Printed on Sept 17, 2008 in the Register Guard:

By Anthony Biglan and Dennis Embry

Prevailing views about the “war” on terror are contrary to scientific understanding of human behavior. Human beings who are traumatized by attack become highly motivated to counterattack. Yet U.S. leaders pursue a strategy that pays little attention to these effects. As the bumper sticker says: “We are making terrorists faster than we can kill them.”

Trauma perturbs the brain’s hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. People exposed to stress become hyper-vigilant and prone to attack perceived threats. These reactions occur whether the stress results from a legitimate effort to fight terrorism or from a terrorist attack. They are the result of natural selection; those who are quick to counterattack were a bit more likely to survive in a dangerous world. It didn’t matter if some counterattacks were misplaced, so long as counterattacking generally contributed to survival.

Yet policy makers are blithely unaware of the seeds we are sowing. A child’s death may be unintended when a terrorist headquarters is bombed, but that does not lessen the trauma to those who knew the child — or their tendency to seek revenge.

The group processes that channel traumatized people’s fear and rage are well understood. Social psychologists have shown that groups faced with a threat as trivial as another group building better birdhouses become more cohesive and will cooperate to defeat other groups.

These processes operate even when group membership consists of simply being of the same race or religion. There is little doubt that thousands of Islamists all over the world have become motivated to attack us as a result of the attacks they have witnessed on their co-religionists.

Our leaders dismiss this analysis. During the 2004 campaign John Kerry said, “I believe I can fight a more effective, more thoughtful, more strategic, more proactive, more sensitive war on terror that reaches out to other nations and brings them to our side.” Dick Cheney responded, “A sensitive war will not destroy the evil men who killed 3,000 Americans and who seek the chemical, nuclear and biological weapons to kill hundreds of thousands more.”

Such thinking reflects the same process that occurs among Islamists. After Sept. 11, 2001, many Americans are more motivated to see us attack Islamic people than to build bridges to them. But we may be able to escape the trajectory of our behavioral inheritance by adopting a scientific pragmatism that asks not whether we — or “they” — are right, but whether we are doing all we can to minimize the number of people who are motivated to kill us. We may be convinced that our military actions are justified. But whether we are “right” or “wrong” has no influence on the impacts of our actions.

Research on treating post-traumatic stress disorder points to what is needed. Many soldiers remain fearful and on high alert long after leaving combat. Effective treatment involves helping them accept their feelings, but also helping see their reactions as reactions, not as the traumatic events they originally experienced. They become able to set a more flexible course through life that cannot erase what has happened, but enables them to move to a more fulfilling life.

In a similar way, citizens of nations that face terrorism can accept that fear and anger toward those who hate us are the natural results of our having been attacked. The link between these feelings and our actions can be tempered by a pragmatic analysis of what will work. The move is not to deny our feelings or to insist that we love those who would kill us. It is rather to accept what we feel as a natural response and, in doing so, recognize that this same response will occur among those on the other side of any conflict.

Committed terrorists certainly won’t be impressed by our sensitivity. But if we are sensitive to the contribution that “collateral” damage makes to terrorist recruitment, we will minimize such damage and reduce the number of those who are willing to join the terrorist movement.

Anthony Biglan, a senior scientist at the Oregon Research Institute, is former president of the Society for Prevention Research. Dennis Embry is president of the Paxis Institute in Tucson, Ariz.