"Peace is a goal, not a strategy"
Interesting perspective from a Chicago Tribune columnist whose writing I like even though I often disagree with his political views (not this time, though):
chicagotribune.com
Eric Zorn
Liberals' goal of peace may require a war
Published March 6, 2003
After I finished a speech last week in Naperville defending the record and vitality of liberalism, a friendly fellow traveler approached and handed me a blue and white "No War" button.
I thanked him and put the button in my bag. The subject of Iraq hadn't come up during my remarks or in the Q & A afterward--the assumption being, I suppose, why even ask? Liberals are peace loving and therefore opposed to military action.
Yet it is precisely because I'm a peace-loving liberal that I've come to support this particular military action.
Not because Saddam Hussein is a twisted tyrant who perpetrates just the sorts of oppression, cruelty and other human rights violations against which liberals have traditionally led the fight. Though he is.
Not because Iraq has stockpiled and hidden horrific weapons that are a threat to people everywhere. Though it pretty obviously has.
But because for 12 years Iraq has flagrantly defied and therefore threatened with irrelevance the will of the so-called "international community"-- the only hope that my children and yours have to live someday in a world with, to quote the button, "no war."
The promise of national alliances, leagues and unions to police the world is a fundamentally liberal notion that goes back hundreds of years. Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, one of ours, helped found the ill-fated League of Nations more than 80 years ago on the grounds, as he said, that "a steadfast concert of peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations."
Wilson said: "We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states."
And we are now at the beginning (if not well into) an age when such insistence has become vital. As nuclear, chemical and biological weapons inevitably get into more and more hands, the spread of meaningful freedom that real liberals hold dear (not to mention the survival of mankind) will increasingly depend on an ever stronger, ever larger, ever more determined and credible coalition of nations devoted to peace.
A weak, vacillating, hand-wringing coalition of nations that won't fight for its own resolutions will lead to mo' war, not no war.
A dithering coalition will be the international equivalent of the bad parent who uses empty threats to try to keep an unruly child in line and then is baffled when the child shrugs off the threats and escalates his misbehavior.
Iraq has been more than unruly. Since 1991 its leaders have failed to abide by the terms they agreed to after they invaded Kuwait and we led the alliance that gave them a mean whuppin.
The Security Council of the United Nations--an organization with hold-hands-around-the-world bona fides a true liberal can love--voted 15-0 in November that Iraq would face "serious consequences" if it didn't disclose and disarm.
It hasn't and it won't, despite the recent hopeful claims of the bad-parent nations that arms inspectors are making real progress and just need more time. The current weak resolve of the UN is a greater threat to the liberal dream than unilateral military action. And if the member nations won't defend their own long-standing resolutions and bolster the organization's credibility for the terrifying century ahead, the U.S. must do it for them.
Yes, it will be unpopular, even here at home where polls show most people want us to wait until the UN gets back behind the effort. Yes, our government's indignation over violations of UN resolutions has been so selective in the past that our footing on the high ground today is unsteady at best. Yes, the consequences of even a quick victory in Iraq are uncertain and may include bloody civil wars in the region and increased terrorism abroad.
And yes, tragically, the invasion will cost young American lives. Every impulse, conservative and liberal, recoils at that inevitability, mourns in advance and searches for an alternative that will not in the end cost even more young American lives, as well as more lives of innocents around the world.
But peace is a goal, not a strategy.
Hand me a peace button, brother, and I'll wear it proudly. |
