The Politics of Peace

by W.C. Scheurer

It is time for the peace movement in America to get serious about the politics of peace. Not because we are in a presidential election year—that would be too short-term a view. Our challenges and opportunities are far greater than the results of any single election. George Bush is not the problem. John Kerry is not the solution. The illness in our body politic runs much deeper than this. Its remedy is much more extreme.

The challenge

This country has now embarked on the most dangerous new security doctrine since the end of the Cold War, with its "mutual deterrence" arsenals of nuclear and biological weapons. I am not talking about the Bush doctrine of "pre-emptive war," as repugnant as this throwback to pre-war (World War II) policies is. I am talking about something much worse, a new doctrine of war without end—the so-called "war on terrorism."

The phrase and the premise each have near-universal acceptance by the leaders of both parties, while the news media parrot it as a given. There is no voice in the mainstream debate challenging this basic assumption. The only argument between the two parties is whose candidate and agenda is best able to "win" this misnomer of a war.

The opportunity

On the other hand, this country now stands at a major crossroads in the history of values. As slavery was in the 19th century, and civil rights were in the 20th, peace is the issue of supreme moral and practical significance for the 21st century.

If I had been writing two hundred years ago and told you that the institution of slavery would be legally abolished in our century, you might have considered me a dreamer. Slavery had existed throughout history, all around the world. It was recognized in the scriptures of our major religions. Some things would never change.

Yet today it is accepted around the globe that slavery is an immoral and illegal practice. Yes, we still face problems in that area. But slavery, widespread as the problem still may be, is considered a crime throughout the world, not a lawful practice.

If I had been writing one hundred years ago, and told you that state discrimination would be legally abolished in our century, you might have considered me a dreamer. Yet, here again, the laws have changed, from South Carolina to South Africa. Of course, in this sphere too, we have far to go and many problems still remain. But our laws and culture no longer sanction the denial of civil rights based on the color of a person’s skin.

Now I am writing today, and tell you that war will be legally abolished in our century. Do you consider me a dreamer? Is war part of our nature, something that will always be with us, because it always has been?

First, let us return to the challenge at hand.

Faulty premise

The root problem with the "war on terrorism" is that there can be no such thing as a war without an enemy. Terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy.

Whether practiced by radical insurgents crashing airplanes into office buildings and setting off car bombs in the public square, or by powerful governments with military operations of "shock and awe" and village pacification, the practice is the same—targeting noncombatant civilian personnel and infrastructure to achieve a political objective through violent acts of disruption and intimidation.

By definition, there can be no end to a war on terrorism, especially when all parties to these conflicts use terrorist tactics of one sort or another to perpetuate the violence. Whom can we meet at the table to sign an armistice? Who can surrender their troops? No matter how hard we try, we can never drain the swamp by killing all the insurgents. The world is too big for that. No single empire can have such a reach and sustain it over time.

When our troops kill one adversary, ten more arise in his place. It is not possible to "kill them all" as some people privately urge, not to mention the shocking immorality of this barbaric (and unquestionably terrorist) proposal. We all live on the same planet. We all depend on each other for trade, travel, ideas, culture, and the global environment. If you burn down the village to get rid of the rats, there is no place left for people to live.

To approach our new security risks through a focus on military campaigns is a flawed idea. We can never be safe from terrorism by military means alone, especially since a military campaign always spreads further terror and resentment of its own. Look at the State of Israel. Are Israelis safe? This is where current American policy is leading us, as well as the handful of other countries that are so dependent upon us as to follow our lead.

We need to change the public debate, revise the basic assumptions, on how we meet the new security challenges we face in these difficult times. We need a new politics of peace. And this new politics must begin and end, not with the candidates, but with the people.

Tough choices

Presidential politics in this country are unlikely to produce a committed peace candidate in the general elections anytime soon. Our electorate simply is not ready for this leap, not even close. We have too much fear and violence ingrained in our society today for that to be a realistic hope. While it is clear that George Bush must go, if for no other reason than to repudiate his disastrous security doctrines of pre-emptive war and war without end, we in the peace movement should be under no illusions about a John Kerry presidency.

In choosing a president, when it comes to peace we remain left with the stark binary choice of the lesser of two evils (which is not to say that the candidates themselves are evil; merely the options available to us as committed peace activists). In this office, the capacity for harm is simply too great to adopt any other responsible approach.

This situation exists because of the "imperial presidency" effect. American voters and media have demonstrated a clear preference for a strong executive, markedly ascendant over a weaker legislature. Presidents are heroes and kings (or villains and emperors, depending on your point of view). Presidents are "leaders." Legislators are supporters or opponents.

Notwithstanding the painstaking efforts by the framers of our Constitution to protect us from the evils of monarchy, we still sing "Hail to the Chief." And, as with any king, we cannot trust the future of peace to our monarch. We may have good kings. We will also have bad ones. Ultimately, kings project power by waging war.

In fact, the concept of war has become a cancerous metaphor in our polity. We have the benign forms, such as the "war on poverty" and the "war on hunger." And, we have its more malignant strains, such as the "war on crime" and the "war on drugs"—neither of which is a genuine military conflict, but both of which have militarized our society. The sure path to elected office in this country is to be "tough" on crime and drugs (and now, terrorism).

Swing voters

This is why voter mobilization is our best hope for peace. We need to create a swing block of voters that can tip the balance in presidential and congressional races.

And we need our own candidates, in both parties, to run for Congress. A real shift in power will only occur when we start sending more peace activists to Congress.

In the long run, congressional politics will be most important to peace. We need to build and strengthen institutions of peace in our government and society. These are all we have to shield us from the twin tides of presidential power and popular sentiment in the face of events like September 11th, which will challenge us again from time to time.

We need Congress to become a stronger branch of government, equal to the presidency. This must be done at both a structural and a cultural level.

Structurally, we need to tighten the War Powers Act to further constrict the ability of an aggressive president to take the country to war without a clear congressional declaration. We also need to expressly state that any violation of that act by a president will constitute a "high crime and misdemeanor"—under the Constitution, an impeachable offense.

In addition, we need those representatives we now have who are committed to peace to establish a congressional peace caucus, patterned after the other successful caucuses, to concentrate and extend their influence on a sustained basis. They must provide the base for an ongoing public debate leading toward other institutions of peace in our society, to help facilitate the cultural transformation required to move us from war to peace.

One such institution we need is an independent federal agency of peace, separate from the administration, with real budgets and real powers to pursue the interests of peace in our government, our society, and around the world. Finding peaceful means of conflict resolution must become the chief cornerstone of a new security policy for our time.

In congressional politics, I propose an approach opposite to the lesser-of-two-evils choice we must make in presidential politics. We should actively recruit and work for committed peace candidates in the primaries of the two major parties, one of which will be the ultimate winner in the general election.

If such a candidate does not win either of the primaries and make it onto the ballot, we should not compromise with other candidates. Instead, we should turn our support to a third-party or independent who is committed to peace as part of his or her platform.

Unlike the choice of our "imperial" president, the stakes for any individual member of Congress are simply not high enough to make it worth throwing away our only vote on any candidate who is not committed to peace. We should not allow either party or any candidate to count on taking the "peace vote" for granted. That would be "wasting our vote," more so than voting for a committed peace candidate who cannot win. This is the only way the parties will ever take us seriously: when we hold the swing vote.

Why peace?

Why is peace so important as to make it a touchstone issue in congressional politics? There is a moral answer, and a practical answer, to this question.

Morally, war is simply wrong, just as owning another human being is wrong. Just as racial prejudice is wrong. War is organized killing and destruction on a massive scale. In war, we set out to kill entire groups of people who are unknown to us. War denies our humanity on all sides, as we suspend our consciences to the mass hysteria of our groups.

War also makes no sense from a practical point of view. It is the ultimate budget-buster, and consumes our productive capacity in ways that have zero benefit to human needs. It pre-empts our domestic agendas and masks the real problems in our societies. As long as we can focus on an enemy without, we can avoid the burden of looking within.

Our government has failed us. Both parties and both branches of government have failed to keep us out of war. We have failed ourselves, and those who follow after us.

It is time for the peace movement in this country to become the peace vote, a key bloc that can determine the outcome of key elections. We must take over both political parties that hold our elections hostage, and the Congress that represents our democracy.

As long as we are content to limit ourselves to protest marches and petitions, we pose no serious threat to "business as usual" politics. Electorally speaking, we do not count.

Decisions in a democracy are made with votes, not with signs or petitions. It is time for us to take over the voting booth, so we can get the kind of government we deserve.

I tell you again: war will be legally abolished throughout the world in this century. I am not a dreamer. I am simply one voice, one among many, in a rising chorus of peace. Now we must work through the political process to turn all these voices into votes. 

Bill Scheurer is the national coordinator of PeaceReferendum.org. He ran for Congress as a peace candidate, and got twenty-three percent of the vote in the Democratic Party primary.