We're spending all our time batting back ridiculous GOP scandal mongering and waiting for Mueller. Meanwhile, back in the real world, this is happening: U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Saturday the threat of nuclear missile attack by North Korea is accelerating.

In remarks in Seoul with South Korean Defense Minister Song Young-moo at his side, Mattis accused the North of illegal and unnecessary missile and nuclear programs - and vowed to defeat any attack.

Mattis said North Korea engages in "outlaw" behavior and that the U.S. will never accept a nuclear North.

He added that regardless of what the North might try, it is overmatched by the firepower and cohesiveness of the decades-old U.S.-South Korean alliance.

"North Korea has accelerated the threat that it poses to its neighbors and the world through its illegal and unnecessary missile and nuclear weapons programs," he said, adding that U.S.-South Korean military and diplomatic collaboration thus has taken on "a new urgency."

"I cannot imagine a condition under which the United States would accept North Korea as a nuclear power," he said.

As he emphasized throughout his weeklong Asia trip, which included stops in Thailand and the Philippines, Mattis said diplomacy remains the preferred way to deal with the North.

"With that said," he added, "make no mistake - any attack on the United States or our allies will be defeated, and any use of nuclear weapons by the North will be met with a massive military response that is effective and overwhelming."

Mattis' comments did not go beyond his recent statements of concern about North Korea, although he appeared to inject a stronger note about the urgency of resolving the crisis. While he accused the North of "outlaw" behavior, he did not mention that President Donald Trump has ratcheted up his own rhetoric. In August, Trump warned the North not to make any more threats against the United States, and said that if it did, it would be met with "fire and fury like the world has never seen." Song, the South Korean minister, told the news conference that he and Mattis agreed to further cooperation on strengthening Seoul's defense capabilities, including lifting warhead payload limits on South Korean conventional missiles and supporting the country's acquisition of "most advanced military assets." He offered no specifics and refused to answer when asked whether the discussions included nuclear-powered submarines. Some South Korean government officials have endorsed the nation getting nuclear-powered submarines amid calls for more military strength. There's a growing concern among the South Korean public that North Korea's expanding nuclear weapons arsenal, which may soon include an intercontinental ballistic missile that could target the U.S. mainland, would undermine Seoul's decadeslong alliance with Washington.

South Korea's conservative politicians have also called for the United States to bring back tactical nuclear weapons that were withdrawn from the Korean Peninsula in the 1990s, which they say would make clearer the U.S. intent to use nukes in a crisis. But Mattis and Song were strongly dismissive of the idea.

"When considering national interest, it's much better not to deploy them," said Song, adding that the allies would have "sufficient means" to respond to a North Korean nuclear attack even without placing tactical nukes in the South. Mattis said current U.S. strategic assets are already providing nuclear deterrence and that the South Korean government has never approached him with the subject of tactical nukes.

Also discussed in the meeting were the conditions under which South Korea would be given wartime operational control of its forces. Currently, if war with the North broke out, the South's forces would operate under the U.S.-led U.N. Command.

Trump entered office declaring his commitment to solving the North Korea problem, asserting that he would succeed where his predecessors had failed. His administration has sought to increase pressure on Pyongyang through U.N. Security Council sanctions and other diplomatic efforts, but the North hasn't budged from its goal of building a full-fledged nuclear arsenal, including missiles capable of striking the U.S. mainland.

If Trump sticks to his pledge to stop the North from being able to threaten the U.S. with a nuclear attack, something will have to give - either a negotiated tempering of the North's ambitions or a U.S. acceptance of the North as a nuclear power.

North Korea has been a nuclear power since 2006. So what it sounds like here is that the US plans regime change, which, in the wake of Iraq and Libya --- and now Trump's bellowing about Iran too --- has set Kim Jong Un on this accelerated path.

It might have happened no matter who won. But nobody could be worse that Trump in trying to manage it. He says his is the only decisions that matters and that he is "tougher and stronger" than his advisers.

October 5 came and went, and Canada's boreal woodland caribou are still in trouble. That was the deadline the federal government gave provinces and territories five years ago to come up with caribou range plans for the iconic animals. Not one met the deadline.

Why should we care about caribou? Beyond the fact that we should care about all animals that play important roles in the ecological makeup of this "super natural" country, caribou are indicators of forest health. When caribou are healthy, it's a sign the forests they live in are healthy. Forests provide numerous ecological services, such as preventing floods, storing carbon and regulating climate, as well as habitat for animals and plants and livelihoods and resources for people.

Failing to protect caribou habitat affects many Indigenous Peoples' rights, cultures and traditional livelihoods, and risks tarnishing Canada's reputation in the global marketplace. U.S. and international customers buy our products on the understanding that we'll protect wildlife and honour commitments to Indigenous peoples.

In 2012, the federal government's recovery strategy for boreal caribou concluded that only 14 of 51 herds were healthy enough to sustain themselves. The strategy, developed by 18 top caribou scientists, established a strong relationship between the extent of habitat disturbance and whether a local population increases, declines or remains stable.

The recovery strategy identifies a minimum of 65 per cent undisturbed habitat in a range as the "disturbance management threshold." Based on this, the government gave provinces and territories five years to develop plans to protect or restore critical habitat.

In the face of ineffective stopgap measures - like killing predators such as wolves and bears, and penning female caribou to keep predators away - many scientists, environmentalists and First Nations have been calling on governments to address the real problem: cumulative disturbance. Roads and seismic lines for forestry, mining and oil and gas operations, along with industrial activity, have fragmented and degraded caribou habitat, altering predator-prey dynamics.

In response to the obvious need for immediate action to protect and restore caribou habitat to reverse the creatures' decline across the country, the Forest Products Association of Canada has done its part to stall the necessary changes. It claims, among other arguments, that the recovery strategy is being rushed; the science is uncertain, incomplete and out of date; the 65/35 disturbance threshold is too rigid; boreal caribou are recovering with good management plans across the country; and climate change isn't being considered as a major cause of decline.

Caribou don't have time to wait, and the science is clear. Many herds were identified as threatened more than 17 years ago, and provinces and territories have had five years to come up with plans. Although the causes of caribou decline are varied and complex, decades of research have shown habitat degradation is a major factor and habitat protection and restoration must be the foundation for recovery plans.

As for rigidity, provinces and territories have been given space to vary their plans based on science, but even protecting or restoring 65 per cent intact habitat only gives caribou a 60 per cent chance of survival.

Climate change is, of course, a factor in the decline of many plants and animals, but that doesn't explain the rapid decline of caribou, nor should it be used as an excuse to ignore habitat destruction.

Industrial resource-extraction operators often claim their practices are sustainable. Yet these practices have contributed to caribou decline and, under the current management regime, there is no evidence herds are recovering. Either the research shows continued declines or, in some cases such as Ontario, populations haven't been monitored for four to six years.

It's time for governments and industry to stop dragging their heels. Habitat maintenance and restoration should be recognized as a cost of doing business in the boreal.

Yes, we need to continue studying caribou and ways to keep their populations stable, and industry has an important role to play. Stalling, raising doubt about the research and exempting industry from regulations, as Ontario has done, will increase risks for boreal caribou.

That sound you heard was another shoe dropping from the human centipede that is Camp Runamuck. Bloomberg grabbed the breaking news.

A former foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, George Papadopoulos, secretly pleaded guilty as part of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's probe into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Bloomberg News' Tom Schoenberg reports. Papadopoulos had suggested that Donald Trump meet with top Russian leaders during the campaign. He pleaded guilty to making false statements during an interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In March 2016, in an email to the campaign's foreign policy team, Papadopoulos suggested he coordinate "a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss U.S.-Russia ties under President Trump," the Post reported, citing internal campaign emails turned over to congressional committees. Those committees are investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election and possible coordination with the Trump campaign. Robert Mueller, the Department of Justice special counsel, is overseeing a separate FBI probe on the same subject...

...But months later, in June 2016, Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin who had promised disparaging information about Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr. has said he did nothing wrong by attending the meeting. But William Browder, a financier and longtime critic of the Russian government, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in July that the lawyer was probably trying to initiate an agreement on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Pro Tip: Lying to the FBI is never a good idea.

Releasing the Papadopolous plea deal was a remarkably deft play by Mueller, whose political savvy is mysteriously under-discussed. The initial White House reaction to the news about Paul Manafort was that everything happened years ago, and what the hell is Mueller doing? Now, we have a completed legal proceeding containing the words "Trump campaign," "Russia," and "disparaging information on Hillary Clinton." Alibis are dropping like the autumn leaves.
(c) 2017 Charles P. Pierce has been a working journalist since 1976. He is the author of four books, most recently 'Idiot America.' He lives near Boston with his wife but no longer his three children.

Remarks at Peace and Justice Studies Association Conference in Birmingham, Alabama, October 28, 2017.

Thank you for inviting me. Can everyone who thinks that war is never, and can never be, justified please raise your hand. Thank you. Now if you think every war is always justified. Thank you. And finally all the moderates holding the balanced subtle middle ground: some wars are justified. Thank you. You may not be surprised to hear that this room is not typical of this country. Typical is for absolutely everyone to pile into that last group.

The relationship between peace and war is clearly not understood by the U.S. public as along the lines of that between alive and dead. Peace and war are things people imagine can coexist.

In Virginia, where I live, a school board member once said he would support recognizing the international day of peace as long as nobody misunderstood and thought he was opposed to any wars.

In Washington, D.C., two years ago I visited the U.S. Institute of Peace along with some other peace activists. We met with some of the top people there and asked them if they would join us in opposing wars. Their president told me there was more than one way to get to peace. I asked her if one of those ways was through war. She asked me to define war. I said that war was the use of the U.S. military to kill people. She said that "non-combat troops" could be the answer. I think I may have been left with only nonverbal words at that point in the conversation. A non-combat troop is a person trained for combat, armed for combat, sent to an area of likely combat, and called a "non-combat troop."

Here's a project on which I could use a great deal of help from Peace Studies programs. I want to persuade the general public that a choice has to be made. On one side is peace, and on the other war.

I believe we have plenty of models to work from. I believe that not only at an early childhood education conference but even in a public square virtually every person would raise their hand to say that child abuse is never justified and can never be justified. And very few would propose using child abuse as a means to arrive at a state of respectful nurturing. There are many other things that one has to work to find open defenders of, things like slavery, dueling, trial by ordeal, or Jeff Sessions. And there are nasty things that most people support or accept: mass incarceration, fossil fuel consumption, animal slaughter, nuclear weapons, hedge funds, the United States Senate - and yet, even with these, a proposal to abolish them is understood as squarely opposed to continuing them. Partial steps are good and necessary, but a plan to get to a green-energy world by burning off all the oil is not understood as actually being a green proposal - not in the way that millions of people imagine bombing North Korea or Iran is the best way to make peace with North Korea or Iran.

Of course no two things are the same, and the arguments that most people believe support wars do not support slavery or fossil fuel use or child abuse. Yet, I believe that most of what makes war unique weighs in favor of abolishing it. And I believe peace studies can go very far toward persuading people that common defenses of war don't hold up.

I. Here's the first point that I believe is established by the facts but badly in need of being learned: War endangers those in whose name it is threatened and waged. Obviously we don't begin sporting events by thanking armed troops for endangering us, but we might be more in touch with reality if we did. Terrorism has predictably increased during the war on terrorism (as measured by the Global Terrorism Index). 99.5% of terrorist attacks occur in countries engaged in wars and/or engaged in abuses such as imprisonment without trial, torture, or lawless killing. The highest rates of terrorism are in "liberated" and "democratized" Iraq and Afghanistan. The terrorist groups responsible for the most terrorism (that is, non-state, politically motivated violence) around the world have grown out of U.S. wars against terrorism. Those wars themselves have left numerous just-retired top U.S. government officials and even a few U.S. government reports describing military violence as counterproductive, as creating more enemies than are killed. Every military action now seems to be launched by a chorus of cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, and senators chanting "There is no military solution. There is no military solution," as they try to solve yet another problem militarily. The violence that the new enemies they create engage in sometimes makes it into the category of terrorism. Then there are the non-terrorism (that is, non-politically motivated) mass-murders that have become an epidemic in a United States that has militarized its police, its entertainment, its economy, and its culture. Here are some facts from a wonderful publication called the Peace Science Digest: "Deployment of troops to another country increases the chance of attacks from terror organizations from that country. Weapons exports to another country increase the chance of attacks from terror organizations from that country. 95% of all suicide terrorist attacks are conducted to encourage foreign occupiers to leave the terrorist's home country." In fact, I'm not aware of a foreign terrorist threat, attempt, or action against the United States, in which a motivation was stated, where that motivation was anything other than opposition to U.S. military imperialism. I think we can safely draw three conclusions.

1) Foreign terrorism in the United States can be virtually eliminated by keeping the U.S. military out of any country that is not the United States.

2) If Canada or some other country wanted the weapons sales that could only come from generating anti-Canadian terrorist networks on a U.S. scale or just wanted more threats of terrorism, it would need to radically increase its bombing, occupying, and base construction around the world.

3) On the model of the war on terrorism, the war on drugs that produces more drugs, and the war on poverty that seems to increase poverty, we would be wise to consider launching a war on sustainable prosperity and happiness.

II. Here's the second big area where I think education is needed: We do not need wars to defend us. Given the number of people, and powerful people, and well-placed people who believe that we do need wars to defend us, and who view the renaming of the War Department as the Defense Department as essentially a question of accuracy, it's worth taking this belief very seriously. In fact, I would like to take it so seriously as to insist that its proponents create effective definitions of defensive and offensive actions, and of defensive and offensive weaponry, and make eliminating the offensive varieties a top priority.

Is massing troops on a border thousands of miles from your own country defensive or offensive? If it's defensive, should we demand that every country start routinely doing it? Is attacking seven countries that have not attacked yours offensive or defensive? Is an airplane designed to evade detection before dropping nuclear bombs or napalm defensive? Is installing missiles near a distant land that views them as offensive defensive if you call it "missile defense"? Is giving airplanes and pilots and trainers to China while blockading and threatening Japan until it attacks defensive or offensive? Is attacking territory where people attempt to secede from a country defensive or offensive? Is dropping white phosphorus on people because their ruler is alleged to have used chemical weapons on his own people offensive or defensive, or simply acceptable because you're killing somebody else's people? Is attacking first before someone else can attack you defensive, offensive, or does it depend on who is doing it - and if it depends on who is doing it, how does one obtain that special privilege?

I don't think you can clearly define every action as defensive or offensive to everyone's satisfaction, much less stop all parties from proclaiming their status as defensive actors. But I do think you can get broad agreement on enough to identify three quarters of U.S. military expenditures, and an enormous percentage of U.S. weapons sales, as having no defensive purpose, and serving rather to endanger than to protect. I would include on that list: U.S. troop presence in 175 countries, U.S. "Special" Forces in 135 countries, U.S./Saudi war in Yemen, U.S. warmaking in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, and Syria, all nuclear weapons, all aircraft carriers, all vehicles not designed for guarding U.S. borders, all State Department and Pentagon personnel employed marketing U.S. weaponry to foreign governments, and all U.S. weapons sales (and gifts) to foreign governments and non-state fighters. So, if someone believes in military defense, we need have no argument. Instead we can work on scaling the U.S. military back in a manner that I guarantee will create a reverse arms race around the world, make us safer, and make total abolition seem dramatically more realistic to everyone than it does now.

Of course we are not taking partial steps toward establishing a defensive Defense Department, because the distinction between "defensive" and "offensive" war is a distinction of rhetoric and justification, not of action. The U.S. prepares for and engages in so-called "defensive" wars in a manner that the earth could never survive, environmentally or militarily, if even just two nations did it, and in a manner indistinguishable from preparation for offensive wars. Thus it becomes important to recognize necessary partial steps away from militarism not as ends in themselves or steps toward better wars, but as steps toward abolition.

The idea that we don't actually need some reasonable level of military defense is boosted by studies like Erica Chenoweth's and Maria Stephan's showing the superiority of nonviolent action to violent. My hope is that the more that people learn the tools of nonviolence and their power, the more they will believe in and choose to make use of that power, which will increase the power of nonviolence in a virtuous cycle. At some point I can imagine people laughing at the idea that some foreign dictatorship is going to invade and occupy a nation ten times its size, full of people dedicated to nonviolent noncooperation with occupiers. Already, I get a laugh on a frequent basis when people email me with the threat that if I do not support war I had better be prepared to start speaking North Korean or what they call "the ISIS language." Apart from the nonexistence of these languages, the idea that anybody is going to get 300 million Americans to learn any foreign language, much less do so at gun point, almost makes me cry. I can't help imagining how much weaker war propaganda might be if all Americans did know multiple languages.

Peace Studies, I think, has the job of replacing just war theory with just peace theory. It shouldn't be that hard a job. Just war criteria come in three types: non-empirical, impossible, and amoral.

The Non-Empirical Criteria: A just war is supposed to have the right intention, a just cause, and proportionality. But these are devices of rhetoric. When your government says bombing a building where ISIS stashes money justifies killing up to 50 people, there's no agreed upon, empirical means to reply No, only 49, or only 6, or up to 4,097 people can be justly killed. There's no kilodometer or mechanical Madeleine Albright that I can plug in and use to measure the number of justifiable murders. Identifying a government's intention is far from simple, and attaching a just cause like ending slavery to a war doesn't make that cause inherent to that war. Slavery can be ended in many ways, while no war has ever been fought for a single reason. Slavery in Birmingham, Alabama, certainly wasn't ended by a war. If Myanmar had more oil we'd be hearing about genocide prevention as a just cause for invading, and no doubt worsening, the crisis.

The Impossible Criteria: A just war is supposed to be a last resort, have a reasonable prospect of success, keep noncombatants immune from attack, respect enemy soldiers as human beings, and treat prisoners of war as noncombatants. None of these things is even possible. To call something a "last resort" is in reality merely to claim it is the best idea you have, not the only idea you have. There are always other ideas that anyone can think of. Every time we urgently need to bomb Iran or we're all going to die, and we don't, and we don't, the urgency of the next demand to bomb Iran loses a bit of its shine and the infinite options of other things to do become a little easier to see. If war really were the only idea you had, you wouldn't be debating ethics, you'd be running for Congress.

What about respecting a person while trying to kill her or him? There are lots of ways to respect a person, but none of them can exist simultaneously with trying to kill that person. In fact, I would rank right at the bottom of people who respect me those who were trying to kill me. Remember that just war theory began with people who believed killing someone was doing them a favor. Noncombatants are the majority of casualties in modern wars, so they cannot be kept safe, but they are not locked in cages, so prisoners cannot be treated like noncombatants while imprisoned.

The Amoral Criteria: Just wars are supposed to be publicly declared and waged by legitimate and competent authorities. These are not moral concerns. Even in a world where we had legitimate and competent authorities, they wouldn't make a war any more or less just. Does anyone really picture a family in Yemen hiding from a constantly buzzing drone and expressing gratitude that the drone has been sent to them by a competent authority? Are there any documented cases of such attitudes?

But the biggest reason that no war can ever be just is not that no war can ever meet all the criteria of just war theory, but rather that war is not just an incident, it is an institution.

III. This is the third lesson that I think needs to be taught widely. War carries a lot of baggage, and it all has to be paid for. Some people who believe that some wars might be good can't identify any of them beyond wars they wish had happened that didn't, most prominently in Rwanda. Others can identify a handful of recent wars they think are justifiable. But most people in the United States are willing to concede that most wars have not been justified, often including every war of the past three-quarters of a century. Yet, most such people (generally oblivious to a half dozen wars currently underway, and having formed no conclusions about their justness) insist that there might be a necessary war any minute, or as soon as a president from their preferred party is in the White House, and that World War II, the U.S. Civil War, and the American Revolution were justified. I've written at great length and talked myself out of breath on why those examples do not hold up, but let's just concede for the sake of argument that they do. Can a choice from a radically different era justify war the institution now, this year and next year and the year after that?

If a candidate for the title of just war were to materialize next week, here's what it would have to do to be just. First, it would have to meet enough criteria to somehow count as a morally defensible action in itself. Second, it would have to outweigh all the damage done by, let's say, 72 years of unjust wars that would not have occurred but for the maintenance of the institution of war. Third, it would have to do so much good as to outweigh 72 years of spending on a scale that has killed many more people than have 72 years of wars. The U.S. government spends about $1 trillion on war and war preparations each year, while $30 billion per year could end starvation, and $11 billion could end the lack of clean drinking water globally. Fourth, this miraculously just war would have to outweigh 72 years worth of environmental damage by the leading destroyer of the earth and its climate. (The fact that the U.S. military is that top environmental destroyer also needs to be made much better known and understood.) Fifth, for a war to actually measure up as just it would have to outweigh the damage that war does to the rule of law. War is illegal under the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and all current wars are also illegal under the U.N. Charter. Numerous atrocities within the wars are also illegal. Fraud committed to start wars is illegal. And of course we lose more legal rights as citizens, defendants, and activists through the course of each war.

A rather disgusting last-ditch effort to put something on the positive side of the balance for the institution of war is the claim that war is economically beneficial, at least to those nations waging wars far from home. The University of Massachusetts - Amherst studies showing that other spending and even tax cuts for working people are economically preferable to war have been invaluable. So have various studies informing us of how much people know about levels of military spending (very little) and what they want to do once informed, for example, of what the U.S. federal budget looks like (they want to move a great deal out of the military).

There is no significant upside to war. Thrill seekers can find them in nonviolent action. Courage can be exercised against a growing onslaught of fires and hurricanes - though the popularity of shooting guns at hurricanes is not what I have in mind, and is, I think, a symptom of war madness. Young people helped to grow up and mature by being screamed at and disciplined in the military would in most cases have been better off with loving and dedicated parents or friends. War is not needed. We can leave it to the ants, who are far better at it. We're better off without it. We can actually stop denouncing something as "not a necessary war." Nobody accuses anyone of a non-necessary rape or a kitten-torturing of choice or an illegal kidnapping. No qualifiers are needed for these evils, or for the greatest evil of all: war.

But what do we replace war with? I have three answers, progressively less flippant.

1) What do we replace murder or rape or arson or looting with? Nothing. We just stop committing those crimes. What should the U.S. government have done instead of attacking Afghanistan? Not attacked Afghanistan.

2) We replace war with talking. Jimmy Carter who has successfully negotiated with North Korea suggests negotiating with North Korea. Mikhail Gorbachev who has successfully negotiated with Ronald Reagan suggests that Trump and Putin give it a try. The government of Afghanistan prior to the past 16 years of war was open to discussing the handover of Osama bin Laden to a third nation to be tried on any charges against him.

3) We replace the institution of war with new and improved institutions of peace that advance cooperation, aid, diplomacy, democracy, and the rule of law. On behalf of World Beyond War, I recently submitted an entry in a competition created by a Hungarian-Swedish billionaire for a design of a better system of world government. Once we've failed to win a million dollars (and save the world) we'll publish our proposal. But we have already published a book called A Global Security System that outlines a future without war systems and war economies. In all such planning we can draw on the work of Peace Studies informing us of what sorts of sanctions have been helpful and hurtful, and what forms of governments best resist war. Instead of attacking Afghanistan, the U.S. government could have presented evidence against those it accused and sought their extradition, offered aid to Afghanistan, built schools in Afghanistan - as Shirin Ebadi proposed - each named for a victim of 9/11, withdrawn its troops from the Middle East and Asia, joined the International Criminal Court, moved to eliminate the veto power at the United Nations, impeached George W. Bush, opened negotiations for a global nuclear weapons ban, abolished the CIA, returned the stolen land at Guantanamo to the nation of Cuba and ended its blockade, increased green energy rather than war spending by a half-trillion dollars a year, and pledged never ever to create any agencies with the word "Homeland" in their names.

Treating war as an institution makes it seem larger and more daunting, but it also means that it is possible to create the conditions in which wars do not happen. That's far more difficult with individual crimes. Tomorrow a major dispute may arise between Costa Rica and Iceland, but they are almost certain to resolve it short of war, principally because they'd have to create militaries before attacking each other.

IV. The fourth big area where I think Peace Studies can help end war is through the advancement of Peace History, Peace Journalism, and Peace Training in Resistance to Propaganda. I realize that we face hurdles here other than lack of accurate and well-conceived information. I remember when believers in weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were shown evidence to the contrary and consequently believed in the weapons all the more strongly. And, by the way, you generally do not, of course, have to persuade people who believe their televisions that their facts are wrong. You can choose to start a very different conversation, such as asking whether all nations that possess weapons of mass destruction should be utterly destroyed, or asking whether the CIA was all wrong when it suggested that the best way to get Iraq to use its weapons would be to attack Iraq. I also remember when the U.S. public powerfully opposed attacking Syria in 2013 only to completely lose its mind the next year when it saw or heard about horribly frightening ISIS videos. Fear is not always conquerable by means of facts or context - such as the fact that toddlers with guns are a bigger danger in the United States than ISIS is. But, among many other things, facts do matter, useful analysis does matter, and changing the conversation to one not framed by sound bytes on subservient corporate advertising-based media matters.

I'm not sure that, in general, even without an unfair draft, one's level of formal education makes one more likely to oppose militarism. But it does seem to be the case that in general the more one knows about a country, a situation, and the range of options the more one favors peace. Various studies have found people's ability to accurately locate a country on a globe to be inversely proportional to their desire to see the U.S. government bomb that country. Ordinary folks and even members of Congress have, when prompted, expressed their belief in the need to bomb various countries with funny names that do not actually exist. Without a doubt people would not hold those relatively harmless beliefs if they knew the names of the world's nations. I'd also be willing to bet, although I have no evidence for it, that an American's willingness to declare the United States the "greatest nation on earth" is inversely proportional to the amount of time he or she has spent outside of the United States or its military bases. And then there's a study I read about in Peace Science Digest that found that people are much more willing to oppose a war if told there are alternatives, but that if neither told that there are nor that there are not alternatives then they are just as supportive of a war as if they had been told there are no alternatives. The researchers concluded that, contrary to logic and past experience, many people simply assume that the U.S. government has already exhausted all alternatives before launching any war. This, it seems to me, can be countered in three ways. First, by creating the understanding that there are ALWAYS alternatives. Second, by pointing out specific current alternatives. And third, by reviewing a little peace history - taking peace history to include antiwar history.

I don't think most text books in U.S. schools point out the following pattern:

Spain wanted the matter of the Maine to go to international arbitration, but the U.S. preferred war.
Mexico was willing to negotiate the sale of its northern half without war.
Peace activists urged the British and Americans to negotiate to transport the Jews out of Germany, but Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden replied that it would be too much bother when they needed to focus on the war.
The Soviet Union proposed peace negotiations before the Korean War.
The United States rejected peace proposals for Vietnam from the Vietnamese, the Soviets, and the French, including through Richard Nixon secretly sabotaging a peace agreement prior to his first election.
Prior to the First Gulf War, the Iraqi government was willing to negotiate withdrawal from Kuwait, as the King of Jordan, the Pope, the President of France, the President of the Soviet Union, and many others urged a peaceful settlement.
Prior to Shock and Awe, the U.S. president had been concocting cockamamie schemes to get a war started; the Iraqi government had approached the CIA's Vincent Cannistrato to offer to let U.S. troops search the entire country; the Iraqi government had offered to hold internationally monitored elections within two years; the Iraqi government had offered Bush official Richard Perle to open the whole country to inspections, to turn over a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, to help fight terrorism, and to favor U.S. oil companies; and the Iraqi president had offered, in the account that the president of Spain was given by the U.S. president, to simply leave Iraq if he could keep $1 billion. In March 2011 the African Union had a plan for peace in Libya but was prevented by NATO, through the creation of a "no fly zone" and the initiation of bombing, to travel to Libya to discuss it. In April, the African Union was able to discuss its plan with Ghadafi, and he expressed his agreement. The U.S. preferred war.
The U.S. government has spent years sabotaging UN attempts at peace in Syria, and dismissed out of hand a Russian peace proposal for Syria in 2012.

Peace Studies needs to include lessons in lie detection, in recognition of common propaganda techniques, and in smart reading of news.

Raise your hand: who can tell me the most successful step yet taken to contain Iran's nuclear weapons program?

The U.S.-Iran nuclear deal? No. The correct answer is the 2005 decree against nuclear weapons by Iran's religious leader, or in other words the fact that Iran did not in 2015 have any nuclear weapons program, nor did it in 2007 according to the U.S. "National Intelligence Estimate." Nor did it ever, according to the reporting of Gareth Porter and others. Of course a deal is better than a war, but believing all the rhetoric of the deal's supporters can be counterproductive, and assuming that one corrupt political party must be 100% right if the other corrupt political party is wrong guarantees disaster.

We need to be trained in resisting demonization of groups of people and identification of groups of people with single demonized individuals. We need practice at distinguishing people from warmongering officials, abroad and at home. We need to resist identifying ourselves with a military. Even a peace activist who has protested a war and gone to jail to try to stop it will blurt out "We just dropped bombs." No, we didn't. The U.S. military did. Of course non-tax-resisters will immediately proclaim their responsibility to talk about the Pentagon in the first person because they pay taxes or simply because they live in the United States. But they pay local taxes and refer to their local government as their local government, not as "we." They pay state taxes and refer to their state government as the government of their state. And when the federal government bails out a bank or eliminates an estate tax or denies people health care it's rarely in the first person. Nobody says "We just eliminated my health coverage." The first person is used for what a government does to other people. The first person accompanies the military and the flag that must be worshiped, which is not a local, state, or earth flag, or a flag of peace.

Studies find that many people in the United States value U.S. lives far more highly than they value the other 96% of humanity. We need to learn to resist the immorality of that, to do what is called humanizing to most of humanity, and to learn who it is that suffers in what we call wars but could as accurately call one-sided slaughters. Ralph Peters wrote in the New York Post that it is worth killing a million North Koreans to save 1,000 U.S. lives.

We have to learn to be wise judges of claims that wars can be humanitarian, beneficial, philanthropic. There has yet to be a humanitarian war that benefitted humanity. Claims that opportunities for such successes have been missed or are still ahead of us should be treated with the skepticism they deserve.

We have to learn to counter the propaganda of troopism and the silly but dangerous notion that opposing a war is the equivalent of supporting the other side of a war. I want to read here a few paragraphs from my book War Is A Lie:

"The chairman of the house appropriations committee from 2007 through 2010 was David Obey (D-WI). When the mother of a soldier being sent to Iraq for the third time and being denied needed medical care asked him to stop funding the war in 2007 with a 'supplemental' spending bill, Congressman Obey screamed at her (and a Youtube video of him screaming made the news for 15 minutes), saying among other things: 'We're trying to use the supplemental to end the war, but you can't end the war by going against the supplemental. It's time these idiot liberals understand that. There's a big difference between funding the troops and ending the war. I'm not gonna deny body armor. I'm not gonna deny funding for veterans' hospitals, defense hospitals, so you can help people with medical problems, that's what you're gonna do if you're going against the bill.' Congress had funded the war on Iraq for years without providing troops with adequate body armor. But funding for body armor was now in a bill to prolong the war. And funding for veterans' care, which could have been provided in a separate bill, was packaged into this one. Why? Precisely so that people like Obey could more easily claim that the war funding was for the benefit of the troops. Of course it's still a transparent reversal of the facts to say that you can't end the war by ceasing to fund it. And if the troops came home, they wouldn't need body armor, [at least outside of Las Vegas and Orlando and wherever's next]. But Obey had completely internalized the crazy propaganda of war promotion. He seemed to actually believe that the only way to end a war was to pass a bill to fund it but to include in the bill some minor and rhetorical antiwar gestures. On July 27, 2010, having failed for another three-and-a-half years to end the wars by funding them, Obey brought to the House floor a bill to fund an escalation of the war on Afghanistan, specifically to send 30,000 more troops plus corresponding contractors into that hell. Obey announced that his conscience was telling him to vote no on the bill because it was a bill that would just help recruit people who want to attack Americans. On the other hand, Obey said, it was his duty as committee chair (apparently a higher duty than the one to his conscience) to bring the bill to the floor. Even though it would encourage attacks on Americans? Isn't that treason? Obey proceeded to speak against the bill he was bringing to the floor. Knowing it would safely pass, he voted against it. One could imagine, with a few more years of awakening, David Obey reaching the point of actually trying to stop funding a war he 'opposes,' except that Obey had already announced his plan to retire at the end of 2010. He ended his career in Congress on that high note of hypocrisy because war propaganda, most of it about troops, has persuaded legislators that they can be 'critics' and 'opponents' of a war while funding it."

*Read more books than articles.
*Avoid allowing Facebook or Google to decide what's news for you.
*Diversify your sources of news, and read news about your country that comes from outside your country.
*Consider what smart people you trust believe.
*Read websites that collect articles on topics that interest you.
*Don't read about a video, watch the video; and don't read about a statement or report or tweet, read the statement or report or tweet.
*Read only what you believe are important topics, whether or not they are the big and popular topics.
*Question everything, especially what is assumed without being asserted.
*Believe what is best documented, not what is most in the middle of a range of claims.
*Be willing to remain in doubt, and willing to believe horrible things when proven.

There is a reason that most countries polled in December 2013 by Gallup called the United States the greatest threat to peace in the world, and why Pew found that viewpoint increased in 2017. But it is a reason that eludes that strain of U.S. academia that first defines war as something that nations and groups other than the United States do, and then concludes that war has nearly vanished from the earth.

Since World War II, during a supposed golden age of peace, the United States military has killed or helped kill some 20 million people, overthrown at least 36 governments, interfered in at least 82 foreign elections, attempted to assassinate over 50 foreign leaders, and dropped bombs on people in over 30 countries. The U.S. government provides military aid to 73% of the world's dictatorships. Wars often have U.S. weapons on both sides.

In conjunction with learning to outgrow nationalism, we need to outgrow what I sometimes call Pinkerism, though it's something found in Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, Daniel Goldhagen, Ian Morris, and many, many others.

To claim that war is vanishing is one point. To erase the warmaking of what Dr. King called the greatest purveyor of violence on earth, the U.S. government, is another.

That war is vanishing is dubious, and certainly exaggerated. Looking at pre-historic tribes only back to 14,000 BCE, as Pinker does, misses most of human existence, puts a controversial interpretation on what early tribes did, and spins the statistics by measuring casualties in relation to those in the immediate area while measuring recent war deaths against the larger population of distant imperial countries, and while excluding delayed deaths from toxic poisoning, injuries, poverty, and suicides - and, of course, excluding deaths from famines and disease epidemics created by wars, and obviously not considering the lives that could have been saved with the funding that is wasted on wars.

Pretending that the United States is not the leading war-maker on earth, that war or genocide is something that arises elsewhere and must be corrected by non-war U.S. militarism is strictly false. Wars, in Pinker's view, originate in poor and Muslim nations. Pinker indicates no awareness that wealthy nations fund and arm dictators in poor countries, that these countries no more manufacture weapons than the Chinese grew all their own opium or Native Americans made all their own alcohol.

Pinker blames the high death rate in what the Vietnamese call the American War on the willingness of the Vietnamese to die in large numbers rather than surrender, as he thinks they should have. Somehow the Soviets' far-greater willingness to die against the Nazis doesn't get mentioned.

The U.S. war on Iraq ended, in Pinker's view, when President George W. Bush declared "mission accomplished," since which point it has been a civil war, and therefore the causes of that civil war can be analyzed in terms of the shortcomings of Iraqi society. "[I]t is so hard," Pinker complains, "to impose liberal democracy on countries in the developing world that have not outgrown their superstitions, warlords, and feuding tribes." Indeed it may be, but where is the evidence that the United States government has been attempting it? Or the evidence that the United States has such democracy itself? Or that the United States has the right to impose its desires on another nation?

After all the fancy footwork calculating our path to peace, we look up and see a war kill 5% of Iraq's population just in the years after March 2003, or perhaps 9% counting previous war and sanctions, or at least 10% between 1990 and today. And far more deadly U.S.-supported wars in terms of absolute numbers in places like the Congo. And war has been normalized. Most people can't name them all, much less tell you why they should be continued.

Peace Studies should get war noticed. The first step, addicts say, is recognizing that you have a problem. I think the value of peace studies is limitless in reaching young people, activists, and the general public, and in showing activists how to reach the general public - also in connecting young people with activists. It's usually in speaking to students or in a debate that I get any chance to speak to people not self-selected to already agree with me.

We really need to create and fund a career path that leads peace studies students into careers in peace activism.

We really need peace activism to better connect with peace studies, and professors to have their names on every statement and their voices at every rally.

World Beyond War is working to organize a nonviolent movement to abolish war and will eagerly accept any input from anyone interested in helping.

Let's try one more time, just for fun: Please raise your hand if you believe war is never justified.

Kurdistan President Massoud Barzani has written a letter to the parliament of Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government announcing that he will not run for president again and will go out of office on November 1 as his much-extended term of office ends.

Barzani had taken heart from the collapse of the Iraqi military in 2014, when it ran away from the ISIL advance in Mosul. For three years his Kurdistan Regional Government, formed from three provinces of Iraq, did not even have a border with territory controlled by Baghdad. Kurdistan's Peshmerga paramilitary occupied the oil-rich province of Kirkuk, even though its status was supposed to be decided by referendum according to the Iraqi constitution. His argument that he therefore kept Kirkuk and its petroleum riches out of the hands of ISIL has some merit. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Jawad Kadhim Al-Abadi wanted it back now that the crisis was passing. Barzani thought Baghdad paper tiger, and so in September he pushed through a referendum on Kurdistan independence, against the advice of all his senior advisers and of the United States. If asked, Iraqi Kurds will say they want independence, and that is how they voted.

It turns out that President Barack Obama's plan to rebuild the Iraqi army was unexpectedly wildly successful. Not only did the army defeat ISIL in city after city, taking Mosul and Hawija, but it gained the experience, strategic acumen and American weaponry to pose a serious threat to the Kurdistan Peshmerga, who had apparently gotten soft in the past half decade. It is also true that the Iraqi Army was supported by Shiite militias, some of them trained by Iran.

Abadi pressed the issue by demanding the return of Kurdistan to Baghdad's control, and then he sent in troops to make that happen. Kirkuk was largely guarded by the Peshmerga from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, based in Sulaymaniya, which is under the control of the Talabani family, rivals of the Barzanis. The PUK and its military declined for the most part to fight the Iraqi army, and so the latter was able to wrest Kirkuk from Iraq over the course of a couple of days. The allegation that this move against Kurdistan was orchestrated by Iran seems to me silly. Baghdad wanted Kirkuk back. Iran gave some help to the Shiite militias, but this campaign was Abadi's baby.

People in Kurdistan blamed Barzani for upsetting the apple cart with his referendum. Kurdistan has de facto autonomy, and few could understand why Barzani took the risk of destabilizing it by demanding de jure independence. The province is landlocked and depends on Turkey for the pipeline through which it exports oil. It is vulnerable to Iraqi government attack.

You have to wonder if Barzani thought Trump would support him. If so, he was badly disappointed. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson sided with Baghdad on the Kirkuk issue.

Since it is unclear when new presidential elections can be held, Barzani does not have an obvious successor. He appears to be urging that his presidential powers be distributed among the three branches of government-the judiciary, the legislature, and the now leaderless bureaucracy.

With the rise of a new generation of the Talabanis, his traditional rivals and partners, Barzani has serious and effective critics. And he was revealed not to control the Peshmerga. Abadi so humiliated him that he had to step down.

Dear Stabschef Kelly,

Congratulations, you have just been awarded the "Vidkun Quisling Award!" Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, George Stephanopoulos, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, Prescott Bush, Sam Bush, Fredo Bush, Kate Bush, Kyle Busch, Anheuser Busch, Vidkun Quisling, and last year's winner Volksjudge John (the enforcer) Roberts.

Without your lock step calling for the repeal of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, your defense of Christopher Columbus and southern slave holders, Yemen, Syria, Iran and those many other profitable oil wars to come would have been impossible! With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Republican Whores" you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account!

Along with this award you will be given the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds presented by our glorious Fuhrer, Herr Trump at a gala celebration at "der Fuhrer Bunker," formally the "White House," on 11-25-2017. We salute you Herr Kelly, Sieg Heil!

Signed by,
Vice Fuhrer Pence