We are all familiar with regions in the world fraught with apparently intractable, violent conflict – Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Israel-Palestine, the Congo, Kashmir, to name a few. In each instance, social science, in careful ethnographic studies, discloses the same patterns at work.

As levels of violence increase, social horizons decrease. The cumulative, deeply experienced, pain of one side in the conflict limits and eventually extinguishes the ability to apprehend the pain felt by the other side. All energy and attention is focused on causing as much or more pain on the “enemy” than one’s own group has experienced. A negative, downward spiral of hatred and violence, once in motion, is profoundly resistant to intervention and change.

A dramatic example of this pattern at work comes out of a YMCA program in the Middle East. For two decades the YMCA brought Palestinian and Jewish teenagers together in safe, retreat settings to share their stories. That process was designed to foster understanding and to create long-term relationships through which the young people would work as agents of reconciliation, renewal and hope for the future. By the mid-1990s, however, the levels of violence in the conflict surrounding them had increased to the point where that was no longer possible. The last sessions before the project was abandoned were filled with hysterical screaming by both groups, each able only to yell at the other “Look what you did to us!” with no capacity left to listen, to hear, “what we did to you.”

So where are there examples of intervention and reversal of this pattern? Two with which we Americans are perhaps familiar are the story of Gandhi and the Indian resistance to British domination, and the story of the active nonviolent resistance of African-Americans to white oppression in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It is well documented that those movements succeeded to the extent that they did by refusing to reciprocate violence for violence. The on-going work of the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa is another illustration of a serious effort to avoid the negative spiral of violent reprisal.

In the aftermath of 9-11, the United States has pursued two very different strategies. On the one hand, we have collaborated with other governments in targeting, arresting and disabling particular terrorist groups and individuals. On the other hand, we have attacked and occupied a foreign country, bringing huge social dislocation and suffering as well as a huge escalation of violence and its arbitrary impact on tens of thousands of people who are in no reasonable way linked to terrorism.

The negative spiral we can perhaps more easily see in the instances of Jewish-Palestinian relations and of conflict in Northern Ireland is now at work in the larger, harder to grasp, arenas of American political culture and Arab political culture. Americans and Arabs are becoming enmeshed in that troublesome pattern: “They” have hurt us; we will punish (hurt) “them.”

With regard to the first strategy – targeting particular terrorist groups and individuals – perhaps we are, in the short term, safer. With regard to the second strategy, however, we are arguably far less safe, generating more intractable enemies than we are transforming enemies into friends.

The key to breaking the pattern of the negative downward spiral of violent conflict is not in who has the more powerful arsenal of technology and weapons with which to inflict violence, or even who perpetrates the last, most devastating act. That cycle never ends, especially when the “ultimate weapon” the cycle itself produces is a suicide agent using any means available to inflict hurt.

The key to breaking the pattern is the appearance of someone (person/group/political leadership/movement) who grasps and champions the one human principle that leads to attitudinal and ideological change and transformation: the principle that love alone is redemptive, that love is indeed more powerful than violence, that loving enemies is the only way to turn them into friends.

This principle is easily caricatured, but it is no idealistic philosophy. It is documented in historical experience – in the change of policy of the British in India; in the transformation of white attitudes and behaviors toward blacks in America, in the ongoing stories of transformation in white and black experience in South Africa.

So, again, are we – Americans – safer? The answer, from every quarter of the political spectrum, is “no.”

In an op-ed piece in the Bangor Daily News on April 1, George Will writes: “More attacks are coming because we are still far from draining the social swamps where attackers breed.” Will does not see the even more disturbing truth of the manifold of ways in which American violence is dramatically increasing the “social swamp” he so arrogantly implies is the source of our fear-filled future.

Rob Stuart, of Frenchboro, has a Ph.D. in ethics from Yale University and has taught at Princeton Theological Seminary, the University of Southern Maine, Bates College and Bangor Theological Seminary. In the 1990s he worked with the refugee communities in Portland as minister of the Chestnut Street United Methodist Church, and was a member of the board of the Maine Council of Churches.