There is no viable peace movement presently, thanks to a thirty-year rise of military-industrial interests. America sells more arms around the world than any other country. We are in the forefront of inventing new means of mechanized death, including futuristic robot armies. We betray tenuous alliances, like the one with Russia, by proposing new missile defense systems that directly threaten them.
Yet the prospects for peace have grown steadily, not by frontal maneuvers but through the back door. Arrogance has been peace's best friend. This month the Israeli prime minister barely held on to his job after a scathing criticism of last year's war against Lebanon. That was an exercise in pure arrogance, a devastating assault on a defenseless neighbor, with the pretext being the capture of two Israeli soldiers. Instead of defeating Hezbollah, the Israeli invasion greatly strengthened them, so that now even sizable Christian groups in Lebanon are praising Hezbollah.
Arrogance has played a prime part in the Iraq war, too. It was meant to be a free war that a rich country could mount overnight against a defenseless one. But arrogance is famously blind, and with no plans for a post-invasion war, the Bush administration finds itself saddled with a military disaster of historic proportions. It's not great news that peace must depend on arrogance as a friend, but both of these wars have deflated Israel and the U.S., and there is little doubt that the future will hold much less aggression, particularly of the unilateral kind, from either country.
Peace also has a hidden ally in "no other choice." When all else fails, when a super power cannot defeat suicidal insurgents and Israel faces a Palestinian adversary that will not give up its fanatical struggle, peace can sometimes erupt. No one can predict when this may happen, since both sides of any protracted conflict always posture belligerently. But the fact that other Arab states are making genuine moves to settle the conflict in Iraq indicates that even the side-liners who have been using Middle East turmoil as a spectacle for decades may at least realize that the one thing nobody seriously thought about, genuine peace, could be their only option.
Therefore, two cheers for peace the hard way. Globalization may help bring peace, along with the Internet, cell phones, worldwide emigration, and other factors too complicated to neatly formulate. Keeping in mind last year's UN report that deaths from major wars are down by 80% over the past twenty years, there is room for cautious optimism.