Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 10, 1991 TAG: 9103110283
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SIDNEY A. PEARSON JR.
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Why was the peace movement politically impotent during the crisis? The most obvious answers, that Saddam Hussein is a thug and that American casualties were mercifully light, are true enough but insufficient in themselves. The failure of the movement to visibly influence policy debates over the war is rooted in the nature of the movement itself, and in the particular vision of peace it has set before us since Vietnam.
The political lessons the movement has tried to teach are simple in content but powerful in their basic appeal: that war settles nothing; that peace is the dominant moral virtue in politics; that the very idea of a "just war" is a contradiction in terms - a morally obtuse notion that should be banished forever from moral and political discourse.
Those points should strike a resposive chord in all of us, even if they fail to persuade. War ought never to be our first choice of political action.
Fundamentally, the peace movement taught that pacifism, non-violence, was the sole moral basis for all political action. Experience with non-violence in domestic civil-rights movements could be applied directly to the field of international relations. Pure pacifism was the only legitimate personal and, hence, societal response to conflict. All other political virtues were to be ignored or subsumed in the single-minded pursuit of peace. Differences between political actions appropriate for domestic politics and those more appropriate for the reality of international relations were seldom, if ever, raised.
Peace came to be understood as a subject to be taught like any other - but, oddly, one to be taught independently of any other academic discipline or moral tradition which might have cautioned that pacifism has limits. Politics was reduced to a problem of applied psychology - "consciousness-raising" in the movement's jargon.
The seemingly studied ignorance of any contrary viewpoint was a conspicuous feature. The movement might have saved time and false starts by a serious study of the principles of America's founding. But to do this, it would have had to be prepared to learn as well as teach.
The American regime is built on a unique proposition - "We hold these Truths to be self-evident . . . " Among other things, this proposition requires that we balance the sometimes competing virtues of ordered freedom with justice.
I say "ordered freedom" because the term implies, among other things, "domestic tranquility," a form of political peace. But it is not simply "peace" in the sense most pacifists use the term. It is built on a constitutional separation of powers and a rule of law that recognizes the need to balance competing human passions and interests. It requires that such desirable things as peace, freedom and justice be ordered in a way as to mutually reinforce one another. No one of these elements can be significantly altered without profoundly affecting the other elements, and no single virtue can presume to blot out the others.
Part of what ensures the continuing reality of this ordered liberty domestically is that we provide for the common defense and be prepared to defend those self-evident truths against a sometimes hostile world.
Peace as the only meaningful political virtue was never seriously debated by America's founders. They understood that the pure peace of the modern pacifist was not really a political concept but rather a misapplied religious truth.
Though themselves mostly deists, the founders understood well St. Augustine's distinction between the City of God and the City of Man, and they did not confuse the truth of one with the truth of the other. The spiritual peace appropriate to the former could be experienced, at most, only imperfectly in the latter, but never as a purely political condition. Spiritual peace and political peace were no doubt related, but in our fallen condition they could never be one and the same.
For the American founders, and for most traditional political philosophy, the teaching of Scripture, philosophy and experience was that mortal men would have to balance, imperfectly and in ignorance, the inherent tensions among peace, freedom and justice.
Only in the City of God could peace be our natural state. In this world, we would all too often have to choose between peace or justice, peace or freedom. Consistently choosing only one would mean consistently sacrificing the others.
There are times when human dignity requires that we pledge "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor" in just wars in order "to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." The truth of our condition now is that we cannot have pure peace and still have a decent human existence.
The idea of the "just war" was born of this need to confront the truth that we must make unpleasant choices - but must do so in the light of whatever moral reasoning and light may be available to us. As such, the idea of the just war is neither obsolete nor a contradiction in terms.
The peace movement failed to influence policy in the Gulf War - and, in all likelihood, will fail in future wars - because mere peace is not the only end of politics. Peace without the ordered liberty essential to our pursuit of happiness is not a goal our citizens should either want or seek. If it should ever be attained, it could only be under conditions that even now the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are struggling to reject.
The absolute pacifism of the peace movement since Vietnam was framed by alienated intellectuals in response to a war policy itself framed by many of the same intellectuals - the "best and brightest" of the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon era. The political ethos of the Gulf War was framed by very different appeals - to the traditional moral virtues of ordinary American citizens, virtues seldom seen among the alienated intellectuals in the peace movement.
The post-Vietnam peace movement failed because it never fully understood the political nature of either war or peace. War does settle some things. There are values other than peace that must be pursued by statesmen - values frequently more precious than peace itself.
There are limits to what can be taught because there are limits to what we can know and do. But within those limits, wars can be more just than unjust. Force can be an instrument in the realization of ordered liberty, all the more necessary perhaps in the international milieu than at home.
If the peace movement can seriously engage us in exploring the connection between how we order our souls and how we order our policy, we may yet learn something from it. But to truly teach peace, the movement will have to become something other than what it has been.
Specifically, it will have to begin to learn as well as to teach. Pacifists have rightly taught that war is too important to be left to generals. But they will have to learn the analogous truth: Peace is too important to be left to pacifists.
by CNB