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There is Only Us:
The Dennis
Kucinich Vision For
Enduring World
Peace
By Tad Daley
As the Bush Administration was busy bullying the UN
Security Council into supporting its Iraq war resolution
in the fall of 2002, the satirical newspaper The
Onion ran a spoof headline: "Bush Seeks U.N. Support
For 'U.S. Does Whatever It Wants' Plan." "I call upon
you now," said the president in his lampoon speech
before the world body, "to join us in our vision of
America as the only country whose wishes matter."
In the past three years, the rest of the world community
has seen unveiled a doctrine of preventive first strikes
against "forces of evil" that have not attacked us. An
obsession with overwhelming U.S. military superiority
maintained over everyone into perpetuity. An insistence
that everyone else adhere to rules of international
order that we have no intention of following ourselves.
Condemnations of the nascent nuclear arsenals of others
while saying not one word about our own. Contempt for
international organizations and any multilateral
constraints whatsoever on the employment of American
power. Rhetoric declaring that other nations must humbly
follow our lead or become “irrelevant.” An arrogant and
barely concealed ambition to build a 21st Century
American empire.
All of this has estranged and frightened and provoked
enduring enmity in both the councils of other
governments and the hearts of other citizens around the
world. Millions of ordinary people around the world feel
a sense of inferiority and wounded pride in the shadow
of American power. Nations and peoples have long
memories, especially of the humiliations they suffer
during difficult times. And many, as a direct
consequence, are now plotting to do us incalculable
harm.
George Bush's foreign policies have made us new foreign
enemies. George Bush's defense policies have weakened
our defenses. George Bush's responses to 9/11 have made
future 9/11's far more likely to occur.
So much for Republicans being "strong on defense."
Boys on the Fence
While many talk of a cycle of violence, Dennis Kucinich
chooses to talk of a cycle of fear. America’s
overwhelming power and overweening behavior on the world
stage generates fears in others ... which provokes
behavior by others that, in turn, generates fears of our
own.
No one can doubt that hard-core terror types exist who
intend to launch attacks on American soil no matter
what. Dennis Kucinich has made clear that he would not
hesitate to use American military power to defend
Americans against such imminent threats.
But the most glaring result of George Bush’s foreign
policies seems to be the phenomenon of self-fulfilling
prophecies. When we treat others like enemies, then
enemies they will surely become. There are undoubtedly
today millions of teenage Muslim boys who are
essentially on the fence. They have perhaps spent most
of their childhood in Islamic madrasas. Their
families have lived in desperate poverty for as long as
anyone can remember. They are unemployed, idle and hold
little hope for obtaining gainful employment. And they
are debating within themselves whether take a stab at
making it as a citizen of the world – or to enlist
instead with the enemies of peace.
So far, George Bush's
incentive program for these boys has been a singular,
one-dimensional message: If you seek to do us harm, we
will pound you. As Morton Halperin recently observed,
the Bush Administration apparently believes “that
the best way to deter suicide bombers is to threaten
them with the death penalty.”
What could be more
delusional than the neo-conservative notion that our
planet contains a finite number of terrorists that we
can entice into Iraq and hunt down, and, by doing so,
win the war on terror? During the Vietnam War, it was
often said that every time we killed a Viet Cong
guerrilla, we created two more. George Bush is all stick
and no carrot. And if history has anything to teach us,
it is that all stick and no carrot never works. All it
does is to provoke new individuals to become new
perpetrators and generate an endless Newtonian cycle of
action and reaction.
How to Wind Friends
and Influence Peoples – and Nations
Dennis Kucinich would accommodate rather than alienate,
make friends instead of enemies and employ carrots far
more than sticks. A Kucinich Administration would dry up
the swamps of hopelessness, exploitation and humiliation
that cause vulnerable individuals to be seduced down the
false road of terrorism. Dennis Kucinich would offer
those teenage boys – and all the poor and dispossessed
members of the human community – some rewards for a
better choice, some hope and opportunity, some promise
of full participation in a prosperous and peaceful
global civilization. In Dennis Kucinich's America, our
great country would abide by Lincoln’s great precept:
"The only lasting way to eliminate an enemy is to make
him your friend."
Next year, our great country will spend more on our
bloated military machine than all the other countries in
the world put together. This is a situation probably
unprecedented in all of world history. In Chalmers
Johnson’s new book, The Sorrows of Empire, he
offers a portrait of what he calls a “globe-girdling
Baseworld” – 725 sprawling U.S. military outposts in 140
of the 189 countries in the United Nations. Oh ... and
234 U.S. military golf courses too. The christening last
year of the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan took us from 12
to 13 “aircraft carrier battle groups.” No other country
has even one.
Yet we will spend one-tenth of one percent of our Gross
National Income on development aid -- the lowest of any
developed country. That gives us a lot to be proud of,
doesn’t it? We’re number one in both our ability to blow
things up and in our stinginess. In the great global
conversation about how to address destitution and
despair in the 21st Century, Paul Kennedy
recently observed that the United States is “away on
crusade.”
Is this a formula for winning the hearts and minds of
the next global generation? Can't we be something more
in the international arena than a hammer looking for
nails? In its singular focus on the war on terror, the
Bush Administration has squandered opportunities to
cooperatively address our most intractable common
challenges. As Mikhail Gorbachev recently asked, why not
“pre-empt global warming?” A Kucinich Administration
would work with the world community to address
environmental degradation, persistent hunger, ignorance
and illiteracy, safe water, the AIDS pandemic, the
degrading status of women in so many places, failed
states, cultural obliteration, exploitative
transnational corporations, and perhaps most important
of all, the grinding poverty of 2 billion souls – fully
a third of the planet. We need a president who will work
to bridge the chasm between rich and poor – around the
block and around the world.
World Peace Through
World Law
During the original
Persian Gulf crisis in 1990, George H. W. Bush labored
to obtain Security Council approval for American actions
every step of the way. He recognized that formal
international legal authorization was vital to gain
legitimacy and credibility, to enforce the will of all
nations rather than to impose the wishes of one and to
avoid an anti-American backlash that could haunt us for
decades to come.
George Bush the son
has obviously chosen a very different approach. By
showing such open disdain for the U.N. Charter and
international law during the past three years, the
primary outlaw on the world stage in the eyes of many
today is no longer Saddam Hussein, but us. The rest of
the world did not miss America’s hypocrisy when we
defied the UN to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein
couldn’t get away with defying the UN. “The U.S. tells
the world: My sovereignty is inviolable. Yours isn’t,”
says the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. “Or, there is
one rule for the USA and another for the rest.”
Dennis Kucinich knows
that the U.N. is far from perfect. Dominated by the five
victors of a war that ended in the first half of the
last century – each one of which, through its "veto,"
can prevent the entire rest of the world from acting –
it is profoundly anachronistic, undemocratic and far
from representative of the peoples of the world. But
it’s the closest thing we have at the moment to a
universal forum, a body representing the whole of the
human community. At this point in history, the United
Nations is the best vehicle we have to assemble the
collective conscience of the human community.
Dennis Kucinich
believes that the rule of law must apply both to the
conduct of our nation in the international arena and the
conduct of our government in its treatment of captured
adversaries. It is perhaps not too much to claim that
the Nuremberg tribunal after World War II was the high
point of 20th Century American civilization.
And it is perhaps not too much to claim that the high
point of the Nuremberg tribunal was not the convictions,
but the acquittals. If anyone ever deserved to be
summarily lined up against a brick wall and shot – as
both Churchill and Stalin advocated – it was the high
officials of the loathsome Nazi regime. What did we do
instead? We provided them with public trials, fine legal
counsel, the full due process of law … and let some of
them walk free. Could anything have more profoundly
demonstrated not just our military victory over Nazi
Germany, but our moral superiority?
In his State of the Union address, President Bush said
“America will never seek a permission slip to defend the
security of our people.” Forget for a moment whether the
unilateral, preventive, illegal and very unwise invasion
of Iraq had anything to do with the security of the
American people. Consider simply that if we flagrantly
disregard the rule of law on the world stage, we
eliminate any incentive for anyone else to abide by it.
We strike at the very foundations of the legitimacy of
the international system. We set the pot simmering with
a recipe for international anarchy. Last year Jonathan
Schell wrote: "there are moments in history when ...
what is at stake is not just who will win and who will
lose, but the rules by which everyone will have to play
from then on." If we disregard the law of nations, we
are left with the law of the jungle, where the only
constraint on violence is the power and ruthlessness of
those who would employ it. Rest assured, in that world,
we will not be the only ones to employ it.
A Department of Peace
In 1793, Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the
Declaration of Independence, published “A Plan of a
Peace-Office for the United States.” “As the War-Office
of the United States was established in the time of
peace,” wrote Dr. Rush, “it is equally reasonable that a
Peace-Office should be established in the time of war.”
Dennis Kucinich aspires to revive Rush’s grand idea and
to establish a Department of Peace to stand alongside
the Department of Defense. If our country must spend
hundreds of billions every year preparing for war, how
about just 1% of that amount for a department whose
raison d'etre is preventing war?
The Department of Peace would seek to make non-violence
an organizing principle of society. It would present a
wider range of alternatives within the councils of our
government. It would
seek to articulate new structures of global governance,
a paradigm of people resolving differences without
resorting to primitive violence and a clear and
sparkling vision of permanent peace as a higher
evolution of Homo sapiens as a social animal.
On September 11, 2001, George Bush told the nation that
“the first war of the 21st Century” had now
been joined. It was as if it was self-evident, for him,
that our new century would be soaked in at least as much
blood as the last – when more than 100 million souls
died face down in the mud. Dennis Kucinich takes no such
fatalistic view of the destiny of the human race. The
Department of Peace proposal, most fundamentally, is
about the proposition that it is within the power of the
human imagination to envision abolishing war itself.
Toward a Politics of
Human Unity
Science writer Michael Shermer recently said: “In-group
morality is a universal human trait ... from the
earliest bands and tribes to modern nations and empires.
The long-term solution is to view all people as members
of our in-group: the species Homo sapiens.”
Dennis Kucinich knows that politics is not only about
tangible policy ideas, but also intangible spiritual
ideals. And the Americans supporting Dennis Kucinich for
president believe that the advancing tide of human unity
may be no less than the Great Story of the 21st
Century. We know that each of us is bound to a common
destiny, that higher than our loyalty to our nation is
our loyalty to humankind, that we are all in the same
boat on Spaceship Earth. We claim that our national
patriotism must be transcended in this new century by
our planetary patriotism. We insist that our
government’s pursuit of national interests must be
accompanied by a consideration of transnational
interests. We know that the only way to end incessant
cycles of hatred and violence is to stop talking about
“them and us,” and to recognize that there is only us.
These are hardly new ideas. We stand in the tradition of
what the great developmental psychologist Erik Erikson
called an emerging "all-human solidarity." We see the
first glimmerings of what the Princeton political
scientist Robert C. Tucker called an "ethic of
specieshood." We are the vanguard of what Voltaire
called the "party of humanity."
The picture taken by Voyager 1 from beyond the orbit of
Pluto shows our planet as a tiny speck – almost
completely lost in the glare of the Sun. In his
exquisite paean Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan wrote
of this photograph: "Think of the rivers of blood
spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in
glory and triumph, they could become the momentary
masters of a fraction of a dot."
We believe that
Dennis Kucinich’s global policy agenda reflects the
truth of Earth from space. We compare the soft blues and
greens of our fragile planet to the stark blackness of
the cosmos and recognize the infinite preciousness of
our lonely home, suspended among the blazing stars. We
have a nagging intuition that the Whole Earth is perhaps
something greater than the sum of its parts. We pledge
allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.
But we also pledge our allegiance to humanity.
Tad Daley has served
since September 2003 as National Issues Director and
Senior Policy Advisor to the Presidential campaign of
U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich. Congressman
Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, is Chair of the
Congressional Progressive Caucus and served as prime
organizer of the Democratic opposition to the Iraq war
resolution in the fall of 2002.
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