Risk for Peace

"Why can't we take risks for peace? We are so brave in war. We see no risks in war. Now we should take risks for peace."

They're the words of a former general, in Israel no less: Amram Mitzna, the outspoken if ineffective Labour leader, who in a handful of soundbites has shown the world that even inside a nation in terror, it is possible to see beyond the politics of perpetual war.

The ground-level shift in Israel brings to mind the words of US State Department spokesman Robert Kimmitt, when he told the world in April that Iraqi citizens face "a hard peace or an easy peace." He meant peace under Saddam Hussein's tyranny, or peace after a short, horrific war — but there's a deeper meaning to be mined from the term "hard peace." It suggests difficult choices. It seems to call for a peace movement that demands much, much more than the absence of war.

We need a "hard" peace movement because the choices on all sides have become so perverse. I'm hanging on to an Associated Press photo of Iraq's militia, women in white headscarves holding AK-47 assault rifles. They are soldiers for Hussein, but they are also the people that the world wants to liberate from a tyranny that is, as Noam Chomsky puts it, "as evil as they come." What does America's war plan offer them? An uncertain chance at freedom, and then only if they survive a war in which they will be the targets.

But what has the peace movement had to offer these women? Millions of people chanting "no blood for oil"? It's a start, but the new politics of empire, sprung from terror, demand a more robust response.

Like the global justice movement, the most effective global peace movement will be grassroots, dispersed, radically democratic, tolerant of a wide array of tactics and even, perhaps, willing to contemplate the possibility of "just war." And it is unavoidable, again, that America will be this movement's principal foe. The US has shifted to a siege mentality — a national cowardice — and placed itself on a permanent war footing. The Bush Doctrine is the grandest imperial arrogance of our times. It needs to be met not only with reaction and refusal, but also with a political challenge for peace that is as complex, imperfect and strategic as the call to arms.

It's worth taking a moment to acknowledge that what is building now is something that has never existed. There have been movements against certain wars, against specific acts or threats of war. But there has never been a global peace movement with the scope and depth of the past few years' campaign against corporate globalization.

The results are plain enough to see. In the headlines, we have utterly vile crimes of war on both sides of the Mideast conflict, and a war criminal in Iraq whose protection has been an uncomfortable side effect to opposition of American aggression. Out of the headlines, the absence of a global peace movement is even more disturbing. There are, for example, the wars of central Africa, in which the dead are piled as high, if not so uniformly, as in the Holocaust. There is Chechnya, where some 100,000 lie dead, most of them killed by the army of Russia — a UN member now opposing the war in Iraq. This is the world in which the old chants no longer make sense.

It's nowhere near enough to "give peace a chance." What we need now is a peace that takes chances.