“Show me your company, and I’ll tell you who you are,” my grandmother would often say with a light Irish lilt but unmistakable seriousness, an admonition about taking care in choosing what company you keep.

On Thursday, I could sense her smiling down through the snow as I stood pinned to the White House fence with Daniel Ellsberg, Chris Hedges, Margaret Flowers, Medea Benjamin, Coleen Rowley, Mike Ferner, Jodie Evans, and over 125 others risking arrest in an attempt to highlight the horrors of war.

The witness was sponsored by Veterans for Peace, a group comprised of many former soldiers who have “been there, done that” regarding war, distinguishing them from President Barack Obama who, like his predecessor, hasn’t a clue what war is really about. (Sorry, Mr. President, donning a bomber jacket and making empty promises to the troops in the middle of an Afghan night does not qualify.)

The simple but significant gift of presence was being offered outside the White House. As I hung on the fence, I recalled what I knew of the results of war.

Into view came some of my closest childhood friends — like Bob, whose father was killed in WWII when Bob was in kindergarten. My uncle Larry, an Army chaplain, killed in a plane crash.

Other friends like Mike and Dan, whose big brothers were killed in Korea. So many of my classmates from Infantry Officers Orientation at Ft. Benning killed in the Big Muddy called Vietnam.

My college classmate with whom I studied Russian, Ed Krukowski, 1Lt, USAF, one of the very first casualties of Vietnam, killed, leaving behind a wife and three small children. Other friends, too numerous to mention, killed in that misbegotten war.

More recently, Casey Sheehan and 4,429 other U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, and the 491 U.S. troops killed so far this year in Afghanistan (bringing that total to 1,438). And their mothers. And the mothers of all those others who have died in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. Mothers don’t get to decide; only to mourn.

A pure snow showered down as if to say blessed are the peacemakers. Tears kept my eyes hydrated against the cold.

The hat my youngest daughter knit for me three years ago when I had no hair gave me an additional sense of being showered with love and affirmation. There was a palpable sense of rightness in our witness to the witless ways of the White House behind the fence.

I thought to myself, this White House is a far cry from the “Camelot” administration of John F. Kennedy, who brought me, and so many others to Washington almost a half-century ago. And yet, I could not resist borrowing a song from the play, Camelot: “I wonder what the king is doing tonight. What merriment is the king pursuing tonight…”

Perhaps strutting before a mirror in his leather bomber jacket, practicing rhetorical flourishes for the troops, like, “You are making our country safer.” The opposite, of course, is true, and if President Obama does not know that, he is not as smart as people think he is.

More accurately, the troops are making Obama’s political position safer, protecting him from accusations of “softness” on Afghanistan, just as a surge of troops into Iraq postponed the inevitable, sparing George W. Bush from the personal ignominy of presiding over a more obvious American defeat in Iraq.

Both presidents were willing to sacrifice those troops on the altar of political expediency, knowing full well that it is not American freedom that “the insurgents” hate, but rather U.S. government policies, which leave so many oppressed, or dead.

Despite our (Veterans for Peace) repeated requests over many months, Obama has refused to meet with us. On Wednesday, though, he carved out five hours to sit down with many of the fat cat executives who are profiteering from war.

It seems the President was worried that he had hurt the fat cats’ feelings – and opened himself to criticism as being “anti-business” – with some earlier remarks about their obscenely inflated pay.

Before our witness on Thursday, we read in the Washington Post that Obama told the 20 chief executives, “I want to dispel any notion we want to inhibit your success,” and solicited ideas from them “on a host of issues.” By way of contrast, the President has shown zero interest in soliciting ideas from the likes of us.

‘The Big Fool Said to Push On’

In another serendipitous coincidence, as we were witnessing against the March of Folly in Afghanistan, the President was completing his “review” of the war and sealing the doom of countless more soldiers and civilians (and, in my view, his own political doom) by re-enacting the Shakespearean tragedy of Lyndon the First.

Afraid to get crossways with the military brass, who have made it embarrassingly clear that they see no backbone under that bomber jacket, Obama has just sped past another exit ramp out of Afghanistan by letting the policy review promised for this month become a charade.

Hewing to the script of Lyndon the First, Barack Obama has chosen to shun the considered views of U.S. intelligence agencies, which, to their credit, show in no uncertain terms the stupidity of keeping U.S. troops neck-deep in this latest Big Muddy in Afghanistan — to borrow from Pete Seeger’s song from the Vietnam era.

There is one reality upon which there is virtually complete consensus as highlighted by the U.S. intelligence agencies: The U.S. and NATO will not be able to “prevail” in Afghanistan if Pakistan does not stop supporting the Taliban. Are we clear on that? That’s what the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan says.

A companion NIE on Pakistan says there is not a snowball’s chance in hell that the Pakistani Army and security services will somehow “change their strategic vision” regarding keeping the Taliban in play for the time when the United States and its NATO allies finally leave Afghanistan and when Pakistan will want to reassert its influence there.

Should it be too hard to put the two NIEs together and reach the appropriate conclusions for policy?

It is difficult to believe that – after going from knee-deep to waist-deep in the Big Muddy by his early 2009 decision to insert 21,000 troops into Afghanistan, and then from waist-deep to neck-deep by deciding a year ago to send in 30,000 more — Obama would say to “push on.”

The answer lies in the kind of “foolish consistency” Emerson termed the “hobgoblin of little minds.” Out of crass political considerations, Obama continues to evidence a spineless persistence behind this fool’s errand. He seems driven by fear of offending other important Washington constituencies, such as the neoconservative opinion-makers, and having to face the wrath of the be-medaled and be-ribboned Gen. David Petraeus. This is pitiable enough — but a lot of people are getting killed or maimed for life.

‘When will we ever learn?’ To answer this other Vietnam-era song, well, we have learned — many of us the hard way. We need to tell the big fool not to be so afraid of neocon columnists and the festooned left breast of the sainted Petraeus — you know, the ten rows of medals and merit badges that made him so lopsided he crashed down on the witness table and was given a time-out by the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Outside the White House on Thursday, we found ourselves singing “We Shall Overcome” with confidence. And what we learned later of other witnessing conducted that same day provided still more affirmation, grit, and determination.

For example, 75 witnesses braved freezing temperatures at the Times Square recruiting station in New York to express solidarity with our demonstration in Washington.

There in Times Square stood not only veterans, but also grandmothers from the Granny Peace Brigade, the Raging Grannies, and Grandmothers Against the War. Two of the grandmothers were in their 90s, but stood for more than an hour in the cold. The Catholic Worker, War Resister League and other anti-war groups were also represented.

What? You didn’t hear about any of this, including the arrest of 135 veterans and other anti-war activists in front of the White House? Need I remind you of the Fawning Corporate Media and how its practitioners have always downplayed or ignored protests, large or small, against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Dave Lindorff summed the situation up.

A Rich Tradition

Civil Disobedience was Henry David Thoreau’s response to his 1846 imprisonment for refusing to pay a poll tax that violated his conscience. Thoreau was protesting an earlier war of aggression, the U.S. attack on Mexico.

In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau asked:

“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.

“It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

Imprisonment was Thoreau’s first direct experience with state power and, in typical fashion, he analyzed it:

“The State never intentionally confronts a man’s sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”

Prior to his arrest, Thoreau had lived a quiet, solitary life at Walden, an isolated pond in the woods about a mile and a half from Concord. He returned to Walden to mull over two questions: (1) Why do some men obey laws without asking if the laws are just or unjust; and, (2) why do others obey laws they think are wrong?

More recent American prophets have thrown their own light on the crises of our time while confronting the questions posed by Thoreau.

Amid the carnage of Vietnam, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ, posed a challenge to those who hoped for peace without sacrifice, those who would say, “Let us have peace but let us loose nothing. Let our lives stand intact; let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.”

Berrigan saw no such easy option. “There is no peace,” he said, “because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war — at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison.”

So, if the making of peace today means prison, that’s where we need to be. It is time to accept our responsibility to do ALL we can to stop the violence of wars waged in our name. Now it’s our turn to ponder those questions.
(c) 2010 Ray McGovern served as a CIA analyst for 27 years -- from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. During the early 1980s, he was one of the writers/editors of the President's Daily Brief and briefed it one-on-one to the president's most senior advisers. He also chaired National Intelligence Estimates. In January 2003, he and four former colleagues founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.

THE EXPRESSION “Ship of Fools” was used by a Swiss theologian 515 years ago as the title of a book harshly criticizing the Catholic church of his day. Its licentiousness, he foresaw, would lead to disaster. And indeed, shortly afterwards a monk named Martin Luther split the church and set in motion the great Reformation.

I used this phrase in the 70s to define the era between the two wars – the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, six years spent by Israel in a state of foolish euphoria. “We never had it so good.”

The present era deserves the title “Ship of Fools 2.”

THE DEFINING slogan of “Ship of Fools 1” was coined by Moshe Dayan, who served as first officer on its bridge, at the right hand of the captain, Golda Meir.

Dayan, then the idol of Israel and an international sex-symbol, declared: “If I have to choose between Sharm al-Sheikh without peace or peace without Sharm al-Sheikh, I choose Sharm al-Sheikh.”

In retrospect, that sounds like sheer madness. Who, today, remembers Ophira, as we called Sharm at the time? Only the Israelis who go there to idle on hammocks in the sun, pampered by the staff of Egyptian hotels. And, of course, the families of the soldiers who died on Yom Kippur.

“Ship of Fools 1” set sail for its fateful voyage on the morrow of the Six- day War, when the new Hebrew Empire extended from the summit of Mount Hermon to the shining sea of Ras Muhammad, south of Sharm. The astounding six-day victory of the Israeli army over three Arab armies, after weeks of nerve-wracking anxiety, looked like a miracle. A deluge of victory songs, victory albums and victory speeches flooded the country. The intoxication swept all sectors of the public, from the top leaders to the last (Jewish) citizen. It addled the brains, perverted logic and precluded any reasonable discussion.

The intoxication did not spare academic luminaries or army generals. Ariel Sharon declared that his troops could reach Tripoli, the Libyan capital, within a week. This seemed almost self-evident.

For those who were not here, or were too young to remember: In the country there was an atmosphere of supreme self-confidence, which led to complete carelessness. “Everything will be OK.” The economy was flourishing. The first settlements were taking root. There was no pressure on Israel to return the territories it had just conquered (“Liberated Territory Will Not Be Returned”). The Arab League met in Khartoum and did Israel an immense favor by declaring the Three No’s – No peace with Israel, No recognition of Israel, No negotiations with Israel. Plucky little Israel attracted the sympathy of the world. It was good to be an Israeli then and to flash your Israeli passport at any border crossing.

This week, Aluf Ben of Haaretz drew our attention to a recording just released by the President Nixon Library. The president used to have all his conversations secretly taped, and much of this material has now been released. This includes a recording of his meeting with Golda Meir in the first half of 1973 – a few months before the Yom Kippur War.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger revealed to Golda that the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, was ready to make peace with Israel in return for Sinai. Golda treated the proposal with disdain and told Nixon that the Egyptians had no chance against Israel – and therefore would not dare to attack.

(I found that particularly striking, because at the same time I told the Knesset that the Egyptians would start a war even if they had no chance of winning. I had reached this conclusion after meeting a number of important Egyptians, who thoroughly convinced me that Egypt just could not tolerate the status quo in which the Israeli occupation of a part of their land was frozen. They told me that Egypt was ready to pay a heavy price just to unfreeze the situation and to get things moving.)

Golda did not understand that. She was a tough but primitive woman, insensitive to the feelings of others, and did not dream of returning territory for peace. About the Palestinians she did not waste much thought (“There is no such thing as a Palestinian people!”) Moshe Dayan laid the foundations for an eternal occupation. In the middle of 1973 the two looked around them and could detect no cloud – not event the tiniest one – on the horizon.

Aluf Ben sees similarities between the Golda-Nixon meeting and the Netanyahu-Obama talks. I agree.

TODAY WE are in a very similar situation. Here we are sailing again on a Ship of Fools, jolly and light-hearted.

We never had it so good. Out economic situation is splendid. So is our security situation. So is our political situation.

The world-wide economic crisis has not touched us. In several areas, our exports are booming. Just now we were told that our commerce with India is about to expand hugely, and with China, too, we are doing nicely. The polls show that most Israelis are satisfied with their personal economic situation and expect an even rosier future. That’s far from what US and European citizens are feeling. A person whose economic situation is good does not crave change and does not make a revolution.

As far as security is concerned, our situation has never been better, The suicide attacks have ceased altogether. The Palestinian security services are cooperating to prevent attacks on us. The Northern border is almost quiet. The occasional incidents on the Gaza border are not worrisome. We are working hard to arouse the world against the dangers of an Iranian nuclear bomb, but Israelis are not really worried. They know that even if the Iranians got a bomb, they would not dare use it, because Israel can wipe all Iranian cities and their beautiful historical monuments from the face of the earth.

On the political level, the sky is the limit for our achievements. In several rounds we have thrown Barack Obama on the boards. The frantic scurrying around of Hillary Clinton and George Mitchel is simply pathetic. The settlement construction, which has not really stopped for a moment, is gathering even more momentum, with the help of thousands of Palestinian workers who have no other means of subsistence.

The Israeli government rules Washington DC more firmly than ever. The new Congress is even more loyal to Israel than the old one, if that is possible. Just now, the outgoing House unanimously passed a resolution objecting to the declaration of Palestinian statehood. After his resounding defeat in the mid-term elections, Obama must start to think about the presidential election in two years time. It’s difficult to imagine that in these two years he would dare to provoke the mighty Israel lobby, which can now rely not only on the Jewish organizations and the millions of evangelical Christians, but also on the people of the Tea Party (many of whom are anti-Semites like Nixon, as revealed in the tapes: he despised the Jews and admired the Israelis.)

Obama can say what he wants: in a real test he will have to veto any Security Council resolution which is distasteful to the Israeli government. He will have no choice. And he will also supply Israel with all the airplanes it desires – and more.

THOSE WHO had illusions about Netanyahu – Israelis and others – seem to have sobered up by now. He does not want peace, nor a “peace process”, nor any movement at all towards peace.

For Netanyahu, peace is a four-letter word (as it indeed is in Hebrew). And not only because he has an extreme right-wing coalition, full of racists and ultra-nationalists, who are happy to play host to fascists from all over the world. And not only from fear of the settlers, whose political clout is growing by the day. But also because Netanyahu himself does not want to enter the history books as the man who gave up parts of the Jewish homeland and turned them over to the Arabs.

With all the differences, there are a lot of similarities between Netanyahu and Golda Meir. True, there is no second Moshe Dayan – Ehud Barak looks like a piece of wood compared to his one-eyed predecessor with his overflowing charisma. Avigdor Lieberman would be only too happy to fill the vacuum - if he could.

Everything is alright, nothing to worry about. This time, the euphoria is not producing a harvest of victory albums and songs of glory, but a deluge of racist laws that apartheid South Africa would have been jealous of, and declarations of rabbis who boast of conserving our “racial purity” (and we need not mention the place where that notion came from).

This euphoria leads to acts whose sole aim – so it seems – is to provoke and humiliate. An outstanding example: this week it became known that Israel is about to enlarge the “Seven Arches” hotel on the top of the Mount of Olives in East Jerusalem – a hotel that belongs to the Jordanian royal family and was expropriated by the Custodian of Enemy Property. That is like the act of a child smashing a precious vase on the ground and shouting: “Ha-ha-ha, what can you do to me?”

“SHIP OF FOOLS 1” went down on Yom Kippur. 2600 young Israelis, the flower of a generation, drowned with it. The “incapable” Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal, and the glorious Bar-Lev Line, the pride of the Israeli army, collapsed. One can pinpoint the exact minute when the euphoria died: on live TV we saw dozens of red-eyed Israeli soldiers crouching on the ground, frightened and humiliated, with moustachioed Syrian soldiers glowering over them. End of the Israeli superman mystique.

“Ship of Fools 2” will also founder. We cannot foresee how. Will it be a war that will lay waste to our towns and villages? Will it be an Islamic revolution in the Arab countries? Will world politics change dramatically?

There is one important difference between Ship 1 and Ship 2: then the whole world loved us, now many around the world detest us. The manifesto of the 26 leading European elder statesmen, who demand that their successors change the European policy towards Israel, is a very bad omen. When the inevitable crisis arrives, world public opinion will no longer be on our side. It will be on the side of the Palestinians.

Somebody wrote this week that America’s support of Israel is a case of “assisted suicide”. In Israel, assisting suicide is a crime. Suicide itself, however, is allowed by our laws.

"Here in Azerbaijan we believe in human rights. PLEASE GIVE US YOUR FILM."

Oh, no, no, not good.

The enforcers here come in three colors: the military police still wearing their old Russian puke-green uniforms, the MSN (the dictator's secret police) in windbreakers without ID, and BP's own corporate police force in black tunics, sashes and full hats who look like toy soldiers from the Nutcracker ballet. They weren't dancing.

I showed all three flavors of police our press credentials in both English and Azeri, neither of which could be read by the officers. (The dictator had suddenly changed the Azeri alphabet, making most of the nation illiterate overnight.)

The dictator made everyone call him, "Baba," Grandpa.

I told the dumbest-looking one, "Look here: This paper says your so-called President is a weasel's rectum," which our 'fixer' translated as, "This letter from Foreign Ministry is authorization to make a documentary for the British Television."

We'd been surreptitiously filming BP's cancer-making machine, the giant pipeline terminal near Baku, the capital, that sends the Azeri's Caspian Sea oil eastward to light Europe's Christmas trees.

Now, it looked like I'd be spending Christmas in Baba's dungeon licking rats for breakfast. My clown-show antics bought the crew the precious minutes needed to switch the film in the camera to blanks. Our cameraman told a BP cop, with mime: "Hadn't begun filming yet, Old Bean."

We would now. I clicked on my hidden micro-cam.

BP's Azeri police badge depicting oil drilling rig

A black SUV arrived on the remote desert track and unloaded its impressive cargo, a colonel sprinkled with medals from the recent war Azerbaijan lost to Armenia. The colonel said, "British Petroleum drives this country," and as a "British" journalist, he thought I'd be as proud of that fact as he is.

"I know," I said. "Believe me, I know."

There is an awful lot of evidence that BP and Britain's MI6 had their hands in Baba's 1993 coup d'état which overthrew the nation's elected president. Within months of taking power, Baba signed "The Contract of the Century" giving BP monopoly control of Azerbaijan's Caspian reserves.

Baba headed the KGB when this Islamic land was an occupied "republic" of the Soviet Union, the good old days of relative peace, freedom and prosperity.

I was here in the desert to investigate a tip-off I'd had that BP had a near-disaster at its Caspian offshore rig that was extraordinarily similar to the Deepwater Horizon blow-out. But BP covered it up.

What I didn't know was that WikiLeaks was about to release a State Department memo which referred to a small piece of this BP game. Rather than go to Azerbaijan to check the facts, the Wiki newspapers called BP in London for comment.

That put BP on high alert and my sources in high danger.

Palast pictured in front of BP offshore oil
rig in Baku, Azerbaijan, December 2010

How the crew and I (and the poor shepherd on a little horse swept up with us) were released is a complex story involving an impromptu banquet with the Secret Police and the poignant recanting of a statement about BP made to us by an environmental activist.

I understood his need to back down. The night before, we dined with a young video blogger who'd just gotten out of prison after the current president (now Baba's son, Baby Baba), saw the blogger hold a press conference in a donkey suit. The President had no doubt that he was the ass. He was. He is.

Welcome to the Islamic Republic of BP, otherwise known as Azerbaijan. And good-bye.

I'm out of there. Out with the evidence we need about BP and how it lead to the Gulf of Mexico blow-out and an extension of the occupation of Iraq.

It's a hell of a story, and my holiday gift to myself is that I'm here and ready to tell it.

Toward the end of Homer’s Iliad, a formative work for the military ethic of the West that was to extend its influence for nearly three thousand years to the present day, the gods hold council to respond to a shocking event taking place on the plains of Troy: the hero Achilles has tied the body of Hector, his most recent victim, to the back of his chariot and is dragging him around the walls of the city. In the course of this debate the god Apollo delivers a famous line:

“For he [Achilles] is torturing the mute Earth in his fury.” (Il. 24:54)

It is important to awaken this sensibility now, among us—and bring it up to the present century. Homer wrote long before artillery barrages and poison gas devastated the landscapes of Europe; before plutonium, depleted uranium, Agent Orange, white phosphorous and other horrors revealed (to those with eyes open to this truth) that war knows no limits in its attack on life and the earth that sustains our life. Moreover, as Apollo’s line indicates, it knows no limits as to where its violence will fall. “Total war,” not unknown in the ancient world, is commonplace in our own, and the percentage of civilian casualties in war has soared since the Second World War, reaching 90 percent already in Vietnam (unmanned drones are no solution, as many tragic “mistakes” have shown).

The word we have translated from the Iliad as “torturing” above also means “humiliating, defiling, shaming.” In this sense, war constitutes an attack on, and a defiling of, the environment in many ways. (The head of Air Force Military Science, formerly Air ROTC, on the UC-Berkeley campus once confessed to Professor Nagler that a single sortie of a B-52 bomber uses more fuel than would be used in the entire lifetime of a Volkswagen; in toto, we observe that the U.S. military as an entity is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on the planet.) War and environmental degradation have a common cause that lies deeper than any of these statistics, one that Homer was trying to express in his poetic imagination. That cause must be addressed, or nothing we can manage to fix on the symptomatic level will last beyond the order of the day.

Intuitively, the longing for peace and the yearning for a sustainable environment are inextricably linked. Peace is not piecemeal, and it must be sought at all levels if it is to have meaning and tangibility as a demonstrable force for good. In this sense, the quest for personal peace is bound up with the aim of achieving a peaceful society, and this can only be attained when society as a whole is striving to exist in a reciprocal and harmonious manner with the balance of life and the extra-human world. Far from comprising some idealistic vision, this is in fact part of the baseline of humankind’s long and complex history on planet Earth, and it is only in recent times (paleontologically speaking) that we have undone the rough balance that held for eons. At the same time, while we applaud all efforts at elucidating the connections between peace and the environment, we note that some methods of accomplishing these aims work better than others. The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to environmentalists in recent years—notably to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 and Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement in 2004—is particularly problematic.

This is not for one moment to understate the inherent value of this work, but rather to recognize that the Peace Prize has become diluted in many respects (for example, by awarding it to Barack Obama on the eve of his escalation of the war in Afghanistan), and that the invocation of “the environment” in this context simultaneously distracts us from focusing on the crucial issues attendant to perpetual warfare while providing a palliative that suggests enough is being done on matters such as climate change and sustainability by virtue of these leading voices being thus recognized. Deeply concerned individuals are doing very cogent work on environmental issues, yet somehow the same energies are not as clearly brought to bear on the war system, which we note does as much as or more than any other single human activity to destroy the environment.

Five years earlier than the Maathai award, the Nobel committee had given the prize to Mother Teresa of Calcutta. She also had little enough to do with war as a formal institution but, as none other than Robert McNamara said, “she promotes peace in the most fundamental manner, by her confirmation of . . . human dignity.” In attempting to desecrate the body of Hector (and it is hard not to have in our minds here the image of a Vietcong soldier being dragged behind an American tank) Achilles is desecrating the earth from which we have sprung and upon which alone we can continue to live and progress toward our increasingly common destiny.

In this sense, our shared commitment to peace becomes simultaneously a commitment to environmentalism the minute it gets down to the root cause of both war and environmental desecration, which lies in the mind and heart of the individual person and the cultural matrix of the prevailing worldview. As Vandana Shiva has said, “if we get rid of the pollution in the human mind they will get rid of the pollution of the environment.” That “pollution” is the idea that we are separate, material beings locked in competition for scarce and ever scarcer resources. This quest for resources in fact constitutes a feedback loop in which the pursuit of material goods at all costs merely renders those materials more elusive, thus requiring even more relentless pursuit.

Perhaps we can illustrate with another example, Lieutenant Jim Channon’s proposal to form a “First Earth Battalion,” a kind of New Age army unit that would protect the environment and use pacific (and rather sentimental) approaches to enemies before resorting to physical force. In the end this scheme only promoted militarism, as some of the ‘tools’ Battalion members came up with were adopted by open-minded planners of psychological combat. In other words, by accepting the core assumptions of militarism—that others must be forced to our will in a competitive world—the attempt to create a sanitized military culture that would protect the environment backfired. The failure was not to recognize that violence cannot protect anything of value —including the minds of its perpetrators, as we now learn from the many studies on the lasting damage perpetrators of violence do to themselves in the course of doing physical or psychological damage to others, even if it is in a cause styled ‘defending freedom’ or other high-sounding euphemisms.

As activists, authors, and educators for peace, we are opposed to all types of violence, and not only to the one most spectacular form, namely armed conflicts between or within state actors that we refer to simply as “war.” Because of this deep commitment to nonviolence, we are simultaneously opposed to the desecration of the living environment, leaving aside the strategic question of which aspect to tackle first in favor of an approach that asks us to work concomitantly for peace at all levels of engagement. One way this deeper commitment shows up is in our recommendation to introduce the use of better language in discussing all of these issues. Just as “peace,” for people outside our field, can mean merely the absence of overt war (witness the U.S. Navy’s definition of ‘peace’ some years ago as “perpetual pre-hostility”), we maintain that the idea of a “sustainable environment” does not evoke the sense of a living, growing planet as the physical basis of human progress toward loving community (as does, for example, Homer’s poem). In pursuit of this aim, we would encourage a perspective that asks instead, what is being sustained and for whose purposes? War as a human activity is inherently unsustainable either socially or ecologically, and thus a vibrant peace and a healthy planet must be developed together.

In other words, our unconditional commitment to life and the inherent dignity of all forms of life applies evenly to the rejection of all forms of violence, including violence against the earth. Even while acknowledging that at this moment there is no more immediate threat to all of life than the progressive distortion of the planetary climate by human (industrial) activity, we call on others as well as ourselves to recognize that the threat posed by the war system is not to be lost sight of as a leading cause of the problem. Indeed it may well be the first issue on which to focus even though, or because, the threat to the planet’s climate is more imminent. We believe that this is true not only because maintaining the war system (largely in place to protect industrialization) is perhaps the chief contributor to climate change but because it is more obvious that deconstructing the war system will require the outgrowing of violence at all levels of engagement.

Gandhi once wrote that “we are constantly being astonished these days at the amazing discoveries in the field of violence. But I maintain that far more undreamt of and seemingly impossible discoveries will be made in the field of non-violence.” It is precisely to make these discoveries and apply them to apparently diverse fields like human rights, militarism, poverty, and the environment that we take as our work. The eternal human desire for peace can only succeed if it strives to attain this transcendent telos both “on earth” and “with earth” as inherently interconnected aims. Today we are faced with paradigmatic crises including perpetual warfare and runaway climate change, yet in this crucial moment may we likewise rise to meet the unique challenge of understanding these as related phenomena whose mutual resolution promises an opportunity to truly usher in an era of peace and prosperity.

At the end of the day, we may even find ourselves wisely embracing an inversion of Achilles’s antipathy, and “nurturing the living Earth in our compassion.”
(c) 2010 Randall Amster J.D., Ph.D., teaches peace studies at Prescott College and serves as the executive director of the Peace & Justice Studies Association. His most recent book is the co-edited volume "Building Cultures of Peace: Transdisciplinary Voices of Hope and Action" (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009).