"Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love."          
           –Martin Luther King, Jr.

          A common and, some would say, fair reaction to the main points I have presented would be to regard me as an appeaser of terrorism or of our enemies; that I would do nothing in a situation that demands action; that it is essential to meet this enemy where they live so we don't have to deal with them where we live.  In a word, I am weak.  This situation calls for strength, for courage.  To the latter two points, to use a friend of mine's favorite phrase, I don't disagree.  We do have to take this fight to the enemy, and to do so requires a great deal of strength, courage, and patience.
          I believe that the solutions to these great problems that we face are political, economic, and moral, not military.  We are not facing a Great Power like the Soviet Union, nor are we trying to slow down the Nazi blitzkrieg.  We are probably at least a decade away from a possible conflict with China.  We have been born and raised with the idea that when in doubt, send in the heavy bombers.  The United States of America reached its apex of bombing "success" when we dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, effectively ending World War II.  From three days later, when we unnecessarily dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki, to "Shock and Awe" in Iraq, it has been all downhill.  Oh, we've had successes; we've killed plenty of bad guys along the way, but by and large, it is my opinion that since the end of WWII our chosen method of resolving conflict has done the world and ourselves more harm than good.
          In Vietnam, we bombed and strafed, and bombed with napalm; we spread Agent Orange (and its harmful byproduct, dioxin) from the air; we bombed the North to a staggering degree...and the North Vietnamese peasants died and hid, and lived in tunnels and caves, and came out occasionally to try and harvest what remained of their crops, and hunkered down in holes, and rode out the fury of the most powerful nation on earth.  For what? What did they do? All the poor peasants wanted to do was farm their crops, sell some of them at market, and live a simple, rural life.  They couldn't have cared less if they were communists or capitalists.  The partition of Vietnam was completely artificial.  The true leader of the Vietnamese people, all of them, was Ho Chi Minh.  The "Ahmed Chalabis" that we brought in to run the South could never compete with Ho for the people's loyalty and affection.  So it didn't matter how much we bombed them, we weren't going to win that war.  It was their country, and they were fighting to defend it.  We were the invaders, not the liberators.  They weren't insurgents–they were freedom fighters.  The fact that we didn't happen to agree with their economic system doesn't make them any less.
          Look what happened in the aftermath; Vietnam is a communist country, at peace with its neighbors.  We have treated the country honorably in defeat.  They have been gracious in victory.  The sky didn't fall, nor did the dominos.  58,000 American soldiers and somewhere in the neighborhood of four million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians died in the liberation of Vietnam.  There are untold amounts of people in both countries suffering from the effects of Agent Orange to this day.  My brother-in-law and his family took a bicycle trip across Vietnam a few years ago and said the people were as friendly as the country was beautiful.
          One of the forgotten elements in the aftermath of the Vietnam War was the fact that the United States, its desire to defeat communism trumping all other factors, supported one of the most murderous regimes in history in Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge when the newly reunited Vietnam tried to intervene in the "Killing Fields" massacres in Cambodia.
          We couldn't expect the politicians of that era: Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara, Richard Nixon (Quaker that he was) and Henry Kissinger, to consider the moral implications of what we were doing over the realpolitiks of the Cold War.  They felt like even if they lost Vietnam, they showed the Soviets and the Chinese that we would fight to stop communism.  The moral fight fell to people like Daniel and Philip Berrigan, brothers and priests, who staged some of the most significant protests against the Vietnam War during the 1960's and 70's.  Their civil disobedience landed them in jail for their beliefs, and at one time on the FBI's most wanted list.  Another surprisingly moral stance was taken by heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, who refused to serve in the Army during Vietnam, saying: "I got nothin' against no Viet Cong.  No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger."  For this, he was stripped of his title, and given a suspended sentence of three and a half years.  Martin Luther King, Jr., bravely spoke out against the Vietnam War even though members of his own inner circle thought he was going to damage the cause of civil rights by doing so.  His speech at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4th, 1967 declaring his unambiguous opposition to the war still ranks as one of the greatest speeches of all time.

          If I am weak, then I hope that I am weak like Jesus was, or weak like Gandhi was, or weak like Martin Luther King was.  No less a man than Dwight D. Eisenhower once said: "Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace."  If we are truly to act in the way Jesus wants us to act, then we as Christians cannot support the violent, hypocritical, militaristic, and definitively unchristian ways of our recent government.  Because here's the thing: your tax dollars and your votes are doing just that.  Instead of forgiving African debt so that the people of Africa have half a chance at life, we are dropping bombs laced with radioactive residue in Iraq.  The money usually goes to one at the expense of the other.
          Both Gandhi and Dr. King proved time and time again that the use of non-violence was definitely not for the weak.  It takes a tremendous amount of courage to be a member of something like the Nonviolent Peaceforce, or Christian Peacemaker Teams, two of the organizations that stand between warring parties.  The Reverend John Dear was incarcerated for eight months for protesting at a nuclear weapons factory, and the Franciscan priest Fr. Louis Vitale has been imprisoned numerous times for acts of civil disobedience in the name of non-violence and peace.

"I believe it is peace for our time."
          –British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, upon returning from his fateful meeting in Munich in 1938 with Adolph Hitler.

          With that sentence, Neville Chamberlain sealed his fate to be ever associated with the word appeasement.  In fact, no modern discussion of accommodation, dialogue, alternative solutions, understanding of the other side's position, trying to find the root causes of conflict, or anything short of bombing the holy hell out of our enemies can even be started without the right-wing spluttering on about appeasement, and in short order, reminding everyone of the famous arch-appeaser Neville Chamberlain.  This is one of the ways that rational discussion is quickly ended.  Once the Right gets someone on the defensive about appeasement, the discussion is over.  This is the tactic of using a word or a phrase inappropriately but saying it loudly enough and with enough blather that the average person who is only catching bits and pieces of the monologue will hear the headlines, "Appeasement" = "Anything but Bombing the Crap out of Our Enemies."  It is then assumed by a whole lot of SAS (short attention span) citizens that any solution to conflict in the world other than massive military force constitutes the act of appeasement.  This is dangerous and unChristian-like thinking.  There are a whole range of ideas that fall between appeasement and the use of disproportionate force that inflicts collateral damage.  First, though, it is necessary to debunk the comparisons of being against the War in Iraq to the famous Chamberlain-Hitler appeasement, the Mother of All Appeasements.
          Appeasement is the act of granting concessions to potential enemies to maintain peace.  Neville Chamberlain thought he could reason with a completely unreasonable human being in Adolph Hitler.  The idea of granting concessions to a man with the largest army in Europe, and with a record both on paper and in speeches of the most apocalyptic utterances, was a dangerously ludicrous fantasy.  No one that I know of wants to reason with radical jihadist nutcases.  They need to be tracked down and put in a jail cell for the rest of their lives, and if they put up resistance, then send them on to their 72 vestal virgins, or wherever they're going.
          Some people talk in absolutes; there are the pacifists, who consider any violence against anyone, no matter how justified, is wrong.  There are others who think the solution to every problem is to put in a call to the US Air Force.  My opinion is that there are times when violence simply cannot be avoided.  I certainly think that it's pretty ridiculous to expect a nation to be pacifist.  I have a great deal of respect for the intelligent arguments of pacifism, but I'm not a pacifist.  It's funny–if you tell people you're against the war in Iraq some of them jump straight to, "Ohhhh, so you're a pacifist."  A real pacifist wouldn't hit a man who was raping his wife.  I would have no problem with committing violence in that case.  A real pacifist would not use violence on anyone at any time, and this includes nation against nation.  There are instances in our nation's history where I think military force was justified, although it's interesting that when you read about wars in general, so many of them were not necessary.  It's hard to tell the family of a soldier that died in an unnecessary war that his death was... unnecessary.
          One thing that has to be made completely clear is that pacifism and the discipline of non-violence is not the same thing.
          Hitler had the ambition, the military force, the scientists, the manpower, the industrial capacity and the will to seriously threaten the whole world.  He had to be stopped.  Saddam Hussein may have had the ambition, but he lacked everything else.  He could have been contained. He was contained.  This is important, because it will help explain my position on using violence.  Each and every life that has been lost on both sides of this conflict is precious–precious to God, and precious to their loved ones.  If my son ever had to give up his life, all of his potential, the loss of his seed to the next generation, the songs he would never write, the father and husband he would never be.........it better be absolutely undeniably necessary.  The people who send our soldiers into Harm's Way know this, which is why they will never, ever admit that they were wrong to do so.  Once they have made that commitment, they must defend it forever, or risk having innocent blood on their hands.
          In Baghdad, a suicide bomber slammed into a group of people on a street in Baghdad, and blew up twenty-seven people. When it happens in London, it's huge news for a month. When it's Baghdad, it's just another day. The difference in this day, though, was that the dead in this instance were mostly children. They were all gathered around a U.S. Army Humvee, and the American soldiers were passing out candy. This is an absolutely heartbreaking story. Here we are, a nation of good people, as exemplified by our brave, yet kind soldiers, who are doing everything they are asked to do and handing out treats for the little kids, and some brainwashed lunatic comes along a blows up these kids. How could anyone think they're going to heaven for that?
          Now certainly these soldiers, some of whom were injured, bear little or no responsibility for this horrific crime against humanity, although some of them probably had pangs of guilt. Our government, on the other hand, once again has the blood of the innocent on their hands. I know this is a harsh indictment. There is a harsher judgment awaiting them.  If some of our brave soldiers were killed in the mountains of Afghanistan or Pakistan fighting Al-Qaeda or Taliban jihadists, or if some of our Special Forces were killed in a covert operation in Saudi Arabia while apprehending the authors of this vile slime that is being passed off as Islamism, and even if, even if innocent civilians were tragically killed in crossfire, this could unfortunately be seen as the price our nation and the world must pay for freedom from this scourge.  This is what our military is for.  Civilians do die in wars.  These twenty-seven children in Baghdad didn't have to die.  This war in Iraq in no way passes the absolutely undeniably necessary test.  Some of the 4,200-and-counting men and women in our armed forces who have died in Iraq might have died in some other theater of war fighting some other battle at some other time, but the mothers and fathers and wives and husbands and children of these soldiers will never know.  We can dispute this all we want, until the soldier that dies is from our family.

What about the Ukraine? And Georgia? Democracy is breaking out all over. How can you say that what we are doing in Iraq is wrong when we are helping them become a democracy?

          I don't recall our armed forces having anything to do with democracy triumphing in either Ukraine or Georgia.  The people of those countries did it themselves.  To the extent that we helped, it was covert, through either financial help or CIA involvement.  It's actually two examples of how we can help spread democracy without blowing a place to smithereens.  Those two countries are also considerably more ethnically homogeneous than Iraq.  We're trying to shove a three-sided peg down a round hole.  It just might be possible that due to the artificial way that Iraq was cobbled together after World War I, and the tribal nature of its people, combined with three distinctly different groups that either ethnically or theologically don't see eye to eye, this conglomeration of humans are not ready to be thrown together in a democracy.  What is much more likely to happen, sooner or later, is that by being forced to be a democracy before they are ready, unlike the Ukraine or Georgia, these three groups of people are going to tear each other apart until a military or civilian leader of strong will and character assumes control of one of the armies, and crushes the opposition one by one and creates yet another repressive authoritarian dictatorship in the name of finally giving these people some peace.  Either that, or they finally separate into three countries, like Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia did in Yugoslavia.  Or first one, then the other.
          The United States has a dismal record of spreading freedom and democracy by force.  Just look at the record during the Cold War.  In most cases, one of two things happened: 1) The guy who we supported was elected, but the opposition doesn't accept the result, so in order for the new leader to keep the peace, repressive, authoritarian measures have to be taken to pacify the opposition.  These measures become permanent, and we have a dictatorship.  2) A left-leaning guy is elected, and we don't like the result, so we engineer a coup, and replace him with the guy in scenario #1.  This represents much of the modern history of Latin America.
          Most democracies that succeed are homegrown.  When the people are ready, they take matters into their own hands.
          I believe that to the extent appeasement has gone on in this country, it has been that we, as citizens, hand in hand with the mainstream media, have granted our government the concession to act in almost any way they see fit in order to maintain our extravagant standard of living at the expense of the many around the world who are too weak to object.  I consider myself fully convicted of this indictment, as I have never lifted a finger in protest in all of my years on this planet until the day I started writing this book.