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Waging
peace in 2006
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
December 29, 2005
LONDON - Americans seem to have
less appetite for war than before. In took the best part
of a decade for public opinion to swing firmly against
the Vietnam War. This time in Iraq it has taken barely
three years. Critics may like to make out that America is
a warrior nation with an urge to dominate the world. But
although from time to time martial figures do push
themselves through to the seats of power they seem unable
to carry the public with them for long.
It looks likely that in the next
general election Americans will vote for a candidate who
stands against overseas adventurism. Those who are trying
to erect a case for de-fanging a putative nuclear Iran by
force will not succeed. Nor will those who want to up the
ante with China.
Of course nothing is simple when it
comes to matters of war and peace. Edward Luttwak,
writing in Foreign Affairs a few years ago, argued that
"An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although
war is a great evil, it does have the great virtue it can
resolve political conflicts and lead to peace". World War
2 is Everyman's exemplar of this.
But World War 1, the more important
geopolitically of the two great wars, was the reverse.
Without the tragic mistakes of statecraft that preceded
it, allowing Europe to drift into massive carnage, there
would have been no great depression, no rise of Hitler,
no consolidation of the autocracy of Stalin, no Second
World War, no unilateral development of the nuclear bomb
and its use on Japan, and no Cold War.
The tragedy of war or violence is
not that sometimes it does not have positive outcomes. It
is that the same goals could have been met without war if
the protagonists had been more farsighted and more
prepared to be patent and creative in their diplomacy and
less bellicose in their confrontation.
The war in Iraq has become a living
witness of how not to use the blunt instrument of armed
might. At the same time its fire and smoke is obscuring
many positive trends all over the world. For the tenth
successive year the Stockholm International Peace
Research Institute has reported that the number of wars
has fallen over the last twelve months. The New
York-based Freedom House reported this month that the
spread of democracy and the respect for human rights
continues on its upward trajectory. This year was one of
the most successful years for freedom since
1972.
The hype of a portion of the
political class constantly impressing upon us the need
for combat if our precious freedoms are not to be
undermined too often pulls the wool over our eyes.
Islamic terrorism is the present case in point. The
renunciation of violence that was declared three years
ago from their jail cells by the leaders of Egypt's
Gamaa, one of the parent groups of Al Qaeda, was only
barely reported and commentated on at the time but it
demonstrated how terrorism can be defeated by solid
police work.
And every time there is a bombing
or racial disturbance in Europe we are fired up against
the danger of militant Islam within by warnings of the
danger of the fifth columnists who have grown up in our
midst. Yet, following the Madrid bombing, Elaine Sciolino
reported in the International Herald Tribune that senior
European counter-terrorism officials were saying that
"the movement of young men from Europe to Iraq has not
come close to the levels seen in the 1980s, when at least
10,000 men travelled to Afghanistan to fight against the
Soviet occupation." In 1980 not only did not that worry
us, the authorities were pleased.
Pull the wool aside and what can we
see? Michael Mandelbaum in the journal of London's
International Institute for Strategic Studies notes, "the
practice of war, once the prerogative of the strong,
instead is increasingly the tactic of the weak". Most
wars these days are conducted by and within the poorest
of the world's nations. "The great chess game of
international politics is finished, or at least
suspended", he writes. "A pawn is just a pawn, not a
sentry standing guard against an attack on a
king."
If only we could recognize this we
could start to become more creative in our tactics. The
Financial Times' Washington correspondent reported
earlier this year that exiled Iranian activists are
studying and training in the techniques of non-violent
conflict. They are learning from the same group that
contributed to the success of movements for change in
Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. This is how it should go.
Then the work of building a more peaceful world can
continue for another year.
Copyright © 2005 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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