Most Offensive Op-Ed Ever

Usually the LA Times does not print things this awful.
 Usually these things don't bother me so much.  The
problem is not just that the author is wrong, or that he develops his
argument poorly -- although both are true.  What bothers me is
the pointlessly malicious tone of the piece.

href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-bawer2sep02,0,833953.story?coll=la-home-commentary">The
peace racket

A growing movement is pushing a worldview that ignores
history's lessons about strength and appeasement.



By Bruce Bawer

September 2, 2007



'If you want peace, prepare for war," counseled the Roman
general Flavius Vegetius Renatus more than 1,600 years ago, echoing the
sage advice given nine centuries earlier by the Chinese military
strategist Sun Tzu. But in a film I saw recently at Oslo's Nobel Peace
Center, this ancient wisdom was turned on its head: "If you want
peace," it said, "prepare for peace."...

First, a little background.  The author, href="http://www.brucebawer.com/" rel="tag">Bruce
Bawer, has some
education: a Ph. D. in English, from Stony Brook.  He's
written some books and magazine articles.  He lives in Norway.
 Could be an interesting guy.  

I'm not talking here about a bunch of
naive Quakers or idealistic
high school students, but about a movement of savvy, ambitious
professionals that is already comfortably ensconced at the United
Nations, in the European Union and in many nongovernmental
organizations. The peace racket, as I've come to think of it, embraces
scores of "peace institutes" and "peace centers" in the U.S. and
Europe, plus several hundred peace studies programs at universities
such as UC Berkeley and Cornell.



What's more, this movement is also waging an aggressive,
under-the-media-radar campaign for a Cabinet-level "Peace Department"
in the United States.  Sponsored by Ohio Democratic Rep.
Dennis J. Kucinich (along with more than 60 co-sponsors), HR 808 would
authorize a secretary of Peace to "establish a Peace Academy," to
"develop a peace education curriculum" for elementary and secondary
schools, and to provide "grants for peace studies departments" at
campuses around the country...

The op-ed in the LA Times is a condensed version of href="http://city-journal.org/html/17_3_peace_racket.html">an
essay in the City Journal.  In
case you haven't heard of the City Journal before,
it is one of those publications that is so important and well-known,
that it has quotes at the top of its website, telling you how important
and well-known it is.



In this post, I don't intend to settle any age-old questions.
 The question of whether humans are intrinsically good or
intrinsically evil is as old as philosophy itself.  The
tension between war and peace is as old as civilization, as has the
question of how best to deal with that tension.  I will solve
those problems in a subsequent post.  Today, though, I am just
going to rant about Bawer's op-ed.



 First of all, he starts out with an implicit false dichotomy:
prepare for peace OR prepare for war.  



Obviously, if you are always preparing for a storm, you will never go
on a Labor Day picnic.  Likewise, if you are never prepared
for a storm, sooner or later you are going to be swept away, or hit by
lightening, or something dreadful.  So you prepare for both.
 The only question is what percentage of resources should go
into each respective activity.



Second, he make dumb statements, like saying saying href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/2008-presidential-candidates/dennis-kucinich/"
rel="tag">Dennis Kucinich is
mounting an aggressive campaign to establish peace.
 Plus he insults an entire religious sect, in "naive Quakers."
 It is the callous obnoxiousness that bugs me.  There
is no reason to be insulting to innocent bystanders.



The mindset that says it is OK to casually insult people is the same
one that says collateral damage is no big deal.  It is a
dangerous mindset.



Third, perhaps most importantly, Bawer develops his argument poorly.

Human history has demonstrated repeatedly
that you're safer if your enemies know you'll stand up for yourself
than if you're proudly outspoken about your defenselessness or your
unwillingness to fight.

This is an approximation of the truth.  It is also another
false dichotomy.  The fuller truth of the matter is that the
Universe is a very dangerous place.  Other humans are perhaps
the biggest danger, but by no means the only one.  And the
more resources you put into protecting yourself against one danger, the
more vulnerable you are to the others.  There are some
exceptions: preparing for bioterrorism may help prepare us
against pandemic influenza.  But it general, preparing for one
threat leaves you more open to other threats.  Plus, the more
you try to prevent bad things from
happening, the less you can attend to the task of making
good things happen.



So again, it is not a question of which we should do; it is a question
of how we should apportion our resources.  



Regarding his statement about how to be safe: I would say that safety
comes not precisely from letting your potential
adversary know that you are willing to fight, although that sometimes
is part of it.  The closer approximation would be to say that
safety comes from earning the respect of your potential adversaries.
 Respect is much more complex than mere intimidation.
 There
is nothing you can do to guarantee that others will respect you.
 In fact, sometimes the things you do to earn the respect of
some,
cause you to lose the respect of others.  



Fourth, Bawer makes the error of treating the peace movement as a
monolithic entity, which it most certainly is not.  Referring
to the enterprise as a "racket" is inappropriate and distracting.
 It does not advance his argument.  



A "racket" is an ongoing conspiracy to obtain material gains by some
illicit means.  Perhaps there are a few within the peace
movement who are trying to profit from it in some illicit way, but it
is an error to characterize the entire movement that way.  It
proves nothing, and all it indicates is that the author is either
sloppy in his thinking, his writing, or both.

As for America's response to terrorism,
David Barash and Charles Webel tidily sum up the view of many peace
studies professors in "Peace and Conflict Studies," their widely used
2002 textbook: "A peace-oriented perspective condemns not only
terrorist attacks but also any violent response to them." How, then,
are democracies supposed to respond to aggression? Should we open an
instant dialogue? Should we make endless concessions? Should we
apologize?

It is hard to know what to say about this.  The guy whom
Cheney shot in the face with a shotgun felt it was
appropriate to apologize.  



The answer to his question, is: it depends.  There is no
single, correct way to respond to aggression.  Sometimes a
peace-oriented perspective might be the right approach.
 Sometimes not.  The first Gulf War was justified, in
my opinion.  The second was not.  



In order to determine the best response to aggression, it helps to
understand the
full breadth of options.  It is not a mistake to study and
learn about the
peaceful end of the spectrum of options, even if that is not always the
part of the spectrum that contains the correct response for a given
situation.



Bawer devotes several column-inches to criticism of educational and
institutional study of peace and conflict resolution.  His
criticism is based on the notion that a peaceful response is not always
the correct one.  That is comparable to criticizing a
university for having a department of English, because English is not
the correct language to use for every situation.



In contrasts to the criticisms above, I note that Bawer's essay does
have some merit.  This is more apparent in the full version
posted at City Journal.

The founding father of the global peace
movement is a 77-year-old Norwegian professor, Johan Galtung, who
established the International Peace Research Institute in 1959...



...Though Galtung has opined that the annihilation of Washington, D.C.,
would be a fair punishment for America’s arrogant view of
itself as “a model for everyone else,”
he’s long held up certain countries as worthy of
emulation -- among them Stalin’s USSR, whose economy,
he predicted in 1953, would soon overtake the West’s.
He’s also a fan of Castro’s Cuba, which he praised
in 1972 for “break[ing] free of imperialism’s iron
grip.”...



...Galtung’s use of the word “peace” to
legitimize totalitarianism is an old Communist tradition.

Perhaps there are people in the peace movement who have some nutty
ideas.  Perhaps there are some who use the peace movement as
cover for malevolent motives.  Any movement, or group effort,
can be co-opted,
infiltrated,
or falsely
emulated.  



The solution, though, is not to disparage the principles of the
movement.  The solution is for persons who participate in
collective efforts to be vigilant against this kind of thing.  



Maybe there are some crackpots in the peace movement.  But the
war movement is large, powerful, and well-funded.  It is also
a lot more dangerous than the peace movement.