1. The U.S. response to 9/11 has cost thousands more people their lives
2. The global economic crisis is in part due to the U.S. response to 9/11
3. The U.S. is still on a path of “Domination” not “Partnership” in the family of nations
4. Americans lost their freedom to ask the legitimate question, “Why Do They Hate Us?”
5. The U.S.’s Global War on Terror has made the world less safe, more hostile
6. The U.S. is still not investing in a realistic security strategy

(This post also appeared on the Huffington Post on .)

[Lisa Schirch, PhD, is research professor at ��ݮ����’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding and director of .]

Sometimes one wishes that our experts in peacebuilding at ��ݮ���� (EMU) had called it wrong. One wishes that they had been mistaken in believing that a large-scale U.S.-initiated military response to the tragedy of September 11, 2011, would have serious global repercussions, worsening the destructive impact of the 9/11 attack rather than easing it.

But if you go back and read their , you will see that EMU’s conflict transformation professors— , Ron Kraybill, , , , , Nancy Good, and , along with others — offered well-reasoned pleas to take a deep breath and to choose a truly restorative path after this tragedy.

They asked their fellow citizens and national leaders to step away from the natural, but ultimately destructive, instinct to strike back at the perpetrators. These professors of peacebuilding explained that such a reaction would feed the cycle of vengeance, cost us friends around the world, result in exponentially more deaths than those killed in the attacks, and actually play into the hands of the terrorists.

Five days after the attack, John Paul Lederach wrote: “The biggest blow we can serve terror is to make it irrelevant. The worst thing we could do is to feed it unintentionally by making it and its leaders the center stage of what we do. Let’s choose democracy and reconciliation over revenge and destruction. Let’s to do exactly what they do not expect.”

In a local op-ed piece, Ron Kraybill further elaborated: “Massive retaliation by U.S. armed forces is precisely the response most sought by terrorists. After all, terrorist organizations are relatively small and weak, and a primary goal is publicity and recruitment of new supporters. Their best hope is to provoke a reaction that earns new enemies for us and new sympathizers for the terrorists.”

Jayne Docherty asked that the U.S. “examine and address the conditions and policies that have given rise to the cycles of unrest, violence, and terror that have been escalating around the world.”

Nancy Good, who did her doctorate on psychosocial trauma, wrote: “We can’t transform the presenting conflict without uncovering—or somehow attending to—the underlying trauma. The conflict can actually worsen. Victims are re-traumatized and, if the trauma goes unhealed, the victim may become the aggressor; the abused may become the abuser.”

Though Good did not write about this at the time, her message on unhealed trauma is now pertinent to U.S. veterans who are returning, after multiple deployments, with not only physical wounds, but psychological ones.

Kraybill worried that “over confidence in the effectiveness of superior conventional force makes it relatively easy for states to be enticed into costly mobilization.” If, as a result, “heavy damage is inflicted on civilian populations, the civilian support base for the ‘unconventional’ group will be exponentially expanded.” (Kraybill’s fears were realized in both Afghanistan and Iraq, though General Patraeus earned wide praised for trying to reverse this tide.)

On the first anniversary of 9/11, Kraybill wrote of grieving over “the billions we have wasted on weapons, when true long-term security requires investments of a different kind.” Those “billions” quickly became tens of billions, and then hundreds of billions of dollars, spent on warfare and its attendant costs. (For fiscal years 2001 through 2007, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the U.S.  spent $602 billion on operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and other regions linked to the “war on terrorism,” as well as on veterans’ benefits and services.) Budget experts now speak in terms of trillions of dollars.

It is not a coincidence, unfortunately, that these massive expenditures have helped fuel one of the worst economic recessions in the history of this country—a recession that has sickened much of the world and rendered it less able to deal with other issues that affect life on earth, such as global climate change.

Though Osama bin Laden is dead, his aim of severely crippling the United States and other perceived enemies lives on.

Let me be clear: none of the EMU-based experts were arguing to do nothing to address the attacks of 9/11. On the contrary, they were arguing in favor of more effective, more collaborative, less costly, and less self-harmful steps to clean up the soil in which terrorism thrives and to ensure that terrorist groups attract a dwindling number of followers.

Writing in a recent Christian Century (8/11/11, on Peacebuilder Online), John Paul Lederach reflected on the decade since 9/11. He noted that many U.S. citizens were led to believe that the world was divided into “us and them.”

“This was particularly true of how we understood and engaged the Muslim world, at home and abroad,” he said. “We spent our national wealth on war and isolating our enemies.”

In contrast, Lederach said the events of the past decade caused him to feel renewed affinity for Jesus’ admonition to befriend the enemy: “We find this in Jesus’ response to people who his closest disciples found unacceptable. He ate with his enemies. He went to their houses and he invited them in.

“None of this implied that he changed his fundamental beliefs or values,” wrote Lederach. “It implied that he reached out and built relationships with those deemed untouchable and a threat. He chose love over fear, engagement over isolation and separation.”

As an example of the possibilities of such relationship-building, Lederach cited the hundreds of Muslims who have gathered with Christians and people of other faiths from all over the world at EMU’s since its founding in the mid 1990s. Almost all of these people have returned to their homes, buoyed by new friendships, by new skills for working in their contexts for peace, and by hope for a world where everyone first reaches for the tools of non-violent conflict transformation, rather than for weapons that will further traumatize us all.

[ (MA ’04) is editor in chief for ��ݮ����’s Crossoads�����Ի� Peacebuilder magazines.]

STAR was born from the ashes of 9/11. Who can forget the haunting images of that September day, the sky balmy, the smoke rising?

Soon after, asked ��ݮ����’s to design a trauma training program for civil society leaders of all faiths whose communities, in the US or abroad, had been impacted by 9/11. Thus began , a week-long training program. Ten years later, this unique program continues to increase awareness of the links between trauma and cycles of violence. It provides tools for addressing trauma that go beyond the psychological, and include restorative justice, conflict transformation and spiritually/faith processes.

As the director of STAR for the first five years, I had the rich experience of facilitating over 50 week-long trainings with nearly 800 people from more than 60 countries. One thing that still amazes me is how a group of diverse individuals come together on Monday morning, strangers, and over the course of the week, forge a bond of human connection rare in our fragmented world.

Even though I marvel, I also know it doesn’t happen by accident. Two early seminar groups nearly shipwrecked, rocked by diversity, differences, and insufficient guidelines to handle it all. STAR staff learned as we went, consciously applying the processes and tools we were teaching to the way we structured the week and facilitated the sessions.

That’s what allowed us to navigate the rapids of the March 2003 seminar which gathered under the cloud of the impending US led invasion of Iraq. Pro- and anti-war divisions in the group mirrored the divide in the country. Mid-week, the war began. Tension abounded. But following the session on the links between unhealed trauma and cycles of violence, a person who supported the war posed a question to the group: “Did you notice that all of us who are offended by the anti-war sentiments are from New York? Look at this model,” motioning to the victim/aggressor cycle handout. “Do you think we support the invasion because we still are pretty traumatized by 9/11 and the economic after affects?”

The tension began to morph into thoughtful reflection. By the end of the week, people on both sides expressed gratitude for what they had experienced and learned. Two participants with opposing views said it well on the written final evaluation:

I came with an us/them mentality. Now I see what I must do: face the trauma so that it doesn’t come out in escalating cycles of violence. We all must work together if we are to be secure and live in peace.”

“I leave with a feeling of humility. I was challenged by my own feelings of tolerance/intolerance, and I grew through the process of facing a dark side of myself.”

Questions remain: Where will STAR go over the next ten years? How can it be made more available to larger numbers of people? How can it become more than a training, but processes embedded and lived in communities and organizations? In what new settings can it be applied: To the bitter political divide in the US? To citizen discussions in emerging democracies? To organizations struggling with diversity issues? To preventing violence in times of crisis?

We are grateful for the ecclesial bodies that sponsored STAR for five years through Church World Service:

Because of this support, STAR has made a difference around the world. More stories on the impact of STAR can be found in our 9/11 commemorative e-book: STAR: The Unfolding Story, 2001-2011.

[Carolyn Yoder – MA, LMFT, LPC- was the STAR director during the first five years of the program, 2002-2006, and is the author of . She and her family have lived and worked in Asia, the Caucasus, East and Southern Africa, and the Middle East. She holds an MA in linguistics from the University of Pittsburgh and an MA in counseling psychology from the U.S. International University of San Diego.]

Inescapably, September 11, 2001 surfaced a question brewing under the surface of my faith and profession: How do we transform enmity?

The faith I embrace and the nonviolent conflict transformation I commit to professionally rise from the life and teachings of Jesus, who measures love in the paradoxical quality of how we respond to those who wish us harm.

The brutal events of that day brought life and work to a standstill. Wherever we were we stopped and watched, staggered. I felt a mix of deep sadness and anger beyond words. As Yeats put it, the center broke. And questions poured out. Unanswerable. Unspeakable. The central tenets of my faith and vocation seemed uprooted, naked and irrelevant to the rising impulse of seeking an adequate response.

In settings of violent conflict, peacebuilding inhabits a liminal existence, the carving of a home between people whose lives are defined and held together by enmity. It chooses to build relationships and trust where pain and hatred run deep. The violent acts in the Fall of 2001 challenged the very core of this vocation: How do we pursue justice and love those who wish us harm?

In the decade following 9/11 our national response entered the slippery but well justified pathway of fear in the name of security. We were increasingly presented a bifurcated world divided into “us and them.” This was particularly true of how we understood and engaged the Muslim world, at home and abroad. We spent our national wealth on war and isolating our enemies.

If 9/11 changed anything for me it was to find my way back to the essence of peacebuilding. The profound truth of Jesus’ life came home in the form of his simplest yet most radical act: Befriend your enemy. We find this in Jesus’ response to people who his closest disciples found unacceptable. He ate with his enemies. He went to their houses and he invited them in. None of this implied that he changed his fundamental beliefs or values. It implied that he reached out and built relationships with those deemed untouchable and a threat. He chose love over fear, engagement over isolation and separation.

What endures since 9/11 is the need to build relationships across our perceived divisions, with those who see the world differently and most importantly with those whom we may most fear. From ��ݮ���� to my current post at Notre Dame, we have committed to engaging the other. Hundreds of Muslim brothers and sisters have traversed the at EMU since its inception in the mid 1990s and the recently launched initiative at Notre Dame provides a platform for building understanding and constructive change between the world’s two largest religious bodies, Catholicism and Islam.

Birthed in a commitment to violence, 9/11 poses the challenge of how, in a world divided and broken, we will choose to respond creatively to enmity.

I think the path of love starts with the simple yet unexpected act of engagement and befriending.