you might call pessimism personified.
However, after I said all that to an audience at the University of Denver during a recent talk about American options in the Middle East, I heard optimism personified. One man stood and asked: What about globalization as a solution to these struggles? His point was, people who’ve long lived pathetic lives in the Middle East, thanks to their own glimpses of globalization, now can see what the world offers people like us and seize similar opportunities for themselves.
Then another man stood and asked why I addressed everything from brutal combat to religious creed in my pessimistic analysis but never mentioned the power of economics. His point was, if we took the money we spend to wage war and put it instead into economic development, we would elevate people to the point where they would see little benefit in continuing to fight.
From experience, I’m convinced there are pragmatic reasons why economics and globalization aren’t going to bring the monsters of the Islamic State to heel — nor adversaries in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rivals in Syria’s civil war, Iranians bent on building nuclear weapons, or Sunnis and Shiites battling for influence in Iraq. But thank goodness, especially now when we want so much to hope for something better, there are people out there who do.
Remember Luke Somers, the hostage of Islamic terrorists, who died during an attempt to rescue him last month in Yemen? A friend of his told The Associated Press that Somers “would have wanted issues of extremism and terrorism to be addressed by stepping up the dialogue instead of resorting to conflict between nations.”
The pessimist in me says that nations can do dialogue until the well runs dry; it’s not going to make violent clashes vanish. I came to this cynical view years ago while covering the United Nations, where dialogue is just about the only thing they do. The U.N.’s member nations couldn’t even agree most days on whether to change the toilet paper in their public restrooms from one-ply to two, let alone on how to make the world a peaceful place.
But the optimist in me takes comfort in one land where I covered deadly warfare for many years and never believed that hostility and hate could be overcome — and then it was. For 30 years, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland were at one another’s throats; each side felt browbeaten by the other. As a reporter, I’ve seen nothing that pits people against one another more feverishly than religion. Yet both sides tired of their bloody battles, and looked for a way out, and through a power-sharing arrangement that has lasted now for a decade and a half, they found it. Sure, there are still bitter feelings in some parts — only two years ago I saw fresh murals on the walls of Belfast buildings, glorifying armed militants — but overall, amity has overcome acrimony.
Is there anything to learn from Northern Ireland that could apply to the world at large? Maybe not. But it does show that no matter how pessimistic some of us are about peace on Earth, there is always hope.
How sad, and how hopeless, if that were to disappear.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
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