> "True peace" can wait its turn.
>
It always does, doesn't it? That's why there has been no peace, except
for a few years, in the last 4,000 years or so.
I'm sorry to be such a hard-liner peacenik. As I said before, the arguments for peace have been given over and over, and everyone rejects them summarily -- even leftists like you. Especially leftists -- the typical leftist is in favor of a strong military because when he or she (and women are definitely included in this) get into power, they want to use the military to fight *their* wars.
For example, the leftists who demand "out of Iraq now" are mostly also foes of Israel. If they really got what they wanted, it would probably be "Stop bombing Baghdad and Fallujah and start bombing Tel Aviv and Haifa." I don't call that a peace movement -- I call it a redirected war movement.
As for isolationists and people ignorant of the rest of the world being the true peace people, I just don't buy it. Wars fought by the U.S. in the contemporary world happen, it seems to me, happen (a) because the nation's leaders want to intervene in areas where the U.S. Empire has economic interests (definitely the Middle East) and (b) they can bamboozle the voters into supporting them by convincing the latter that they (the leaders) are solving some sort of humanitarian problem (fore example, relieving the sufferings of the Iraqi people under Saddam and bringing "freedom and democracy" to the Islamic countries of the Middle East). If (b) were not true, that is, if the public were much better informed about the world than they are, we'd have a better chance of preventing (a). But it's awfully hard to get Americans, many of whom would have a hard time finding Canada on a world map, interested enough and caring enough about the world to become informed.
In the case of the Vietnam War, for example, most of us peaceniks, who had been concentrating on the nuclear issue, had to inform ourselves (since we too were pretty ignorant) about the history, geography, and politics of Southeast Asia in a big hurry. Hence the teach-ins. Then we had to inform the public, which was a really hard struggle, taking years. And it was only very partially successful.
Now we are doing the same thing again with the Middle East. Yes, some Americans want the troops pulled out because they are isolationist and don't like to see American "boys and girls" getting injured and killed. But is that something we can really build a solid anti-war movement on? (By "anti-war," here, I don't just mean anti-this-war, but anti-war in general, because if we can't build that kind of movement we're just going to have to do all of this educating the public over and over).
What I would like to see is a growing, well-informed, *fundamental* anti-war movement. Unfortunately, given the proclivities of the American public, this is an extremely hard job -- much harder than popularizing the slogan "out now" and admiring how many people are going to see F911. And Kerry is not doing a damned thing to help -- just the reverse. He's *increasing* militarism in the public, not decreasing it.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt