Ways to wage peace in 2006

Jonathan Power International Herald Tribune

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 29, 2005

STOCKHOLM War doesn't work





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 American public with them for long.

It took the best part of a decade for public opinion to swing firmly against the Vietnam War. This time, with tthe war in Iraq, it has taken barely three years.

It seems 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 defanging a putative nuclear Iran by force will not succeed. Nor will those who want to up the ante with China.

Nothing is simple, of course, when it comes to matters of war and peace. The historian Edward Luttwak argued in Foreign Affairs a few years ago that, "An unpleasant truth often overlooked is that although war is a great evil, it does have the great virtue that it can resolve political conflicts and lead to peace."

World War II is Everyman's exemplar of this. But World War I, 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 World War II, 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 patient and creative in their diplomacy.

The war in Iraq has become a living example 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 10th successive year, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute has reported that the number of wars has fallen over the last 12 months. The New York-based group Freedom House reported this month that the spread of democracy and the respect for human rights continues on its upward trajectory. This year was the most successful year for freedom since 1972.

A portion of the political class too often tries to pull the wool over our eyes by constantly impressing upon us the need for combat if our precious freedoms are not to be undermined. Islamic terrorism is the present case in point.

When the leaders of Egypt's Gamaa, one of the parent groups of Al Qaeda, renounced violence three years ago from their jail cells, their declaration was only barely reported and commented on. 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. After the Madrid bombing, however, senior European counterterrorism officials were reported in this newspaper as 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."

Pull the wool aside and what can we see? In the journal of London's International Institute for Strategic Studies, the analyst Michael Mandelbaum 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.

If only we could recognize this, we could start to become more creative in our tactics. The Financial Times reported this year that exiled Iranian activists are studying the techniques of nonviolent 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 the work of building a more peaceful world should continue.

(Jonathan Power is a freelance writer on foreign affairs.)