CHAPTER EIGHT: A POLITICS OF LOVE
War and Peace: Fighting the Profits of War
CHAPTER 8:
WAR AND PEACE: FIGHTING THE PROFITS OF WAR
A politics of love is neither unsophisticated nor naive about the dangers of the world; it acknowledges the need for military preparedness. But in the world as it is today, we need to know as much about how to wage peace as how to wage war.
The US military deserves the utmost respect from every American. Those who serve display not only advanced expertise but also advanced devotion: a willingness to sacrifice their lives in service to their country. Any criticism of US military policy is not a criticism of the military itself, but of the civilian leadership that controls it.
Our military should be like the best surgeon in the world. Of course we want to have the very finest surgeon available if we need surgery. But any sane person tries to avoid surgery if possible. We should go to war only because we need to go to war. Our defense establishment should not be a self-perpetuating war machine.
Yet that is basically what has happened over the last few decades, as we have fallen into a continuing pattern of war that few even dare to question. Most Americans couldn’t tell you which countries we’re engaged with militarily at this point. After 9/11, through the Defense Authorization Act, Congress gave the president unprecedented authorization to do whatever he wants in the name of fighting terrorism (decidedly against the “advise and consent” clause of the Constitution), basically giving the executive branch of our government carte blanche over military authority. All we can do is pray that they’re getting it right.
The US Constitution made the president commander-in-chief of the US armed forces in order to guarantee civilian control of our military. This is how the Founders protected a democratically elected government from being overturned by a military coup. But while it’s important that the military work at the behest of the president, it’s also important for us to remember that the president and Congress work at the behest of us. This is one more area where financial corruption, so endemic to our current politics, has put advocacy for corporate profits—in this case, military defense contractors—before advocacy for the health and well-being of the American people.
No American would argue against protecting our homeland. But enemy threats today do not arrive only via land, air, or sea; they also arrive over the internet. Terrorists don’t trade in warships, bombers, or submarines, but in pathological ideas and malevolent cyberwar. And they’re not always foreign fighters either; they are just as likely to have been born and raised right here. America today is like the British Red Coats during the Revolutionary War—standing abreast in a straight line waiting for someone to yell “Fire!” while American colonists were hiding behind trees like the early guerrilla fighters that they were. Our entire notion of national security is like something out of another century.
That is why in this area, as in so many others, we will adequately address our challenges only if we are willing to rethink them. We will be able to keep our nation safe in the years ahead only if we think differently about war, and differently about peace. In the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt, “We must do more than end war. We must end the beginnings of all wars.
Traditional warfare addresses external realities, seeking to suppress or eradicate malignant symptoms. But with society as well as with the body, we ultimately cannot just treat symptoms; we need to treat their cause. We can’t just fight the symptoms of hate; we must cultivate the love in the presence of which hate does not grow. Most of our problems are opportunistic infections, none of which would have gained such power had our societal immune cells been healthier. That is why cultivating justice and brotherhood is more than just a “nice” thing to do; by cutting off its oxygen, the politics of love is the most sophisticated response to evil. This century demands a different mental framework through which to view the entire notion of security. In today’s world, no amount or means of brute force can provide an absolute guarantee of our safety.
We should see the soul force of peace-building, then, as central to our efforts to create a peaceful world. Our conversation around national security rarely names the goal of creating peace at all, and that is where our modern political establishment most fails us. Peace is not the absence of war; war is the absence of peace. Preparing for and waging war—while it might fend off some enemies at times (while often creating new ones as well)—is not the most potent tool for peace creation.”
PROFITS OF WAR
Our current national security strategy is all about war and very little about peace. If we really wanted peace in the world, then we would strive for peace. But a quick look at America’s national security budget makes it obvious that peace is not our direct goal. Peace is just something we sort of hope we’ll back into.
Our Defense Department now functions in a role of dual advocacy, both for America’s security interests and also for the economic interests that accrue to military defense contracts. Where the interests collide, at present the defense industry tends to win out. A case in point is America’s current relationship with Saudi Arabia. For the sake of over a billion dollars in arms contracts, the United States is providing arms to the kingdom in a war that has led to the starvation of tens of thousands. Also, Boeing has signed a $500 million contract to provide technical support. Even the brutal murder of a Saudi journalist, a legal permanent resident of the United States, wasn’t enough to tear us away. The State Department issued a statement saying it’s possible for us to have “strategic partnerships” with people “who do not share our values. Which is to say that it’s okay for us to have no values at all.
Supporting our military is very different from supporting the multibillion-dollar behemoth of military contractors that make up America’s current war machine. Too often today young people die on battlefields so that old people can get rich selling armaments. It’s not enough to have private morals if we, as citizens, are willing to acquiesce to the complete surrender of our public ones.
It was the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower—the supreme Allied commander during World War II—who, in his farewell address to the nation, warned us of what he called the “military-industrial complex.” This is the enduring financial and political alliance that makes war such big business—now on the scale of a $718 billion annual US defense budget. Today our defense budget outstrips those of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and India combined.
Before World War II, the United States had no standing army; while no one would argue that we don’t need one in the present age, neither should we deny the risk that comes with making war into such big business. Too often, weapons are not manufactured to help fight wars so much as wars are manufactured to help sell weapons. If defense manufacturers stand to make billions of dollars off the machinery of war, there will always be more and more political pressure to provide theaters in which to use it.
In less than one hundred years America has gone from military power “as needed” to military power as big business, with the attendant false glamorization that all militarized societies proffer. All this has led to subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which Americans have begun to think differently about war. It is no longer something we do only when we have to; it has become something that is sort of just “always there.” When there was a draft, war was never just “over there.” Without a draft, it’s far too easy for all of us to simply look away. This is not an argument for the reinstatement of the draft, but it is an argument for the reawakening of the American mind.
SPEAK SOFTLY AND CARRY A BIG STICK
When I was a child, as we watched images of military parades in the former Soviet Union on TV, we were taught that we didn’t do things like that in America. And we were proud of it. When Dwight Eisenhower was the supreme commander of all Allied forces, he obviously wore military clothes, but as president, he just as proudly wore civilian clothes. Not just the symbolism of these differences but the energy they carry can determine how a society perceives itself. We are not a military society, and we don’t want to become one.
President Theodore Roosevelt described his foreign policy this way: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” No one in the world doubts how powerful our military is. But the military misadventures of the last half century have garnered us neither greater respect nor friendship nor affection. Quite the opposite: millions around the world, having witnessed American involvement in wars such as those in Vietnam and Iraq, see no reason to believe that America is always a beacon of democracy or that the US military is effective at solving every problem.
This is not a conundrum for politicians alone to handle; it is an issue for all of us to wake up to. It’s said that war is too important to be left to the generals, but it’s also too important to be left to the politicians. Our political establishment is enamored of the power of brute force, and undervalues the power of soul force. We need to adopt a new political mind-set if we are to deliver to our children and our children’s children any semblance of a peaceful world.
Only those who are either ignorant of history or willfully blind to it can deny the role of widespread human despair, economic hardship, and lack of education in fostering eruptions of violence around the world. Only when we consciously and willingly address those issues in a meaningful way will we be paving the way to a sustainable peace on earth. We can’t just go around fighting violence all the time; we must learn how to cultivate peace.
At present, the resources we spend on building true foundations of peace—diplomacy, support for democratic institutions, expansion of economic opportunities for women, providing educational opportunities for children, and ameliorating human suffering—are minuscule compared to what we spend on defense.
An example of our war-for-profit mentality is the following. The US Air Force has recently ordered one hundred B-21 raiders at a cost of over $550 million each, for a total price tag of $55 billion. Each of these stealth bombers carries both conventional and thermonuclear weapons, begging the question: are we planning to drop one hundred thermonuclear bombs? Of course not.
But it’s relevant to ask, because once even four or five of those start dropping, it’s over for all of us. It’s difficult emotionally to even think about a prospect like nuclear war. Yet that is exactly where America needs a revolution in consciousness: our willingness to think about some very serious things.
It is our denial, our avoidance of such painful topics, that is most dangerous to us now. We have gone from being a country with a vital ban-the-bomb movement—the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 was a really, really big deal—to one where the average citizen has been lulled to sleep, where the very subject seems so complicated, so difficult, that many of us have just left it to other people to think about. Yet the people we’ve left to think about it are the same ones ordering those B-21 raiders! That is why we are where we are today. You simply can’t outsource your thinking, your conscience, or your heart.
Even the smallest nuclear bomb that exists today, if it were to be detonated in a major city, would kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. This is not a technological issue; it is not even a military issue. It is a human issue.
For the $550 million we are spending on just one B-21 raider, we could ameliorate the human suffering of billions of people around the world. That would be the moral thing to do. That would be the loving thing to do. And that would be the smart thing to do.
To whom in America do we turn for moral guidance in handling issues of war and peace? Theoretically, that would be our president and Congress. Yet the moral judgment of our politicians is far too often sacrificed at the altar of financial and political corruption.
As an example, the defense authorization bill approving President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq was based on the political considerations of that moment more than on deep and sober analysis of US intelligence. In fact, most members of Congress apparently did not read the full analysis made available only to them in classified reports. That would have meant walking down the hall.
The US military establishment has become a gargantuan enterprise with seemingly no moral oversight whatsoever. No religious, spiritual, or philosophical voices are publicly asked to contribute in any meaningful way to a political topic that could determine whether humanity lives or dies. Yet if whether we kill each other is not a question for moral consideration, I don’t know what is.
Not only are we dealing with the reality of nuclear bombs now, we’re dealing with a plethora of them, and some are not in the hands of responsible people. The idea that we can deal with the issue only through an ever-escalating arms race—even to the point, being currently discussed, of putting nuclear bombs in outer space—is not responsible. It is insane.
A politics of love expands the political conversation by expanding its human dimension. Institutions do not change quickly, but people’s attitudes can, and Americans are good at doing that. One of the greatest dangers posed by the breakdown of our democracy, as evidenced by the disconnect between the consciousness of our people and the actions of our government, is the threat this poses to our national security. People are evolving in one direction and our government is evolving in another. People are clamoring for peace; too often our politicians are clamoring for war. If we the people don’t inject some higher consciousness into the conversation soon, then God help us all.
A politics of love takes an integrative approach to political issues. The same holistic paradigm that has transformed our view of physical health can be applied to our societal health. We know better than to think that we can avoid taking responsibility for our heath and not expect to get sick. We know better than to think that we can avoid paying attention to our nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle and then simply suppress or eradicate any symptoms of sickness that may arise. We realize that we must cultivate our health of we want to be healthy, not simply fight sickness when it appears.
We should apply that same logic to issues of war and peace. We should know better than to think that we can avoid taking responsibility for peace and not expect war. Active peace-building measures reinforce the social health of our planet the way good nutrition and exercise reinforce the physical health of our bodies.
Currently, not only are more and more resources being added to our defense budget, but more and more resources are being withdrawn from actual peace-building. Since the beginning of 2017, while building up our military, our president has routinely attempted to strip our government of programs that provide humanitarian aid and support diplomacy, education, campaigns to eliminate violence against women, refugee assistance, mediation, postconflict and restorative justice, democracy-building, and other critical peace-building measures.
What would it look like for a politics of love to infuse the workings of the US government? Among other things, we should foster a far more equal working partnership between the Defense Department and the State Department to handle international security needs. James Mattis, the former secretary of defense, said that if we didn’t fund the State Department fully, then he would need to order more ammunition. We should establish a US Department of Peace to identify and foster domestic peace-creating projects in the United States; outbreaks of violence here are as horrifying as those anywhere else in the world. We could make peace-creation central to all domestic and international policy, not just in word but in deed.
While some say it’s naive to believe that massively realigning resources toward helping people thrive—by leading efforts to eradicate global poverty, support democratic institutions, and expand economic and educational opportunities—is central to creating peace in the twenty-first century, we need to unabashedly insist that it’s naive to assume humanity will even survive the twenty-first century if we do not.
A more loving life is a smarter life—smarter for our health and for the health of our planet. When it comes to international relations, if someone asks, “What’s love got to do with it?” the answer is “Everything.” In study after study, the success rate of “soft powers” at dissolving international conflicts has proved greater than that of military might. Love is not a less sophisticated worldview; it is a more sophisticated worldview. There’s nothing sophisticated at all about viewing security only in terms of bombs on land or sea, when the first bombs that go off are inside a person’s heart.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are 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 any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.*
We are hanging on a cross of iron right now. And this is not just corrupt; it is dangerous for us all. Large groups of desperate people anywhere in the world should be seen as a national security risk, as desperate people do desperate things. The problem isn’t just that some people hate us; it’s also that a lot of people who never really hated us just don’t like us anymore either. They too often see us not as a beacon of democracy, but as a bullying and imperialistic power. And that makes them far more vulnerable to ideological capture by genuinely psychotic forces.
After World War I, the economic devastation of the defeated German nation was a primary factor in the rise of Hitler. After World War II, we did not make the same mistake, but rather passed the Marshall Plan to help all of Europe rebuild. The best way to create a more peaceful world is to treat people with greater compassion. Our task is to replace a politics of fear with a politics of love. Love is a wiser, more evolved, and more powerful modus operandi than fear, if our goal is to bequeath a habitable world to our children and our children’s children.
WAGING PEACE
As children of God, peace is our natural state of being. It is our moral responsibility to cultivate the conditions in which our natural state of being can thrive.
Every cause has an effect, and there is no way to obstruct the ultimate consequences of our actions. That is why war waged for any purpose other than absolute necessity is a danger not only to the victims of its perpetrators but to those who perpetrate it as well. The tragic mistake that was the invasion of Iraq, for instance, should arouse within us more than a collective “Oops.” It should arouse within us the deepest realization of the horrors we unleashed both for ourselves and others, and a sincere attitude of atonement before God.
The women of America are key to challenging the insanity of America’s war habit. If nothing else, we should be awakened by the fact that more women and children die in wars than do male combatants. We should unabashedly stand up to militarism, viewing this stance as simply one more way of dismantling the patriarchy. Feminine values like nurturing children and caring for the home are not just peripheral issues; they are the keys to peace on earth.
If Americans are to adequately deal with terrorism, we need to look deep into our own hearts and minds. A trigger-happy propensity for war should give way to a taste for wisdom, maturity, and reflection. The false power of the tough cowboy should dissolve now, giving way to the genuine power of wisdom. We should reach not only for a rich society but for a good society, both in how we behave at home and in how we express ourselves abroad.
According to research done by the Friends Committee on National Legislation, “The world spends just $1 on conflict prevention for every $1,885 it spends on military budgets. In the US, less than 2 percent of income tax goes to civilian foreign affairs agencies; while, 39 percent goes to the military. And though taxpayers provide almost $1 billion per year for military academies, they pay only about $40 million for the United States Institute of Peace—the only US agency dedicated to conflict prevention and peace-building.” All this despite the fact that investing early to prevent conflicts from escalating into violent crises is, on average, sixty times more cost-effective than intervening after violence erupts.
The problem does not lie with our military; the problem lies with our politics. And the problem lies with us.
We the people must become deeper thinkers now. No think tank’s research or government commission’s findings can substitute for the power of personal reflection and citizen engagement. A corrupt government will do what we allow it to do. We need to say things that a lot of politicians are not going to say, and insist that they do some things that they otherwise will not do.
We need to look at some difficult facts of American history over the last sixty years. The United States, for instance, through the invasion of Iraq, was the biggest factor in the formation of ISIS. Could we not take a moment away from our popular amusements to seriously reflect on the suffering caused by that immoral, illegal invasion? And should we feel no remorse? The only person who feels no remorse, who expresses no regret, is a sociopath. An entire country failing to do so is no less pathological.
You don’t get to irresponsibly cause thousands upon thousands of tragic deaths and then just say, “Oops.” Nor should we allow ourselves, or anyone else, to perpetuate the canard that “Oh well, they acted on the best information they had at the time.” Actually, no, they didn’t. The pretext for the Iraq war was a “major intelligence failure,” according to the Bush administration’s own report, and they knew exactly what they were doing at the time by misleading Congress and the world. We invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, that was actually serving as a buffer between us and Iran, and whose leader was a secularist who kept Al Qaeda at bay; and with no serious plan for rebuilding a city that we ourselves destroyed. None of those factors can be ignored by a conscious person, or a conscious country. Even if Iraq had had weapons of mass destruction, we do business with countries that have weapons of mass destruction each and every day. Even though Saddam Hussein was a horrible murderer who terrorized his people and killed many innocents, we routinely do business with governments that have done the same. Is anyone thinking the Chinese arrived in Tibet with candy? How easily we, the American people, acquiesced to something so wrong.
In a nation’s life as well as an individual’s, invisible forces of healing are released when we admit the exact nature of our wrongs and atone for them in our hearts. Only then can we pave the way to new beginnings.
America will not move forward into a new era of greatness unless we atone for the militaristic madness that has gripped our country in the years since World War II. We fought that war because we needed to. We’ve fought at least a couple of wars since then for one reason only: because someone wanted to. Dealing with America’s militarism—not just in the leaders who led us into wars that in retrospect we can see to have been huge mistakes, but also in us, that we acquiesced so easily to them at times—is essential to disrupting the dangerous patterns that now threaten our future. Militarism, like racism, has become an American character defect. We must soberly realize this, humble ourselves before God, pray for forgiveness, and seek fundamental change.
Too many times, as a nation, we have chosen the ways of war over the ways of peace, the ways of mean-spiritedness over the ways of compassion, the ways of separation over the ways of unity, and the accumulation of money over the accumulation of good. What we need more than anything now is to return to the wisdom in our hearts.
In the words of President John F. Kennedy, “This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.” People heard those words when he uttered them, and we need to hear them today.
At times such as these, understanding the powers of the spirit is as important as understanding the powers of the world. The meek shall inherit the earth because, in the end, they are stronger. To be secure, we need to ask deeper questions than “What should we do?” We need to ask, “Who should we be?” And “Who should we be to each other?
After the Charlie Hebdo tragedy in Paris in 2015, where twelve French journalists were killed by Islamist terrorists, a rally of two million people on the streets of Paris provided a beautiful show of solidarity. Such solidarity is what we need now, not just as a reaction to tragedies, but as a way of preventing them in the first place. When men, women, and children feel like they belong to something, feel that they are part of something, feel that they stand for something meaningful—that is the answer. It is the key to peace abroad, and it is the key to peace at home. What could be a more horrific irony than that jihadists say they feel a sense of community? The only thing more powerful than a brotherhood of hate is a brotherhood of love.
A “brotherhood of love” is not just a metaphor, and “the better angels of our nature” is not just a symbol. Both represent a matrix of choices made moment by moment as to how we will behave, how we will treat each other, and how we will choose to live our lives. They also represent the existential challenge now facing humanity: will we or will we not grow into the people we need to be now—to endure the times in which we live, navigate the times in which we live, and transform the times in which we live?
As any expert will tell you, there is no way to track down and stop everyone who has ever been radicalized. The force now tapping into the darkest corners of the human psyche, both here and abroad, will be defeated only from the most light-filled corners of the human heart.
WHEN THE BOTTOM LINE IS PEOPLE
For years, when politicians spoke of America’s “vital national interests,” I assumed they meant peace, the cultivation of our democratic values, and genuine security. Little did I know how often they had in mind the care and protection of American and multinational corporate interests.
Our vital national interests do not lie in protecting Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Boeing, and Exxon. That they and companies like them provide thousands of jobs is true, the importance of which is not to be minimized. But they are also companies that could be transformed through values of corporate responsibility to serve a peacetime rather than a war economy, and a green rather than an oil-based economy. In issues ranging from war to climate change, what such corporations do now, in too many cases, not only does not serve our vital national interests but actually works against them.
Our vital national interests lie in protecting the 3.1 million children who die from hunger-related preventable causes each year, the 71 percent of the world’s population who live on less than $10 a day, and the nearly one billion people who live on less than $1.90 a day. It is the humanitarian aid workers, diplomats, and peace-builders who most serve our vital national interests. The amelioration of unnecessary human suffering, both here and around the world, should be the bottom line of all US policy.
It is not the radicalism of hate that is our biggest danger today; our biggest danger is that we lack the radicalism of love. That is the revolution now to be waged: a change in our thoughts, along with a change in our behavior, along with change in our institutions, along with a change in our votes, that will lead in time to a change in our world.
Any conversation less radical than that simply plays into the hands of those who despise us. We have the power to override the heinous efforts of those who terrorize, to overrule them and nullify their malevolence. But it cannot be done with mere military might.
What we need now is our spiritual might. The real war is not without, but within: between ego-based fear and spirit-based love. That is the contest that matters the most, and it rages constantly inside our heads. Will we choose brute force or soul force to provide for our security? As long as we the people are not answering that for ourselves, there will always be others seeking to provide the answers for us. Whether we let them do so will determine the fate of our precious world.
Chapter 9 will be emailed tomorrow!
Chapter 1: Love in a Time of Crisis: Lessons in Fear and Love
Chapter 2: A Revolution of Love: Reviewing the Plot
Chapter 3: Love and Conflict: Disagreeing with Love
Chapter 4: An Economics of Love: A New Bottom Line
Chapter 5: American Youth: Equal Rights for Angels