Does Peace Have a Future?
If the pundits and pollsters are right, the American public has tuned out the Iraq War. It’s become a foregone conclusion that the conflict will grind on until at least Jan. 2009 when a new president takes office. The anti-war movement has been completely blocked, and grass-roots efforts against the war have become more or less futile. In realistic terms war remains a stubbornly unchanging policy controlled by the right wing. Does that mean that the rest of us — the vast majority who oppose the war — are left without options?
I think it’s possible to leapfrog beyond Iraq to consider the prospects for peace in the future. There is more hope on the horizon than people realize. Certain trends in the present could well become much stronger in the near future.
- The American public, particularly young people, no longer support a freewheeling policy of militarism.
- It’s generally recognized that America’s nuclear arsenal and massive standing army are not effective against insurgencies, civil wars, sectarian violence, and terrorism.
- We are being pulled into a global perspective that extends beyond nationalism.
- The right-wing military machine has lost public credibility.
- Totalitarianism, the scourge of the twentieth century, has all but disappeared.
- A huge potential enemy like china has resolved to seek commercial rather than military dominance.
- The actual number of people dying in major conflicts has steadily decreased outside the Middle East.
These trends have not developed because of intelligent policy decision made in Washington. They have developed in reaction to terrible policy decisions, and they are rooted in real if invisible changes. Collective consciousness has shifted, at long last, against the model laid down in WW II. America, it appears, is willing to stop policing the world and dictating to other countries how to run their internal affairs. The U.S. has engaged in more covert and overt military operations since 1945 than any other nation. Fear of Communism created a bloated and now completely untenable state of readiness for war that never ends. Instead of seeing peace as the norm, this society has lived with a distorted norm — constant vigilance against foes real and imaginary.
By stoking fear against terrorism, Pres. Bush played a card that has never failed in the past. But now there’s hope that a sizable portion of the American public will no longer react to the crude, cynical manipulation of fear. There are still some crucial tests to pass. Can we react with maturity to another terrorist attack as Britain has learned to do after years of IRA assaults? Can we stop trying to bully the world through militarism? Most important of all, can the U.S. finally emerge from the shadow of colonialism? When Alan Greenspan said, much too candidly for comfort, that the Iraq war was basically about oil, he touched upon the last gasp of colonialism, which is economic.
America doesn’t seize other people’s lands in the old colonial way. Instead, the goal is to protect markets and remind the Third World that they are lower on the scale of value than the industrial West. In a sane world, the U.S. has no right to use gunboat diplomacy to bolster the interests of Haliburton and the oil companies. We aren’t entitled to protect our privileged lifestyle by using military threats against dispossessed societies barely struggling to survive. It’s not a national birthright to keep army bases around the world. No other country adopts such a nakedly intrusive posture.
Fortunately, larger forces have been moving history forward during the last eight years of right-wing regression. The world market has become a much more level playing field. The iPod and the Internet will do more to salvage American prestige than foreign policy ever could. Happily, the U.S. remains the country everyone hates and everyone wants to move to. Peace has a future on that basis, not on the basis of current military misadventures. Even the dire prospect of the Islamic bomb and a Shiite theocracy uniting Iraq and Iran isn’t strong enough to reverse the larger trend toward globalization. As the Iraq war recedes into the rearview mirror, however slowly that happens, the rise of peace could be far more positive than anyone perceives at this dark and discouraging hour.
