In his State of the Union address, President Bush said "America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people." Forget for a moment whether the unilateral, preventive, illegal and very unwise invasion of Iraq had anything to do with the security of the American people. Consider simply that if we flagrantly disregard the rule of law on the world stage, we eliminate any incentive for anyone else to abide by it. We strike at the very foundations of the legitimacy of the international system. We set the pot simmering with a recipe for international anarchy. Last year Jonathan Schell wrote: "there are moments in history when ... what is at stake is not just who will win and who will lose, but the rules by which everyone will have to play from then on." If we disregard the law of nations, we are left with the law of the jungle, where the only constraint on violence is the power and ruthlessness of those who would employ it. Rest assured, in that world, we will not be the only ones to employ it.

A Department of Peace

In 1793, Dr. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, published "A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States." "As the War-Office of the United States was established in the time of peace," wrote Dr. Rush, "it is equally reasonable that a Peace-Office should be established in the time of war." 

Dennis Kucinich aspires to revive Rush's grand idea and to establish a Department of Peace to stand alongside the Department of Defense. If our country must spend hundreds of billions every year preparing for war, how about just 1% of that amount for a department whose raison d'etre is preventing war?

The Department of Peace would seek to make non-violence an organizing principle of society. It would present a wider range of alternatives within the councils of our government.  It would seek to articulate new structures of global governance, a paradigm of people resolving differences without resorting to primitive violence and a clear and sparkling vision of permanent peace as a higher evolution of Homo sapiens as a social animal.

On September 11, 2001, George Bush told the nation that "the first war of the 21^st Century" had now been joined. It was as if it was self-evident, for him, that our new century would be soaked in at least as much blood as the last - when more than 100 million souls died face down in the mud. Dennis Kucinich takes no such fatalistic view of the destiny of the human race. The Department of Peace proposal, most fundamentally, is about the proposition that it is within the power of the human imagination to envision abolishing war itself.

Toward a Politics of Human Unity

Science writer Michael Shermer recently said: "In-group morality is a universal human trait ... from the earliest bands and tribes to modern nations and empires. The long-term solution is to view all people as members of our in-group: the species Homo sapiens." 

Dennis Kucinich knows that politics is not only about tangible policy ideas, but also intangible spiritual ideals. And the Americans supporting Dennis Kucinich for president believe that the advancing tide of human unity may be no less than the Great Story of the 21st Century.  We know that each of us is bound to a common destiny, that higher than our loyalty to our nation is our loyalty to humankind, that we are all in the same boat on Spaceship Earth. We claim that our national patriotism must be transcended in this new century by our planetary patriotism. We insist that our government's pursuit of national interests must be accompanied by a consideration of transnational interests.  We know that the only way to end incessant cycles of hatred and violence is to stop talking about "them and us," and to recognize that there is only us.

These are hardly new ideas. We stand in the tradition of what the great developmental psychologist Erik Erikson called an emerging "all-human solidarity." We see the first glimmerings of what the Princeton political scientist Robert C. Tucker called an "ethic of specieshood." We are the vanguard of what Voltaire called the "party of humanity."

The picture taken by Voyager 1 from beyond the orbit of Pluto shows our planet as a tiny speck - almost completely lost in the glare of the Sun. In his exquisite paean Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan wrote of this photograph: "Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot."  

We believe that Dennis Kucinich's global policy agenda reflects the truth of Earth from space. We compare the soft blues and greens of our fragile planet to the stark blackness of the cosmos and recognize the infinite preciousness of our lonely home, suspended among the blazing stars. We have a nagging intuition that the Whole Earth is perhaps something greater than the sum of its parts. We pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. But we also pledge our allegiance to humanity.

 

Tad Daley has served since September 2003 as National Issues Director and Senior Policy Advisor to the Presidential campaign of U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich. Congressman Kucinich, Democrat of Ohio, is Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and served as prime organizer of the Democratic opposition to the Iraq war resolution in the fall of 2002.