"Peace is about getting people to disagree without killing each other."

Driving back from St. George Island, somewhere in southwest Georgia on Sunday afternoon, I picked up an NPR radio station and heard an interview with Lord John Alderdice, the Irish psychitrist and psychoanalyst, liberal member of the British Parliament, who was a key negotiator in the 1998 Belfast Agreement that brought some measure of peace to Northern Ireland, where Catholics and Protestants had been killing each other in a more than 30 year long struggle over bitter divisions that began 800 years ago.

He is now reportedly being consulted by those working for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. I was deeply impressed by his wisdom and by his articulate and concise way of expressing simple but profound truths about human conflicts and how to work for peace. The quote in my headline is his.

I wanted to capture as much as I could of what he said -- while driving at 75 down the expressway and scribbling on a pad without looking at what I was writing. Of course, now I can hardly make out what I wrote.

I suppose the gist of it is that he doesn't approach negotiating with enemies as a power play, or even as a political balance of power (like Henry Kissinger, for example) but by treating people with respect, trying to understand what causes their pain or fear, and -- above all -- avoiding humiliating your adversary.

What causes people to resort to terrorism is feeling aggrieved and humiliated. And the humiliation is the important difference: people can feel aggrieved and put up resistance, even fight you. But if you humiliate them, they will resort to terrorism, which he defines as asymmetric warfare.

Ralph