War and Peace

Dec 18, 2009 Editorial

It is said that we now live in a “post-modern” world, with irony being one of its distinguishing features. The irony of President Obama collecting his Nobel Peace Prize just a week after he had dispatched 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and escalated attacks on the Taliban from Pakistani soil has maybe confirmed our historical trajectory and moment.
But President Obama, fully cognisant of the irony of his prize, delivered his requisite Nobel Lecture that offered an insight into the dynamics that confront a leader in the post-modern world. Acknowledging the non-violent path advocated by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he stated his case quite bluntly: “As a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake, evil does exist in the world.”
For a post-modern president, Obama was acknowledging an age-old truth – that facticity of evil and the necessity to confront that evil by measures that are calibrated to the nature and measure of the threat. President Obama, as so many leaders before him, was laying out the argument for “just wars”. Hitler and his Nazis, President Obama posited, would not have been defeated by non-violent means:
“Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.”. The point the President was making, was that while non-violence was an ideal that the entire world should strive towards achieving, the moral imperatives for a leader that is responsible for the lives of his entire society demand that he takes cognisance at all times of the consequences of his actions.
Even Gandhi, it should be remembered, asserted that his choice of non-violence as a weapon against the British, was strategic. Violence and non-violence each has its own time and place.
What was heartening about the President’s articulation of the need for wars sometimes to keep the peace was his acknowledgement of the real-life horrors of war: “The instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another: that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy.”
This rueful acknowledgement is the difference between the jingoistic bellicosity of his predecessor Bush and the neo-cons that appeared to revel in their vision of the last superpower standing using force to remake the world in its self-defined image.
War may sometimes be necessary but because of its costs, it must always be the last resort. Mr Obama emphasised alternatives to violence, stressing the importance of diplomacy and sanctions to confront nations like Iran and North Korea over their nuclear programmes.
When the Nobel panel awarded him the Peace Prize, they were fully aware that Obama was in charge of a country at war. They were commending him for “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples” after he had assumed office.
There were those that scoffed at his presumed “waffling” as he invited wide debate and wider inputs as he struggled to make a decision on the way forward in Afghanistan.
But it was not waffling, rather it was the willingness of a mature leader willing to examine all the options before choosing one that entailed the “human tragedy” that war guarantees. As he pointed out in Oslo, “I understand why war is not popular, but I know this: The belief that peace is desirable is rarely enough to achieve it. Peace requires responsibility. Peace entails sacrifice.”
This is a lesson that needs to be inculcated and appreciated in Guyana. While our country may not be engaged in any “hot” war at the moment, there are new threats that are not only the moral equivalent of war but its substantive equivalent.
The new threats of domestic terrorism, gang-related crimes and drug smuggling are no less threatening to our society’s survival than the classic wars. Just wars against these threats are also justified. Peace has its costs.

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