Dec. 24, 2006

By Harry T. Cook

Not so very far from the territory in which the evangelist Luke imagined the half-slumber of shepherds being interrupted by celestial voices singing something about peace on Earth . . . not so far way from there even now as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight . . . ignorant armies clash by night.*

Who would not wish on this eve of Christmas to be able to announce the break-out of that elusive peace on Earth, good will to humankind? Who would not wish to know that all combatants anywhere of whatever loyalties (misplaced or otherwise) who had taken up arms have been persuaded to put them down and beat them into ploughshares?

For anything like that to happen some will have to understand that they have lost. Wars always have winners and losers. Germany never did truly acknowledge its defeat in the First War and went on to spend its slim capital on a catastrophic loss of the second. In the Vietnam conflict the Viet Cong and their sponsors won, and the United States lost.

There are those who have never been able to acknowledge that loss. So they came up with the cockamamie idea of a pre-emptive invasion of a nation that was not a threat to U.S. security and in the streets of which our troops would be greeted as saviors. It is that same bogus optimism and denial of the possibility of defeat in what’s left of Iraq that keep President Bush and his neo-conservative hawks from admitting the U.S. has lost . . . again.

Why, though, if there is such a thirst for victory, don’t we try to win the peace? Of course, winning peace is always more difficult than winning war – any war. World War II lasted nearly six years. It took another 45 years for the Cold War to end, though it was immediately succeeded by related regional conflicts.

How would the U.S. or any nation, group, class, clan, kith or kin set out to win a peace? First: by a unilateral retreat from conflict and a laying down of arms with a vow never again – aside from gross provocation as, for example, in Pearl Harbor – aggressively to take them up again against fellow human beings.

Second: a declaration of purpose – appropriating Lincoln’s sentiments for the Union and applying them to a wider venue – to lean into the future with malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right . . . [to] bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves and with all nations.

Third: in the post-Bush/Cheney era, a declaration of intent to invest moral and financial capital in the United Nations to help it become what it was created to be: a true parliament of humankind in which conflicts can be headed off before they move from words to war. Never again must there be a spectacle such as occurred when Colin Powell, worrying more about loyalty to his boss than the truth of the matter, misled representatives of world governments with a tissue of lies about WMDs in Iraq.

Fourth: a declaration of assurance on the part of the incoming U.S. Congress that the aim of this great people from henceforth shall be to live up to the aspirations set forth in the Declaration of Independence and their restatement in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

That’s how to win the peace. Winning the peace will take a great deal of time, money and energy, leaving the U.S. fewer resources to start wars and therefore less inclination to do so. If we send our best and brightest to the UN instead of people with permanent chips on their shoulders, we can use our good offices there to reform the place without making things worse than they already are.

Can’t promise shepherds abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night. Can’t promise an angel choir belting out Gloria in excelsis Deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis. But we can make a start.

Merry Christmas to all my readers: believers, unbelievers, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, deists, atheists all. I believe in humankind and in our collective potential to make Earth fair, if not quite all souls glad and wise.

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* from “Dover Beach,” 1.35, by Matthew Arnold

 © Copyright 2006, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.