from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 27 Sep 2009 03:00 PM PDT

To the modern citizen of the West, peace is an ideal and war is
a tragedy. Depending on his or her political orientation, war may even be
considered inexcusable under any circumstances. At the heart of this dogma
is the idea that war is a disruption of a state of peace, brought on by
greedy warmongers, the military industrial complex or some modern day
variation on the old 19th century labels. But what if rather than being a
disruptive force, war is actually the father of peace.

To pretend that peace is a more natural state for humanity than
war is to exercise a great deal of denial regarding human nature. We are
no more creatures of peace, than any member of the animal kingdom. The
difference is that we have a greater capacity for choice, to be moral
protectors and defenders, rather than predators. But that is a choice that
some may make, and others will not. And for as long as men will remain
men, there will be men who pray on others, and men who must study the arts
of war and killing in order to resist them.

Peace is not a higher
moral state, or even the absence of war-- it is the product of wars and
conflicts that have been successfully won. Or it is the product of the
threat of violence and war. Whether it is the police station a few blocks
over, where well armed men sit guarding other more dangerous men, the army
base a few miles over or a few countries over-- the peace we have is the
product of violence and force. And anyone who pretends otherwise is lying
to himself and to us.

To perpetuate peace requires more than mutual
understanding, tolerance and a willingness to join hands and dance in a
circle with a rainbow of colors. Those things can only come about after a
great deal of violence, and also often represent a society that is no
longer in touch with the realities of the world and its own need for
survival. Because as long as violence remains within human nature, and as
long as it represents an effective tool for conquest, dominance and
acquisition-- we must not only know war, but be the best at it that we can
be.

There cannot be peace without war, because war is a necessary
prerequisite to peace. To have peace, one must created a society, a nation
and a political space in which domestic and foreign violence is checked.
Otherwise the society becomes nothing more than the Eloi of H.G. Wells'
Time Machine, charming children laughing and playing, until the Morlocks
come for them. The children of the modern West are well on the way to
becoming the Eloi, and when they are beaten, robbed and raped by the
Morlocks imported into the hearths and homelands of the West. And
uncomprehending they let it happen, because the Eloi allowed themselves to
become sheep, and where there are sheep without sheepdogs, there will soon
be shepherds to rule them or wolves to prey on them. With the EU and
growing centralization in America on one side, and rising immigrant
related violence on the other-- the West looks to be gaining
both.

The delegitimization of war in the West came about for one
primary reason, because war no longer seemed like a useful tool for
obtaining peace. As the weapons of war became more destructive, war came
to seem less like a protective force, and more like an apocalyptic force.
With WW1's generations lost, gas masks and battlefield trenches-- war
appeared to have become a senseless thing. A revolted youth proceeded to
embrace decadence, chaos and anarchy, best exemplified by Dadaism. WW2
appeared to restore something of a moral order, but the rise of nuclear
war and MAD, took the apocalyptic warfare of WW1 to an entirely new level,
with weapons of mass destruction that threatened to destroy everything in
sight.

This sort of bleakness caused even otherwise sensible men to
put their faith in international orders and organizations, such as the UN,
and the growing enlightenment of humanity, believing that with enough
education, a form of reciprocal pacifism could be achieved in which no one
would find any purpose in harming anyone, thus ending any need for
violence or war. As absurd as such a premise may be, variants of it
continue to command the philosophies of foreign affairs on both sides of
the Atlantic. Diplomacy is considered supreme, tolerance is the watchword,
and national defense takes a back seat to both. Even war itself has been
transformed into "Nation Building", becoming a tool for this global
educational project of reciprocal pacifism, the thinking being that if we
can remove dictatorships, we will give their peoples a chance to assert
that just like us they don't want to fight anymore.

Having learned nothing from WW2 about the
causes of war, the illusion of a world of reciprocal pacifism dominates
the dialogue and educational processes of four generations of children--
with the result that the children of the West become Eloi-like, more and
more so in every generation. And the Morlocks are sharpening their teeth
and becoming more plentiful.

Over a decade and a half after the
collapse of the USSR, the average Russian hates America and England about
as much as he did in the days of the Iron Curtain, and the Russian
government is even more eager for conflict. The two wars that the United
States and Europe fought on behalf of Muslims, the Gulf War and the
Bosnian War, came back to the United States in the form of four planes
piloted by Muslims and aimed at dealing a devastating blow to America.
There are no happy endings anywhere in sight, because as it turns out the
reasons underlying many wars are not as simple as the proverbial evil
tyrant living in his castle and oppressing his people. Yes many of our
enemies do have an evil tyrant over them, but the dirty little secret of
human nature is that few tyrants would endure if the majority of their
people did not support them on at least some level.

Today, Stalin,
who murdered more Russians than Hitler, is one of Russia's most popular
historical leaders. Yeltsin who brought democracy to Russia is one of its
least popular leaders. Given democracy at American insistence, the Arabs
of Gaza and the West Bank, chose Hamas. Polls suggest that if given
democracy, the Egyptian would choose the Muslim Brotherhood, the
grandfathers of Islamofascism, who helped birth Al Queda. That is because
democracy creates a forum for making choices. And people are as likely to
make violent choices, as non-violent ones.

And until that changes,
war is not going anywhere. The ancient Roman dictum, "If you would have
peace, prepare for war", yet applies. The task of the West is to make war
meaningful again. The bleakness of modern war, whether it is gazing at
counters that will launch ICBM missiles that will turn the world into a
single great sheet of glass, or maintaining endless patrols against
insurgents, has a way of making it seem meaningless, a useless tool of
stalemate, an endless waiting game without conclusion or greater meaning.

The fundamental meaning of war is that it is a tool that protects,
defends and enables peace. To enable that peace, war must have a
definitive purpose and a definitive conclusion. Endless watches on the
sand dunes waiting for a possible insurgent attack, negotiating with
tribal warlords whose loyalties switch every season and adapting to the
local culture-- is not war, but colonialism or nation building. Such
conflicts have conclusions and goals that cannot be achieved by military
means, only enabled or protected by the military, and only serve to render
armed force into a bodyguarding role.

To make war meaningful, it
must have a true target and goal that can be achieved by military means.
"Bring me the head of Osama bin Laden", is a military goal. "Teach
administrative management to four nephews of the local warlord so he can
reform local government", is not. You can use the military to try and
reach such a goal, but you can also try to use a gun to turn a screw. It
just isn't the best match of the tool for the job. Turning the military
into the Peace Corps is a mismatch of institutions that drains strength
and purpose from the military, into a project inspired by neo-pacifist
ideals.

There can be no peace without war, but peace is not a military
project. Only clean wars that settle conflicts in enduring wars can bring
peace. To try and blend the two, is to create neverending wars.
Policymakers who fear to use the military to destroy the enemy, instead
draw out war into an endless exercise in bloodletting with no end in
sight. And such wars quickly make the public lose faith in the whole idea
of military solutions. They transform war into a meaningless hopeless
farce, thus making pacifism and appeasement seem moral and plausible by
comparison. And so the children of the West turn Eloi, and the Morlocks
grin and gain strength as they sense that a victory is not too far away.

The moral way of war is to serve as a protective force for a
vigorous and healthy society, to deter and destroy enemies, to protect,
defend and maintain the conditions in which peace is possible. When war
ceases to become a useful tool, the survival of the society itself becomes
endangered. Just as the collapse of the human immune system foreshadows a
serious infection, the collapse of faith in military solutions and the
growth of anti-war sentiment, foreshadows a major conflict to come. There
can be no true peace without war, only the peace of temporary appeasement,
to be followed by subjugation and slavery.

(Reader's note:
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