Why don't we try peace?

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/168103/why-dont-we-try-peace-interview-dennis-kucinich

It can be unanimously agreed upon that it was a misadventure and a mistake. But the only ones that have really paid a price for it are the innocent people, perhaps a million innocent people in Iraq, who lost their lives. Millions more whose lives were damaged possibly beyond repair, a nation which was basically laid ruined, and American soldiers by the thousands who lost their lives or received permanent injuries—and their families. But let me tell you who didn’t pay the price. George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, the neocons—Richard Perle. All of these hawks who had a plan to go after Iraq after 9/11 even though Iraq didn’t have anything to do with 9/11. They never paid a price. The politicians who went out front and supported the war, Democrats and Republicans alike, who burnished their images by being hawks. And then when the entire adventure disintegrated into a fiasco, are still ought after for their sage advice on world affairs. The New York Times and Washington Post, who helped beat the drum for war, they really haven’t paid a price. So actually war is politically profitable, financially profitable, morally depraved.

And we have a culture which is so sated with violence that we will accept war on the installment plan in our own communities. And we buy it as official policy writ large in attacking nations that have no quarrel with us. So this is a cultural problem. It is a problem of our times. And at the root of it is fear. It’s irrational, mindless, fear that paradoxically has nothing to do with who we are as Americans, because the American people by and large are not fearful people. But the fear has been used to cause the American people to support a continuation of wars and military spending that is absolutely adverse to the practical aspirations of everyone in this country with the exception of the people who make money off of it.

We tried war, we tried aggression, we tried intervention. None of it works. Why don’t we try peace, as a science of human relations, not as some vague notion—as everyday work. As diplomacy, as respect, as understanding the essential interconnectedness of all people, that we’re really one. This dichotomous thinking that causes us to think of people as others instead of aspects of undivided human unity is what causes our dilemma.