Dumb Wars

Nonviolence helped create the most auspicious change in America since the Civil War. No one is saying we do not need a good war now and then. Like the one against Hitler. That was the last good one we fought. The rest were and remain dumb.

Nonviolence is tough power but it requires a very specific condition for it to work. There must be a hint at least of a legal system that is capable of being appealed to. One of the reasons that the United States has been so hapless since WW2 is its evident refusal to strengthen international law to the point that it has a few teeth. We will not ratify the criminal court. We will not even ratify the rights of children. We are in lockstep with Somalia. Who thinks our willingness to cave to Right Wing stupidity is new?

Nevertheless there are modes of nonviolence that require some imagination. Modes like using a bully pulpit. Modes like creating global contests and competitions. Modes like mass media. Modes that cost a fraction of what a war does and are life-friendly, body-bag free.

Sometimes I am afraid we will become so used to the current MO of sending marginal young folk off to die that we will end up as the Romans did when all they had was hapless legions who had neither the spirit nor the power to overcome new hordes descending on the once glorious empire. But then again there were other causes of decline. The premises of violent rule are a failsafe recipe for eventual self-destruction.

I harp on values for a reason. Values rule. I love the Bard. I love his take on honor The value honor was what Falstaff dissed. It dies each Wednesday. He refused to fight.

The tough power of nonviolence prevailed in Birmingham and Selma and and Nashville. Prevailed. And why not? There was a higher law at work.

We do not honor even existing international law and so we get mired in violent solutions.

But go back to my little basket of alternatives. I keep proposing that we could win the war on terror with media initiatives such as contests to produce three blockbuster films on the problems of Islamic women. The President uses contests to improve schools. How about to eliminate war as a dumb and useless political tactic?

Even if we cannot replicate the conditions that enabled massive movement in the 60s, we can and should apply our minds to smart nonviolence today. There's too much else on the table to be wasting more billions on more wars that we cannot win because they are not -- like WW2 -- wars of necessity.

Were the President as inventive about negotiation as he was forthright in advocating it, he might be sitting on a runway in Iran now trumping the worst plans of Bibi and Idad.

Abba's Way. Table Talk. "Nonviolence Is Smarter Than Waging Dumb Wars No One Can Win."