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Beyond War A talk at the City Club, 11:45 am, Friday, February 28, 2003 Moving the world beyond war is possible. Not only that, as Albert Einstein indicated 50 years ago, moving the world beyond war is necessary for long term human survival. Einstein said: "Everything has changed, save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe." The catastrophe he was referring to was a war or an accident with nuclear weapons. With their invention, the reality about human war changed forever. Carl Sagan taught us in the 1980s about nuclear winter and the fact that the nuclear warheads that were aimed and ready to fire between the United States and the Soviet Union--whether by choice or by accident--could cause a nuclear winter that would make the earth uninhabitable for mammals. Scientists generally agree that bacteria would survive a nuclear winter. Human beings would become extinct along with horses, eagles and whales . Most of the nuclear weapons that were poised to fire in the 1980s still exist along with some new ones. And now 8 nations have nuclear weapons including India and Pakistan who have very tense relations and who have recently considered firing nuclear weapons at one another over the issue of Kashmir. Recently our government has said that it would consider a preemptive, first nuclear strike against nations that might threaten us. As we add this up, it becomes evident that it is time to move the world beyond war--and the essential first step is to change our modes of thinking. We need to develop lively curiosity about how we can learn new patterns of thought and action that will ensure our survival. As citizens of the world's only super power, we Americans have the capacity and the responsibility to make a very important historic change in the way we think and the way we do things here and outside our country. This in itself will go a long way toward changing the modes of thinking around the world. In order to move the world beyond war, here are some thingss that we have to do:
I will present principles, successful processes, and examples of cooperation in a moment, first I want to sketch a story about Afghanistan that will give you some context for the rest of what I'm going to say. In 1989, a group of Afghan Americans went to the Beyond War Foundation Office in Palo Alto, California to ask for help for their families and friends still in Afghanistan. The Beyond War movement had been established in the Bay Area in 1981 in response to concerns about the nuclear arms race. By the mid 1980s, Beyond War had spread to twenty-three states with about 24,000 active people so it had a record of effectiveness. The Afghan Americans who showed up in 89 said their relatives and friends in Afghanistan needed help. Would a Beyond War team go with them to the border of Afghanistan to learn more? Four Beyond War leaders went and talked to Afghan leaders of all types. Everywhere they heard the same thing: Now that the Soviet troops were gone, Afghanistan was facing a horrible civil war between the Afghan moderates and fundamentalists--the Taliban. The people looked to the U.S. to help avert this civil war. They asked that the U.S. stop giving hundreds of millions of dollars to the Taliban which we were doing to ensure that every last communist was driven from the country, and they asked that the U.S. help them with peace keepers to stabilize the country so that they could hold a Loya Jirga, their traditional national convention to resolve conflicts and achieve national direction and unity. Beyond War people from the trip and others made two journeys to Washington D.C. and talked to everyone who would listen about the Afghan's plan. They went to Congress and the Senate and the State Department and they relayed the request for help from Afghanistan. The response from Congress and the State Department was that the American people did not care about this issue and there was no political will to change what the United States was doing. In January of 1990, the United States partnered with Saudi Arabia to increase military funds to the Taliban to $250 million dollars per month. Most of us understand better today than we did in 1990 why it would have been in our nation's best interests to have supported the moderate majority of Afghan's to form their Loya Jirga and to be free of the Taliban. It didn't happen and the Taliban won the civil war. So in 2001 the planes hit the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon, and our military again tried to address our national interests with bombs and violence in Afghanistan. Now it's 2003. We still haven't caught Osama Bin Laden. Respected International Mediator John Paul Lederach has said that trying to capture the Al Quaeda Network by bombing Afghanistan was like hitting a mature dandelion with a baseball bat. It only ensures that there will be another generation of terrorists. So by continuing to use war, we will eventually have nuclear winter, since anything that can happen will happen given enough time. We have continued alienation with countries we need to cooperate with for trade and mutual security. And meanwhile the costs of war have already increased our national debt and we are heading toward being a debtor nation. Congressman Peter D'Fasio writes that median cost estimates of the war with Iraq will be $80 billion and rebuilding Iraq will cost about $150 billion. The children President Bush intended not to leave behind are attending financially strapped schools all over our country. Federal financial aid to schools near military bases is drying up. Medicaid and Medicare funds are in trouble. There is less safety on our coastline because some of the Coast Guard is being diverted to the Middle East. Funds for dredging Oregon ports are not going to be available which is only one of many hits on Oregon's economy. If you believe that a vigorous economy is the solution to social problems, analysts say that the stock market is held very low right now because of fears about a war with Iraq. Most economists predict that a recession will follow a war with Iraq, along with a 2-5% decrease in the Gross Domestic Product. When we look at nuclear war and nuclear winter, using war to fight terrorism and how dangerous and ineffective it is, and the costs of war, we see that WAR IS OBSOLETE. So what should we do instead? Einstein also said "Problems cannot be solved in the context in which they were created." For our civilization to reach a new level where we can move beyond war, we need to dedicate ourselves to understanding and living two principles: We all live on one planet together. and The means are the ends in the making. Included in the behavioral implications of these principles are the pledges: I will maintain an attitude of goodwill. I will not preoccupy myself with an enemy. One thing these principles mean is that there must be no more indulging in the instinctual activity of building enemies and of seeing the world in terms of "us and them." Congruent with these ideas, our leaders would never call anyone part of an "axis of evil," because that is being preoccupied with an enemy. Nor would we dismiss our allies with the phrase "Old Europe." With an attitude of goodwill, and without increasing animosity and violence, our leaders and citizens must deal with weapons systems, power struggles, trade agreements, poverty, overpopulation and more. Civil and international cooperation and collaboration is imperative to move the world beyond war. For those of you who are beginning to wonder if I'm going to directly address the situation with Iraq, there's this: The statements of President Bush and our government about Saddam Hussein are text book examples of being preoccupied with an enemy. Under the principle "We all live on this planet together." and the behavioral implication "I will not preoccupy myself with an enemy." it is completely appropriate to acknowledge that a leader or government or group might be doing everything in its power to behave like an enemy. This person or group might be trying to kill me or you or people in our country and elsewhere and there is no value in being naive about it. Nevertheless, the behavioral implication "I will not preoccupy myself with an enemy" is practical. It frees us from getting sucked in to our instinctual responses by which I mean our fight or flight reflexes. When we are in our fight or flight reflexes--when we are afraid or angry--the energy in our nervous systems is at the back of the head near the neck in the reptilian part of the brain. We can't think clearly then. We can't solve problems intelligently. By training ourselves to keep our mental energy up in the frontal lobes where we can think we can better figure out how to build constructive relationships. We can think about the difficult truth that United States has had a long term relationship with Sadam Hussein. While it is true that he used biological and chemical weapons to kill Kurdish people in Northern Iraq, he originally got the weapons from the United States CIA who had trained him to "destabilize" that area because the United States was trying to make things difficult for the government of Iran. The situation that we are in today is one illustration of "The means are the ends in the making." President Bush gave five reasons to go to war with Iraq in his State of the Union Address. He said that Saddam Hussein is cruel to his own people. We have helped him in this. President Bush says Saddam flouts treaties with the United Nations. The United States has violated the Geneva Convention over war prisoners in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, we have unilaterally failed to sign important international treaties such as the international treaty to ban landmines and the Kyoto Convention to Reduce Global Warming, we have withdrawn from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, and more. President Bush said that Saddam has ties to terrorists in general. The CIA says that there is not significant evidence of that. President Bush said that Saddam is a military threat to his neighbors, that is what many countries around the world are now saying about us. President Bush also said that Saddam might attach the United States. Respected military commanders, mostly retired and free to speak, indicate that Saddam is contained. Many of our allies believe he is contained. In figuring out what to do it may help to remember that we hope to be here on this planet together with people in the Arab world over a very long time. We need to begin to build respectful working relationships. President Bush understood that within the borders of the United States when he visited a mosque and talked about being respectful to Muslim Americans after September 11, 01. Now we need to expand our frame of reference beyond the borders of the United States to include the whole planet. Luckily, important work has already been accomplished. People have learned a great deal about diplomacy, mediation and negotiation in the last fifty years. The international organization "Association for Conflict Resolution" which is based in Washington D.C. has [X] members, including practitioners from all over the world. I will describe three examples of important work in which nonviolent means have led to resolutions of conflicts: These include Israeli/Palestinian dialogues and cooperation, The Inter-Tajik Dialogue, and The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. There have actually been many useful Israeli/Palestinian dialogues here in the United States and in Israel during the last twenty-five years. Len and Libby Traubman of San Mateo, California have sponsored living room groups that have grown and replicated into dozens. They have sent their guidelines about how to host and foster these groups to more than 1,000 individuals in 600 institutions in more than 400 cities from Sidney Australia to Calcutta, India. Their participants report that they are changed, and they understand the other side in ways they didn't believe possible, that hate has changed to compassion and the desire to work out the terms of living together here in the states and for their colleagues in Israel. Sustained dialogues between Israelis and Palestinians began in Israel about 1974. The first dialogue pioneers were heavily criticized by both sides--they were accused of fraternizing with the enemy. By the mid 1980s, there were many dialogues happening and a growing number of people who could see possible grounds for nonviolent conflict resolution. By the end of 1989, there was an event called "Hands around Jerusalem" where 30,000 Israelis and Palestinians formed a human chain around the walls of Jerusalem. It was organized by Peace Now, an Israeli organization and a local PLO affiliated organization. Benchmarks of progress included The Oslo Agreement of Principles which was signed on the White House lawn in September of 1990. It was made possible partly by the number of people who had talked to one another about building peace. The Oslo Accords, a preliminary peace agreement were signed in 1993. Progress continued until 1996 and the beginning of the narrowly elected new government in Israel which had promised to continue the peace process but did not. Neve Shalom/Wahat Al Salam, a village of equal numbers of Israelis and Palestinians 30 miles west of Jerusalem, has been a successful model of cooperation in Israel for 25 years. The villagers sustain themselves by running a successful school attended by their own children and those from the larger area, and by sponsoring Israeli and Palestinian teen and educator seminars on peace making and dialogue. The members of Neve Shalom/Wahat Al Salam and members of many other groups have spent years in studying and living together. They have already moved beyond war in their relationships. As Americans, we hear a great deal about conflicts in the world, but are generally very ignorant of possible solutions. We need to develop a great interest in what works. Shouldn't we be at least as curious about the stories of these people and their successes as we are about rock stars and scandals among our elected officials? Then there is the success of the Inter-Tajik Dialogue--you remember that Tajikistan is one of those former Soviet "stans" on the northern border of Afghanistan. In 1991 when the Soviet Union fell apart, fierce fighting broke out in Tajikistan among factions there and it looked like there might be a prolonged civil war. In 1993 on the first Russian/American citizen peace making team, Dr. Harold Saunders and 5 others helped to initiate a sustained dialogue among the factions. Saunders is a former member of the National Security Council Staff in the White House and the Assistant Secretary of State. He flew on Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's diplomatic shuttles in the Middle East and in 1978-79 he worked with President Carter, President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin to produce the Camp David Accords. At the beginning of the dialogues Saunders helped organize, the Tajik leaders had trouble even looking at one another and when they talked they shouted in anger. All they could think about was the violence and what they had been doing to one another. After 5 years of meeting every few months, and after seeing the futility of war, they came to extensive formal agreement on civil society in Tajikistan and worked together on important projects to improve their country. The dialogue participants, who were civic, military and social leaders did their work in five stages: from "Stage One: "Deciding to engage" all the way to Stage Five: "Acting together to Make Change Happen" 1998. Their work included evolving ideas and information that the government could use in its peace process and developing nongovernmental agencies that helped their new democracy work better. Another successful process which is more well-known is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Please keep in mind that the United States CIA once labeled Nelson Mandela a terrorist. There was widespread prediction that there would be a bloodbath in South Africa as apartheid ended. It didn't happen. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its work of revealing the truth and creating the possibility of healing on the basis of that truth is key to the nonviolent situation there. In his book "No Future without Forgiveness" Desmond Tutu states "God does have a sense of humor. Who in their right minds could ever have imagined South Africa to be an example of anything but the most ghastly awfulness of how not to order a nation's race relations and its governance?" Tutu also wrote "Reconciliation is going to have to be the concern of every South African. It has to be a national project to which all earnestly strive to make their particular contribution...by working for a more inclusive society where most, if not all, can feel they belong--that they are insiders and not aliens and strangers on the outside..." If we look at this quote in the context of the difficult, painful and highly successful reconciliation work they have done in South Africa and also in the context of the principles that We all live on this planet together and The means are the ends in the making, we can begin to see a vision of a world beyond war and the work that we all need to do together to create that world. We need a culture in which we know at least as much about these kinds of nonviolent conflict resolution successes as we know about the teams in the Superbowl. We need to develop an insatiable curiosity about how to move the world beyond war. These models for conflict resolution are not the only nonviolent tools that we have to use. We just need to stop looking through the lenses of our fear and begin to act based on the principles and tools we already have and understand. Here's an example of what I mean: When Timothy McVeigh blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, we didn't go to his hometown in Ohio and bomb it. Did we? I don't know of anybody who thought that we would. Why? We have had a system of laws in our country that most of us agree to and basically trust. We need to remember that we all live on one planet together and figure out what kind of system of international law will lead to more security for us and more security for everyone on the planet. One hundred and thirty nine (139) countries have signed onto the treaty for the International Criminal Court, but the United States has been unwilling to sign. The weapons of mass destruction that our species now has requires us to learn to cooperate and collaborate with other nations to move the world beyond war. We need to stop indulging in fear and instead work together to find ways to create security for everyone around the world. If we look through the lens of fear we will be afraid of what other groups of people or nations will do. Gripped with this fear we will be stuck in our old modes of thinking, drifting toward unparalleled catastrophe. If we focus on the principle that the means are the ends in the making then we begin by looking at our own actions as a nation and we will be empowered to constructive action. Some people are afraid that if we try to address the root causes of terrorism it will cost too much or that we won't be able to do it positively no matter how hard we try. I have some good news. The causes of terrorism and sometimes war are poverty and violence and indifference. Our nation has within its history some record of understanding this and responding appropriately. The United States Marshall Plan, used to rebuild Germany and Japan after World War II is a successful part of our nation's history. Our former enemies have become our valued trading partners. As for the costs today, the military budget for the United States is $585.5 billion dollars per year. With our NATO allies, we spend 6 times as much as every conceivable enemy combined, including Russia and China. Former President Eisenhower said "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in its truest sense...it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." So what shall we do? Using only 25% of our military budget we could work with the citizens and governments of other nations, asking them what their priorities are and assisting them in meeting their national goals to create security and prosperity in their countries, in an even more supportive role than the one Dr. Saunders and his colleagues played in the Inter-Tajik Dialogues. Using only 25 % of our military budget we could:
Right now, the United States ranks 21st in the world in foreign aid as a percentage of GDP (.17 %) vs the United Nations recommended amount of .7% -- some nations exceed this amount in giving. After September 11, 01 amid our grieving of deaths due to the collapse of the Trade towers in New York and the destruction of the Pentagon, we experienced ourselves as a generous people. We celebrated the stories of the rescue workers and firemen. We were grateful to all the people who went to New York to help. We sent medical people and teddy bears and blood. As we adopt the principle "We all live on this planet together" we will leave behind our fear. We will roll up our sleeves and reach out to the rest of the world out of our national identity as generous, capable problem solvers. We will give people in the rest of the world good reasons to value us and work together with us to create security for everyone. We will receive generous cooperation worldwide on apprehending criminals like those in the Al Quaeda network. Participants in Beyond War have never advocated unilateral disarmament, and we believe there is an important peace keeping role for our troops, whom we honor. What we must do as a species to survive is to move beyond war. The work of building a world beyond war will be cost less and be a better investment than continuing the war model. This is a time of crisis and opportunity for our country and the world. Let's base our thinking and action on the principles "We all live on this planet together" and "The means are the ends in the making." Let's overcome our fear impulses and think clearly and constructively about having our government represent us and our values. Former President Eisenhower said "One of these days the people are going to want peace so badly that the government is going to get out of their way and let them have it." I invite you to dare to want this and to let your going after it become a worthy adventure in your life. Gayle Landt
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