Peace

If you would like to see the background on these action items (and we recommend that you do), please see the book The American Ideas: 13 American Originals to Know, Love, and Defend available in hardcover and eBook.

CHAPTER 13:  Peace

• Love peace and its promise with a passion.  Politicians and governments talk constantly about peace.  But that’s much different than loving peace.  To love peace is to embrace it, caress it, provide for it, care for it, enjoy it – and if necessary, but only if necessary, defend it.

Loving peace is knowing that a long and lasting peace is full of possibilities.  Loving peace is treasuring the life of every American, of every human being.  Loving peace is relishing many years free of news and discussion about the latest violent madness.

A peaceful man destined to die a violent death once said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall see God.”[i]  Americans would call that a pretty good outcome.

President Benjamin Harrison said,

The offices of an intelligent diplomacy or of friendly arbitration in proper cases should be adequate to the peaceful adjustment of all international difficulties.  By such methods we will make our contribution to the world’s peace, which no nation values more highly, and avoid the opprobrium which must fall upon the nation that ruthlessly breaks it.[ii]

• Hate war and its lies with a passion.  The old saying is terribly true – the first casualty of war is the truth.  War has to be surrounded with lies or no sane people would stay in it even if they allowed themselves to be led (or deceived) into it in the first place.

We have to give up the lies about the high purposes and glories of war. When General Sherman said “War is cruel and you cannot refine it,” he reminds us that to see war in all its gory reality is to hate it for the unrefined evil that it is.[iii]  Historian Jacques Barzun wrote about

the horrors of war, the coarsening of the individual’s moral fiber, the misery endured by all classes, and the dulling of the mind by fighting, which, when prolonged, makes the contenders forget what it is about.[iv]

To hate war is to despise it, to refuse to touch it, to reject seeing any good in it – and, except for facing truly deadly threats to our existence, to avoid it like the plague that it is.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said

But there are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted…I never intend to become adjusted to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating method of physical violence.[v]

Hating war is knowing that war is full of unimaginable death and destruction.  Hating war is seeing that nothing in the end will be like what we thought it would be in the beginning.  Hating war is resisting all of the justifications for it beforehand and all of the rationalizations for it afterward.

• Honor the military, but stop talking about the glory of war.  Sometimes wars are necessary.  But they’re never, ever glorious.

We talk about the glory of war because war is just so damn bad.  Death, destruction, broken people, grieving families, waste of money and lives, energies spent on tearing down rather than building up, mountains of debt and taxes and inflation, lost opportunities – not much to commend it.  So, because we’re human, we look for some way to make it…tolerable.  But this just makes it easier to start or join the next war.

Does saying there’s no glory in war mean that there’s no heroism in war?  Of course not.  Many people have given their lives and sacrificed their personal well-being to defend and protect and rescue others.  This represents some of the best of what it is to be human, and we should rightly be grateful and proud that some are so willing and so brave.

But that individual heroism doesn’t make war glorious.  Nothing is good enough to make war good.  The old saying about war is also its oldest lie:  Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori (It is sweet and proper to die for the fatherland).  Some may indeed have to die for the country – but that doesn’t make their deaths sweet or their loss a proper thing.

• Always remember the devastation of all wars.  In surveying the damage of World War I, President Warren Harding said what could have been said about every American war since then:

While the world’s embittered travail did not leave us devastated lands nor desolated cities, left no gaping wounds, no breast with hate, it did involve us in the delirium of expenditure, in expanded currency and credits, in unbalanced industry, in unspeakable waste, and disturbed relationships.[vi]

Sylvester Stallone, as war veteran John Rambo, summed up this devastation well:  “Old men start wars, young men fight wars, nobody wins, and everybody in the middle dies.”[vii]

And more.  Alexis de Tocqueville said

…all nations that have had to engage in great wars have been led, almost in spite of themselves, to increase the powers of the government….A long war almost always faces nations with this sad choice:  either defeat will lead them to destruction or victory will bring them to despotism.[viii]

The devastation includes bigger government and smaller liberty.

• Make it much harder to start or join a war.  Shouldn’t we insist that the government actually follow the Constitution, and not allow a shot to be fired without a formal declaration of war?  The U. S. government has been trying to downplay and soft-pedal war ever since World War II.  It calls them police actions or resolutions, never declarations of war.  But war is a really big deal.  Let’s make the actions and votes to start them big deals as well.

And we should also require that the congressional vote to declare war be a huge majority, say 80%.  Jefferson said, “Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities.”[ix]   A new war should certainly fit the bill of being a great innovation.  If more than 20% of the people’s representatives aren’t sure, then we must not be seriously threatened.

We said after Vietnam, “That’s it, no more undeclared wars.”  But that wasn’t it.  It’s time for it to be “it.”

Wars have generally been driven by presidents, who often think the title Commander-in-Chief really means War-Starter-in-Chief.  This unwisely leaves the decision in the hands of the one person most likely to gain power and stature by starting a war or joining one in progress.  Historian Bruce Cummings wrote that

the United States has had no exit strategy anywhere since 1945, except in places where we were kicked out (Vietnam) or asked to leave (the Philippines):  American troops still occupy Japan, Korea, and Germany, in the seventh decade after the end of World War II.  Policymakers – almost always civilians with little or no military experience… – get Americans into wars but cannot get them out, and soon the Pentagon takes over, establishes bases, and the entire enterprise become a perpetual motion machine… [x]

Jefferson saw how war refocused the people’s attention onto the President: “In times of peace, the people look most to their representatives; but in war, to the Executive solely.”[xi]

Crippling the war-starting capability is one area where the Constitution needs to be amended.  There’s obviously still too much wiggle room, and this is just too important an area to allow any wiggling.  Of course, presidents may claim that this will tie their hands.

Exactly.

• Whenever possible, involve all Americans in a decision to make war.  Assuming that we haven’t been attacked in force and aren’t already fighting for our lives, wouldn’t it be a good idea to then take a war decision by Congress to the next level, and have a national vote – with a huge majority required for war?

But don’t we have a representative government, where we select people to think about these things and make good decisions on our behalf?  Yes.  But too often they don’t.  War is very different from anything else people face in a republic.  The people who do the dying, or who send their sons and daughters and grandchildren to die, should in this most severe case insist on pure democracy.

Won’t this take time?  It will, and that’s a good thing.  We have a standing military, the largest and most powerful in the world, so taking the time won’t affect our readiness to fight.  However, it may very much affect our willingness to fight.  And if a draft is to be used, everyone of draft age should get more than one vote.  Why should others have just as much say in whether I have to die?

We’re talking here about a vote, not a poll.  Up to 70% of Americans surveyed in 2003 thought America should go to war in Iraq.  Anyone can say anything in a snap answer to a survey question, and their answer will depend a lot on how the question is framed or on what is left out.  A vote is another matter entirely, with time for thought and debate.

This populist phase of war declaration could be part of the Constitutional amendment that is needed to take congress and the president out of the undeclared war business.  A decision to go to war should be laborious and distasteful – just like the war will be.

Jefferson said, “the good sense of the people will be found the best army.”[xii]

• Establish strong fences around a declared war to keep it from expanding.  If the Congress gets past the obstacles to declaring war, including a popular vote on the heels of its own high-majority vote, it should require in its declaration of war specific objectives – which when met translate into “we go home.”  The primary goal is to avoid scope creep, the frequent corollary of war.

And these objectives shouldn’t be political or economic, but only about defense and survival.  For example, we won’t fight over oil, because we know that much worse than having no oil is having no 19-year-olds.

We should have a milestone (or series of milestones) that force us to formally review this horrible path, and slow down or stop or leave when reality intervenes.  We should do all we can to make the war short, because we realize that long wars are numbing and outlandish, and because we know that the only thing better than a one-day war is a half-day war.

And if we determine that a mistake was made after all, that we shouldn’t have gotten into this war, we should lose the path-dependency mindset that says, “Now that we’re in, we have to win,” and remember that discretion is the better part of valor.  The fact that five thousand lives have already been lost is the worst of reasons to lose five thousand more.

• Pay for any declared war as you go.  Except when the very existence of the nation is in jeopardy, all wars should be on a pay-as-you-go basis.  Few things allow a nation to mortgage its future faster and more destructively than unfunded or underfunded wars.

Either other spending has to be cut or taxes have to be raised to pay for the whole thing, now.  No deficit spending or printing money.  Let’s see how popular the war is when we start massively raising taxes and creating new taxes or stop building and fixing roads and caring for the sick and needy.

It’s enough that the war will leave posterity with a warlike spirit, dead ancestors, and devastation.  We can at least have the decency not to stick them with the bill.

• Understand that America didn’t lose the war in Vietnam.  We need to recognize the huge difference between voluntarily ending our involvement in a poorly conceived, undeclared war and losing that war.  We didn’t get beaten in Vietnam.  We could have hit them with everything we had.  Using nuclear weapons, we could have killed all of them in about 30 minutes.  War over, America “wins.”

But America was too good to do it.  So we just stopped.  We said, “Enough.”  It may not have been a victory in military terms because the cost was just too much in excess of any possible gains.  But it was a victory for the American Idea of Peace.

• Get out of stupid and ruinous wars…now.  The Navajos say, “When the horse is dead, get off.”  How soon should we get out of a mistake?  Now.  Today.  Yesterday.

Thomas Friedman says there are three fundamental questions Obama should have answered about the War in Afghanistan – Why do we want to achieve their goals more than they do?  Why are we supporting a hoodlum government there?  And what do we hope to win?  He writes, “When you can’t answer the simplest questions, it is a sign that you’re somewhere you don’t want to be and your only real choices are lose early, lose late, lose big or lose small.”[xiii]  Philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal said,

Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with him?[xiv]

• Resist any call for a draft or mandatory service.  It’s an odious thing when a government assigns itself the power to take young people from their homes against their consent and send them off to die.

If the nation was truly in peril, there would be no shortage of people of all ages willing to step up and defend it along with their families and homes.  A draft is a subtle acknowledgment that this war isn’t mandatory – that there’s so little obvious need for it that we have to force people into uniform, or that the government has overreached and expanded a necessary war into unnecessary territory.

If there must be a draft, though, it should come up for a national vote .   At its best, only those of draft age or their parents and grandparents should get to vote.  No one without children or grandchildren should have the right to vote mine to death.

• Remember the many limitations, mis-directions, and potential dangers of diplomacy.  “Great” powers have always loved diplomacy.  It gives them a chance to feel and act important, throw their weight around, and find less-strenuous ways to get what they want.

But diplomacy is full of pitfalls.  It is less often a benefit than a way for either (1) friends to draw us into their conflicts and interests, or (2) for enemies to talk us to death while they plan to attack us to death.

Part of diplomacy sometimes means that we provide aid or development support to nations that only in the most questionable use of the word could be called a friend or potential friend.  We shouldn’t be so naïve to think that if we help or develop them they will like us or avoid aggression because it could stop the flow of dollars.  If they don’t share our values, they shouldn’t share our wealth.

Here’s the radical truth:  American doesn’t need any nation to be its friend, and doesn’t want any nation to be its enemy.  Let’s keep all at a pleasant distance and save a lot of useless talk.

• Observe strict neutrality with all warring nations.  If two other nations are fighting, we should refuse to join in, support either one in any way, or trade with them until they come to their senses.

One may be more “right” than the other, and we can hope that they win.  But pick sides and add to the body count?  No.  “When the elephants fight, the wise one hides in the jungle,” says the old African proverb.

• Lose the terrible notion that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.  There are leaders who don’t like America, who would be happy to destroy America if they had the means.  They may be, in a weak or strong sense, our enemy.

But that doesn’t mean that anyone who hates them, anyone who is their enemy, is our friend.  The enemy of my enemy could be…my enemy.  The U.S. helped a monster, Josef Stalin, defeat another monster, Adolph Hitler.  Both were enemies to everything that America stands for.  We helped Afghanistan defeat our enemy, the Soviet Union, but that didn’t prevent Afghanistan from being our enemy too.

Iraq and Iran fought a terrible war against each other not long ago, but that didn’t make either of them our friend.  Saudi Arabia is supposedly a U. S. ally, even though its values are largely repugnant to Americans and it is a hotbed of Islamic fanaticism.

And we don’t even go after the real bad guys at times.  Sometimes because they are “allies” and sometimes because they’re big.  Thomas Friedman wrote,

We’ve found ourselves at war with radical jihadist Islam.  It is fed by money and ideaology coming out of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran.  The attack of 9/11 was basically a joint operation by Saudi and Pakistani nationals.  The Marine and U.S. Embassy bombings in Lebanon were believed to have been the work of Iranian agents.  Yet we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, because Saudi Arabia had oil, Pakistan had nukes and Iran was too big.  We hoped war-by-bank-shot would lead to changes in all three countries.  So far, it has not.[xv]

People are our enemies if they are violently opposed to our values.  This should never include calling someone an enemy because of their opposition to our interests, especially as generically and expansively as those are usually defined.  In fact, it’s possible to have peace friendly competition with opposing interests.  But no one with opposing values, and a willingness on their part to turn that opposition into violence, should ever become our friend, no matter how much they hate our other enemies.

• Bring all the troops home from everywhere.  All of them.  Many worry rightly about placing more nuclear weapons around the world.  We should worry no less about the placement of more troops around the world.  So many opportunities to get involved in so many conflicts.  And why?

Defending our allies?  We only need allies if we’re in a war – and then only maybe.  Dying for oil?  A tanker isn’t worth one freckle-faced kid from Iowa.  Keeping the troops there for nation building?  That gives us all of the disadvantages of being an empire with none of the perks.  If they don’t have any interest in being a viable nation with a dynamic society, we surely won’t be able to do it for them or give it to them.

And what about the costs of keeping all of these bases operational and ships afloat and planes in the air?  Mind-boggling.  All of that money can be spent on building an even stronger, richer and more delightful America.  The Cato Institute wrote at the end of 2010, ”By withdrawing our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan, we could save at least $125 billion next year.  Eliminating other unnecessary overseas missions would allow for a leaner force structure and defense budget, saving at least $100 billion a year…[xvi]”   Frankly, even this doesn’t go deep enough.  How much would we save if we brought them all home?

Let’s pay all of those returning troops a nice salary until they can find other work.  We can employ them here at a fraction of the cost.  Let’s use some of the difference between what we’re paying them and the massive cost of those foreign bases and activities to build and rebuild America – high-speed rail, repair of bridges and highways, and countless other things that make our country better than theirs.  And let’s use most of it to eliminate debt.

• Stop selling weaponry to other governments.  We should say to our defense contractors, “You can sell to the U.S. military plus nobody, or you can’t sell at all.”  The government can work out a method so that all contractors share the work, to help these companies make the transition and to keep the supply chain robust.

Won’t this hamper free trade?  Of course it will.  But just like war is completely unlike any other human activity, so weaponry is completely unlike any other human product.  Weapons take on a meaning and potential not found in anything else.  People and companies wanting to sell them can sell as much as they can to the U. S. government, and convert the rest of their capacity to products Americans and the rest of the world can…enjoy.

Let’s not make it easy for warmongers to kill others – or us.  We want to go back to being peacemakers, not moneymaking war-makers.  We don’t want to fulfill Karl Marx’s prediction that capitalists will sell them the rope that they’ll use to hang us.

We love peace, but many others don’t.  Why would we give them the means to make war?

• Refuse to allow anyone to get rich through an American war.  If we are in a war, strict controls should be placed on the profits of any business supplying the war.

It would be criminal to allow “swollen fortunes to flout the sacrifices of our soldiers.”[xvii]   No one should become rich while our soldiers become dead.

• Remember that the best offense is a good defense.  We need to have a defense so impregnable that no one will even dare to attack us.  Benjamin Franklin said

Let us therefore beware of being lulled into a dangerous security…the expenses required to prevent a war are much lighter than those that will, if not prevented, be absolutely necessary to maintain it.[xviii]

This means we need to spend the necessary money – but on real defense, not on things like bloated bureaucracies, unnecessary forts and equipment, overseas troops, and over-the-top pensions for non-combat veterans.

The goal of our military should be to protect our citizens, freedom, and chosen way of life.  Period.  No interventionism, “savage wars of peace,”[xix] or preemptive strikes.

• Focus at last on the true defense of American lives against nuclear holocaust.  Isn’t this what our Department of Defense is all about?  Not exactly.  In fact, not really.

It’s incredible that after well over half a century of nuclear weapons, America has no defense against them.  The main thing we desperately need our government to do is to remove the decision to destroy us from the hands of foreign madmen, and our government simply hasn’t done it.  Amazingly, it isn’t even trying to do it.

This raises questions with fairly obvious answers.

• Can a nation that won’t defend itself by every means available retain its freedom forever?  Not likely.
• Can we really count on the notion of no more lunatics taking power and doing insane things?  No.  In fact, we already have them.
• Will it be expensive to build an anti-missile system?  Yes.  But it will be dirt cheap compared with the alternative of annihilation.
• Will it be difficult to design and deploy?  Not for a nation that put people on the moon in the 1960s using vacuum tubes and slide rules.

Vladimir Putin, as president of Russia, said not so long ago, “I can inform you that at present the work to create new types of Russian weapons, weapons of the new generation, including those regarded by specialists as strategic weapons, is in the practical implementation stage.”[xx]   Anyone who thinks that the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989 brought about the end of Russian militarism isn’t keeping up with current events – or, for that matter, 500 years of Russian history.  Not to mention the Chinese.

If we’re ever defeated, let it be because we can’t defend ourselves – not because we won’t.

• Simplify the concept of national security and dismantle much of the national security industry.  Providing national security mean finding ways to keep America safe, not building a giant bureaucracy to give us the illusion of safety at massive cost and with intrusion on civil rights.

If we have a huge collection of badly coordinated agencies and organizations – all focused on the tiniest possible breach of security, duplicating many of their efforts, and producing vast quantities of data that are more likely to confuse and misdirect than to clarify and spotlight – we’re likely to be involved in more conflict, not less.

And we have just such a collection.  Shockingly, “1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.”[xxi]  Anyone should be able to find a crack in that system, the embodiment of the principle that if everyone is responsible for everything, then no one is responsible for anything.

In spite of the reality that human beings are terrible at keeping secrets, “An estimated 854,000 people…hold top-secret security clearances.”[xxii]  Are we kidding?  And mounds of useless data?  “Analysts…share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year.”[xxiii]   This isn’t Ph.D. work requiring dissertations.  This is life-and-death work requiring actionable information.

High-reliability systems are sophisticated but not complex.  What we have is…something else.

• If war is absolutely necessary, fight to win and have no more half-way wars.  If we’ve passed all of the hurdles to get into a war, we should be in it to win – to completely remove both the enemy’s ability to wage war and all of the people who initiated it.

We’ve gotten into the trap that befalls powerful nations that also have a conscience.  We feel guilty for a variety of reasons – we’re so strong, they’ve got so many problems, the world is watching and judging.  So we play around the edges of war, not quite going at it full bore, pulling our punches, checking on world opinion.

President Theodore Roosevelt said, “I love peace, but it is because I love justice and not because I am afraid of war.”[xxiv]   He reminds us that we shouldn’t love peace because we’re cowards.  We should love it because in the midst of peace, justice is much more likely to be found.  But if a nation is so unjust as to attack us, we can’t be afraid of war.  Our love of peace requires us at that point to destroy the enemy and restore true peace.

To nations we can say, “If you start it, we’ll finish it.”  To terrorists we can say, “We will take you out and the places that nurtured you.” And to foreign madmen we can say, “Don’t think we’ll kill your people and leave you alone.  We know your people don’t have control over you.  We know that killing those people will seldom stop you who control them.  We’ve been upside-down, believing it all right to kill civilians but immoral to target their leaders.  The old principle, the one we’ll now use, is ‘cut off the head and the body dies.’  Be prepared to die.”

To our own people we can say, “If you really want this war, remember what that means.  We will fight very hard with everything we have at our disposal.  We will win.  We will kill every one of the enemy that we can find, destroy their factories, and level their cities.  You can’t whine when the news reports come out.  You can’t say, ‘We didn’t know you’d actually kill people or blow things up.’  War is the very devil.  Are you sure you want it?”

War is not a game.  The only way to fight it is ferociously and relentlessly.

• Take very good care of the combat veterans from the moment combat ends.  Those who have been put through war deserve the very best we have, everything we have.  Sadly, they’ve often gotten the leavings – or less.

Those who serve in combat have already lost a part of themselves.  We should help them find what they can.  They should be given full and very large pensions from the end of combat, which will still only partly compensate them for their loss.  They should get the best healthcare, paid education, extra tax breaks.

A side benefit of doing this will be to put a lid on future wars, because the cost of paying and caring for combat veterans would be so high.

How do we pay for this?  In the long run, by having no more wars.  But right now it can be paid for in large part by treating the retirement of non-combat veterans like any other civil servant.  The system as it stands is unsustainable, and it’s supported in part by our lack of clarity in separating combat from non-combat veterans.

Why should those who have merely served in the armed forces, but not in combat, get any of these benefits?  Why should they get pensions as very young people and then get to work in the private sector and receive Social Security benefits as well?  Why should someone typing reports in San Diego before they lunch at the beach get even close to the same as a Middle East combat veteran who no longer has legs?

There’s so much we can do for our combat veterans.  But whatever we can think of, whatever we can do, it still won’t be enough.

• Keep the trade routes open and use them to minimize warfare.  Human beings are very, very competitive.  We can have free markets and peaceful competition, or we can clog up markets and create better conditions for war.

Shared economic interests don’t guarantee peace, as the European powers proved with World War I.  But they can at least provide more reasons to avoid war than to start one.

Peace isn’t everything.  But it’s a mighty good start.