In Jerusalem, sometime in the latter half of the 8th century B.C.E., a prophet rose up to challenge the wickedness of the ruling elite, and predict a day will come when the Lord will punish the warmongers.

And He will judge between the nations, And will render decisions for many peoples; And they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks Nation will not lift up sword against nation, And never again will they learn war.
Isaiah 2:4

Twenty-seven hundred years later, a co-religionist offered a secular version of the same vision.

Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.
– Albert Einstein.

Einstein offered an ideal. He offered dialogue and negotiation as a prophylactic against war. But those ideals were challenged by the unspeakable policies of National Socialism. As Whitehead and Orwell noted:

“The absolute pacifist is a bad citizen; times come when force must be used to uphold right, justice and ideals”
– Alfred North Whitehead- (British mathematician and philosopher, 1861-1947)
“Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me.'”
– George Orwell

:::flip:::

This is the rhetoric that George W. Bush would turn to in the aftermath of 9/11. Bush would brand the 19 hijackers as ‘evil’, assert that they were the opponents of ‘freedom’, and thereby insist that in a ‘war such as the present one’ one must fight ‘to uphold right, justice and ideals’.

But are we in ‘such a war’? Has Bush properly diagnosed the motivations of the 19 hijackers?

The answers are ‘no’ and ‘no’.

The hijackers were not angry with the United States because we have certain freedoms. They were angry that we support the House of Saud, Hosni Mubarak, and have a notably pro-Israel foreign policy. They were angry because we have military bases throughout the Arabian Peninsula.

I wouldn’t say that the hijackers were pro-freedom; the type of society they wanted is no less oppressive than the ones they sought to replace. Nevertheless, Bush misdiagnosed the problem.

Pacifism in the face of National Socialism was ‘objectively pro-fascist’ because the fascists were not willing to negotiate, there could be no dialogue, and the only way to stop their path of destruction was to fight and defeat them.

Again, George W. Bush would echo this sound reasoning in the aftermath of 9/11. But he was wrong. There is no reason to expect that we could not diminish the threat of terrorism through negotiation, and some changes in policies. The attacks of 9/11 should have caused a certain level of introspection on the part of Americans. Do we really need to have military bases in Arab lands? Do we really need to support Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and do we need to do it in the same ways as in the past?

Starting out with a misdiagnosis of the threat, Bush moved, dishonestly, to exacerbate the threat by invading an Arab nation and building more military bases in Arab lands.

He paid lip service to promoting freedom and freer elections in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and he has tried to get decent elections in Iraq. But this approach is inadequate if the goal is to diminish the motivation for terrorists to attack America.

Meanwhile, he lied about the reasons for attacking Iraq, authorized torture, outsourced torture, failed to punish torture…

All of this has worked to undermine the rhetoric of ‘freedom-spreading’ and respect for human rights.

The result is a lack of consensus that we should be fighting the war in Iraq, that we are making any progress in diminishing the threat of terrorism, or that we are, in any sense, winning.

Given the financial costs of the war in Iraq, the diplomatic fallout of going to war on a ‘pack of lies’, of using torture and religious humiliation as policies of interrogation, we have reached a critical point. We are a point where almost 60% of Americans do not think the war in Iraq is worth fighting. It is exactly at such points where unnecessary wars are lost. The people revolt and insist the war be stopped. And the war is lost.

You would think, therefore, that Bush would be interested in reaching out to the Democrats in Congress and encouraging them to stay the course. You would think that he would be concerned enough about the direction things are going that he would begin to make concessions and invite Democrats to help maintain support for his foreign policies.

He might begin by scaling back his domestic agenda and making a genuine effort to build a coalition wartime Congress, with a legitimate loyal opposition.

Why, then, does he nominate the most extreme judges, the most controversial people for Attorney General, Homeland Security, Director of Intelligence, Secretary of State, and UN Ambassador?

Why does he pursue the gutting of Social Security? Why does he try to push through the ‘nuclear option’?

People ask me whether I highlight Bush’s failings because I want to gain political advantage for the next elections. I highlight Bush’s failings because his policies are catastrophic. And he simply will not ALLOW Democrats to work with him.

Even in these desperate times, he still is trying to push the Democrats away and to humiliate us. He is an extremist, and there is no working with him.

As Einstein noted, ‘peace cannot be kept by force’. Sometimes you have to fight, and we had every right to pursue the people that were behind 9/11, and to neutralize them. But real peace can only come by dialogue, negotiation, and compromise. After the trauma of World War Two the world attempted to set up structures to encourage this process. In a nuclear age, we realized the need to hammer our swords into plowshares and our spears into pruning hooks.

Bush does not understand it, but the future of mankind depends on our learning the wisdom of nations not taking up arms against nations.