antiintro

 INTRODUCTION

     THIS BOOK is about wars and anti-wars to come. It is for the Bosnian child whose face has been half ripped away by explosives, and for his mother staring with glazed eyes at what is left. It is for all the innocents of tomorrow who will both kill and die for reasons they do not understand. It is a book about peace. Which means it is a book about war in the startling new conditions we are creating as we race together into an alien future.
     A fresh century now stretches before us, one in which vast numbers of humans can be raised from the edge of hunger...in which the ravages of industrial-era pollution can be reversed and a cleaner technology created to serve humanity...in which a richer diversity of cultures and peoples can participate in shaping the future...in which the plague of war is stanched.
     But we appear, instead, to be plunging into a new dark age of tribal hate, planetary desolation, and wars multiplied by wars. How we deal with this threat of explosive violence will, to a considerable extent, determine how our children live, or perhaps, for that matter, die.
     Yet, many of our intellectual weapons for peacemaking are hopelessly out of date - as are many armies. The diference is that armies all over the world are racing to meet the realities of the twenty-first century. Peacemaking, by contrast, plods along, trying to apply methods more appropriate to a distant past.
     The thesis of this book is clear - but as yet little understood; the way we make war reflects the way we make wealth - and the way we make anti-war must reflect the way we make war.
     No subject is as easily ignored by those us lucky enough to be living in peace. After all, we each have our private wars for survival: making a living, caring for our families, battling an illness. Enough, it would seem, to worry these immediate realities. Yet how we fight our personal, peacetime wars, how we live our daily lives, is deeply influenced by real, and even imagined, wars of the present, past, or future.
     Present-day wars raise or lower the price of gasoline at the pump, food in the supermarket, shares on the stock exchange. They ravage the ecology. They erupt into our living rooms via our video screens.
     Past wars reach across time to affect our lives today. The torrents of blood spilled centuries ago over issues now forgotten, the bodies charred, impaled, broken, or blown into nothingness, the children reduced to swollen bellies and stick-limbs - all shaped the world we inhabit today. To cite a single, little-noticed example, wars fought a thousand years ago led to the invention of chain-of-command heirarchies - a form of authority familiar to millions of jobholders today. Even the wars of the future - whether planned or merely imagined - can steal our tax dollars today.
     Not surprisingly, imagined wars grip our minds. Knights, samurai warriors, janissaries, hussars, generals, and G.I. Joes parade relentlessly through the pages of history and the corridors of our mind. Literature, painting, sculpture, and movies picture the horrors, heroism, or moral dilemmas or war, real or unreal.
     But while wars actual, potential, and vicarious shape our existence, there is a completely forgotten reverse reality. For every one of our lives has also been shaped by wars that were NOT fought, that were prevented because "anti-wars" were won.
     War and anti-war, however, are not either/or opposites. Anti-wars are not just waged with speeches, prayers, demonstrations, marches, and picket lines calling for peace. Anti-wars, more important, include actions taken by politicians, and even the warriors themselves, to create conditions that deter or limit the extent of war. In a complex world, there are times when war itself becomes an instrument needed to prevent a bigger, more terrible war. War as anti-war.
     At the highest level, anti-wars involve strategic applications of military, economic, and informational power to reduce the violence so often associated with change on the world stage.
     Today, as the world hurtles out of the industrial age and into a new century, much of what we know about both war and anti-war is dangerously out of date. A revolutionary new economy is arising based on knowledge, rather than conventional raw materials and physical labor. This remarkable change in the world economy is bringing with it a parallel revolution in the nature of warfare.
     Our purpose therefore is not to moralize about the hatefulness of war. Some readers may confuse the absence of moralizing for an absence of empathy with the victims or war. This is to assume that cries of pain and anger are enough to prevent violence. Surely there are enough cries of pain and enough anger in the world. If they were sufficient to produce peace, our problems would be over. What is missing is not more emotive expression but a fresh understanding of the relations between war and a fast-changing society.
     This new insight, we believe, could provide a better base of action by the world community. Not crash-brigade, after-the-fact intervention, but future-conscious preventative action based on an understanding of the shape that wars of tomorrow may assume. We offer no panacea. What we offer, instead, is a new way of thinking about war. And that, we believe, may be a modest contribution to peace, for a revolution in warfare requires a revolution in peacefare as well.
     Anti-wars must match the wars they are intended to prevent.