For the week of Sept 25 - Oct 1, 2002

As a way to peace, 
war flops

Commentary by PAT MURPHY

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What could Republican President George W. Bush have in common with the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle and the early 1900s Democrat President Woodrow Wilson?

They each believed that wars create peace.

Last week, when President Bush told congressional leaders, "If you want to keep the peace, you've got to have the authorization to use force," he was echoing words from antiquity.

More than 300 years before the birth of Christ, Aristotle said, "We make war that we may live in peace."

Then, more than 2,200 years after Aristotle’s observation and four days before declaring war on Germany on April 6, 1917, President Wilson justified the end to U.S. neutrality by saying, "The world must be made safe for democracy."

Yet, war hasn’t created peace in any century or made the world safer, which is what politicians tend to promise while dispatching a nation’s youth into battle and inevitable deaths and maiming that create new widows, new orphans and grieving parents, and fill Veterans Hospitals for generations.

If wars haven’t guaranteed peace, they’ve assured the world of one thing—deadlier weapons. Arsenals have evolved from stone-throwing catapults and bows and arrows to appalling biological, chemical and nuclear arms as well as "smart" weapons that allow killing to be carried out dispassionately and at a distance.

In pursuit of peace-through-war, the United States alone has toted up 1,138,456 deaths in 10 major wars since the 1775 Revolution, including 648,871 killed in combat and the remainder in non-combat roles—more than the combined populations of Alaska and Wyoming (1,120,714). This doesn’t include peacekeeping casualties, such as 241 Marines and seaman killed by a 1983 suicide bomber in Beirut, Lebanon.

In the 20^th century alone, the United States has been involved in five major military operations (World War I, WWII, Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War). President Bush wants to rush pell-mell into a war with Iraq that would involve upwards of 250,000 troops and years of occupation.

Statistically, America’s major wars since 1775 have occurred on average every 21.6 years, and presumably will continue to recur as future presidents promise peace-through-war. The cycle is just enough time to spawn another generation of youth for the next war.

The futility of combat has found its voice among disparate figures.

In 1935, the Soviet diplomat Maxim Maximovich Litvinov concluded somberly, "It has now become clear to the whole world that each war is the creation of a preceding war and the generator of new present or future wars."

Even a Bush predecessor and one of the Republican Party’s most beloved figures, President Herbert Hoover, said this in a speech to the GOP convention on June 27, 1944. "Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow and the triumphs that are the aftermath of war."

If the wisdom of a presidential candidate is insufficiently credible, then consider the view of the Civil War hero, Union Army Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who said on June 17, 1879, "War is at best barbarism. Its glory is all moonshine. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is Hell."

Now, as President Bush invites the United Nations and Congress to endorse the threatened U.S. pre-emptive attack on Iraq in the name of peace, perhaps America is taking another step toward the apocalypse the late President John Kennedy envisioned in his Sept. 25, 1961 speech to the United Nations.

"Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind."

 

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