Read an Excerpt

War Ends Today

Today is a good day for war to come to an end.

The symbolic number of 1,000 U.S. casualties was passed today in Iraq--I am writing this on September 9, 2004--most of the deaths occurring after victory was declared over a year ago. What is the world like on the day you read this? I cannot predict, but I know, even if this particular war is over, you will be confronted with terrorism, suicide bombings, insurrections and civil war somewhere on the planet, and nuclear threats from rogue nations like North Korea and Iran. Violence will still be raging out of control, no matter what day you read these words.

At the outset of 2003 it was estimated that thirty military conflicts were being fought around the world. It's a good day for all these wars to come to an end. But will they? And if they do, what will replace them?

To end war, you have to think of ending not just one conflict, and not just thirty. What we have to end is the idea of war, which has turned into the habit of war, and then into the numbing constancy of war. The last time the U.S. wasn't on a war footing was December 6, 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor inflamed the U.S. into declaring war against Japan. Since then, America has accepted the need for a huge standing army, the growth of arms manufacturers and merchants into a massive part of the economy, thousands of troops stationed around the world, intensive research into new technologies of death, and a political climate in which it is suicide to come out against war. This whole situation, which reaches into every home, keeps us on a war footing even when there is no declared war to grab the headlines.

Like any habit, war has worn a groove in our minds, so that when we become very afraid or very angry, the response of war comes naturally. It has an easy track to follow. Even as the body count rises in the Sunni Triangle and the photographs of torture from Abu Ghraib prison stun one's conscience, the groove is still there, deep and familiar. War has almost become a secret pleasure. It brings excitement and revs up the routine pace of life. In Mira Nair's film adaptation of Vanity Fair, a woman comments smugly at a party, "War is good for men. It's like turning over the soil." We reach for war the way a chain-smoker reaches for a cigarette, muttering all the while that we have to quit. In the past four decades America's war habit has led us into Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam, and Cambodia, not to mention more covert military operations into places like Laos, Nicaragua, and Colombia.

This book is about erasing that groove and substituting a new way to respond when we are very afraid or very angry, or even when we aren't. The way of peace has to become a new habit. To do that, it must offer a substitute for every single thing that war now provides. You may feel immune to the appeal of war, but everyone has benefited from war's gifts in some measure.

War provides an outlet for national vengeance.
It satisfies the demands of fear.
It brings power to the victor.
It provides security to the homeland.
It opens an avenue for getting what you want by force.

By contrast, living in peace one breathes easily. There is space to allow for connections with other people. Arguments proceed with mutual respect for either side. Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa lived different aspects of peace. We learned from each that the way of peace can...