Against Warmongering Rhetoric

With the Middle-East in turmoil, the Iran-Saudi rivalry at its peak, rampant manipulated national emotions and zealotry at their historical heights, and the exchange of threats on both Iranian and Saudi sides, all pieces of an impending war puzzle seem to be in place. But as most commentators would suggest, the probability of an all-out war is far-fetched, and Iranian and Saudi military threats are but strategic ruses for gaining an upper hand at the negotiating table over many matters of geopolitical importance.

Though history keeps repeatedly reminding us that many wars started just to gain a strategic advantage at negotiating tables, for the moment, let’s not be very much concerned about the politics of all this. What is disconcerting for me is the rise of hate/war mongering rhetoric among the relatively (and sometimes highly) educated people after the Mina incidents in which many Iranian pilgrims died.

Highly dysfunctional and opaque method of governance in Saudi Arabia is indeed a drag on the Saudi government to effectively and transparently attend to the concerns of all stakeholders of the incident and communicate its messages clearly. Needless to say, no dictatorship is immune to such dysfunctionality and it should not be taken personal. This is a point that needs not be explained as it is evident.

But what is not very clear is that we have to be especially careful where there is a misunderstanding between two undemocratic, non-transparent, and non-meritocratic governments. In open democracies, premature hard-line sentiments to such contentious incidents wither away in the process of open consensus building via institutions that replace sentiments and emotions with reasoned institutional responses. But when an undemocratic government lacking a decentralized deliberative system for decision making faces such an incident, no such mechanisms are in place and the probability of emotionally-driven and wrong reactions with potentially enormous catastrophic consequences is indeed very high.

Not only do those grave consequences originate from the lack of domestic bottom-up consensus building mechanisms, but also they may stem from the absence of proper channels of communication between the two undemocratic, dysfunctional rivals.

It is highly probable that the Mina incident was caused by a simple error. If so, legal mechanisms provide for redress. So far, I have not seen any indication in the media suggesting that there will be a legal or judicial follow-up for the incident. Instead, we see highly irresponsible harsh language and military threats in abundance even prior to any investigation on the causes of the incident being conducted. If anything, what we can learn from our eight-year war with Iraq is that war is and should always be the option of last resort.

Of course, politicians, military officials, and diplomats might have many reasons to use this type of language (mostly for strategic reasons), but ordinary citizens should avoid following suit. What might be right for a nation might not be right for an individual. Let me rephrase the great historian and storyteller of the 20^th century, Will Durant. Prejudice is fatal to an individual, but indispensable to a nation. 

The long term result of the propagation of such threatening language among citizens against other nations will be an epidemic of bigotry, racism, and xenophobia. 

My advice, if I may, to my compatriots is to let the politics and diplomacy take its course. It is indeed imperative not to let the political rivalries lower our moral standards and civic education as citizens, and drag us down into hatemongering. We are already paying politicians handsomely to take care of the corrupt and corrupting political issues in order for us to keep our distance from the toxic touch of politics. So, let the politicians do the dirty job for you.