By Robert Dennis, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX – Remember last August when Andrew Card, White House Chief of Staff, explained that nobody starts a marketing campaign in that month? He was alerting us that after the first of September when President Bush returned from his vacation a campaign to get rid of Saddam Hussein would begin.
And what a marketing campaign it has been! All the resources of the U.S. government have been mobilized. The media were courted; top officials of the White House, State Department, Pentagon, CIA, FBI and Homeland Security appeared on talk shows, gave speeches and wrote for major papers and magazines.
What a juggernaut! Opponents of the war felt overwhelmed because they were. How could we possibly stand up in the face of such a well-oiled machine? Who were we? Few of us knew each other, and if we did, we were pretty autonomous.
To me, we were like the people of Leningrad during the Nazi Army's siege in the Fall and Winter of 1941-2. Surrounded, cut off from food, and living in bitter cold. To them, and to us, it felt like the world we knew was being forfeited for some mysterious whim.
Yet we began finding others by word of mouth, by showing up at meetings and above all, by exchanging messages on the internet.
As during Vietnam, the national media tended to follow the President's lead and so did many decent Americans, but a funny thing happened. Like the three million inhabitants of Leningrad who stubbornly determined to resist the Nazi Wehrmacht, many Americans joined with others around the world to wage peace.
It has been one of those rare experiences when everyone is learning from everyone else. "A miraculous time of history to be alive," in the words of Robert Muller, former U.N. Assistant Secretary and Peace University Chancellor.
We have all been so consumed by positions taken by leaders that we failed to see the big picture. At eighty years old, Muller hadn't missed it.
"Never before in the history of the world has there been a global, visible, public, viable, open dialogue and conversation about the very legitimacy of war," he told a gathering in San Francisco.
The whole world is now having this critical and historic dialogue-listening to all kinds of points of view. Is war legitimate or not? Is there enough evidence to warrant an attack, and if so, what will the consequences be? The costs in life and treasure and relations among countries.
Muller was euphoric because this discussion is taking place in the U.N. Security Council, the body he helped set up in 1949, that was established for exactly that purpose.
It is also taking place in the streets of the world in giant demonstrations of ordinary people who have found one another and found that they share a message of non-violence in dealing with Saddam Hussein.
These ordinary people see the complexities and penalties of war, of killing innocent civilians, of slaughtering practically defenseless soldiers, of destroying schools, hospitals, libraries, water and sewage systems, the economy and future of cities, destroying priceless archaeological treasures in the cradle of civilization, of bankrupting many of the soldiers called up to fight the war, of living with the residue of weapons that will kill or maim long after the fighting ends, and above all, of care for the wounded, often crippled bodies-friend or foe - whose lives are forever changed for the worse.
In thousands of ways these issues are discussed, debated, communicated. After fifty years that Robert Muller has witnessed, he is seeing the U.N. function the way it was supposed to.
"We are not at war," he declared. "We, the world community, are waging peace. It is difficult, hard work. It is constant, and we must not let up.
"It is working, and it is an historic milestone of immense proportions. It has never happened before in human history, he continued. "But it is happening now, every day, every hour, waging peace through a global conversation.
"We are in the most significant and potent global conversation and public dialogue in the history of the world," he says.
Yes, Dr. Muller, you are right. A worldwide conversation that will never end is underway even in the face of war. Would that President Bush were willing to join in the discussion.
Robert Dennis is a former president of the Dallas Peace Center.