When, if Ever, is the Use of Military Force Morally Justifiable?

[Alternative title: Militarism, Morality, and War]

Paul Rasor

The 2009 Kiplinger Lecture, Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church, November 21, 2009

            I want to thank the Kiplinger Committee for inviting me to give this lecture, and especially Robert McClusky and Harvey Lerner for their attention to the details that make an event like this work.  I also want to thank Rev. Roger Fritts and the members of the Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church for your excellent hospitality – and for attending today.  It is an honor and a pleasure to be with you.

            The title announced for this lecture is “When, if ever, is the use of military force morally justifiable?” I have to say that I am not entirely comfortable with this title.  This is often a problem when I have to turn in a title several months in advance, and in this case the problem is compounded by the fact that I have been rethinking these issues over the past year or so.  But this is what we have this afternoon, so let’s start here.  

            To begin, the question posed in our title cannot be answered in the abstract.  By this I do not mean simply that we can respond only to specific wars, though that always sharpens any analysis.  Certainly it is possible to adopt a principled position that says war is always wrong, or that military force is morally justifiable only for defense against foreign aggression or for purposes of humanitarian intervention, say, and then argue about whether any particular situation satisfies these conditions.  These positions are basically those of pacifism and just war, the frameworks within which the morality of war has traditionally been evaluated.

            But there is another sense in which this question cannot be answered in the abstract.  These traditional approaches, and especially the just war model as it has evolved over several centuries, presuppose a world of independent nation-states concerned with threats or potential threats from their neighbors.  But for the United States today, the world of independent nation-states is no longer the relevant context for the use of military force.  It is commonly said that the U.S. is now the world’s only superpower.[1]  This is of course correct, but the language of superpower does not really capture the reality we must address if we are to talk intelligently about the morality of war.  A better term is empire.  This term is rarely used in public discussion, much like the word “socialism” in our health care debates, but the reality is that America today is the most powerful empire the world has ever seen, far stronger and more dominant than even the Romans could have imagined.[2] 

             So, our question needs to be reframed to fit this context.  Perhaps we should ask: When, if ever, is it morally justifiable for a world-dominating empire to use military force?  A related question is whether the traditional approaches to the moral analysis of war can be effective in this kind of international context, indeed, whether they are even possible any longer.  

            With this in mind, here is my plan for the talk.  I will begin by describing the context for our question in a bit more detail, focusing in particular on the issue of militarism.  I’ll then examine some of its implications and note how these complicate the process of moral discernment.  I’ll close by offering some tentative suggestions for how we might respond, both as Unitarian Universalists and as concerned citizens.  I’m not sure whether we will end up with a satisfactory answer to the question posed by the title, but I hope this will provide some helpful reference points for further discussion.

Context: The “New Militarism”

            The central feature of our current context is nicely captured by the title of an important recent book by Andrew Bacevich: The New Militarism: How Americans are Seduced by War.  While “new militarism” is an apt term, for liberals it is important to understand that this was not invented by the Bush administration.  American militarism goes back at least to World War I, and its roots lie in the period of European colonial conquest.  Yet in an important sense it is new; the American military empire has expanded rapidly in the past two decades, since the end of the Cold War. 

Our militaristic worldview has become so normalized that it is now simply taken for granted.  It is embraced as much by political liberals as by conservatives; certainly no politician of either party who wants to keep her or his job can dare question it.  In the 2004 presidential campaign, for example, Senator Kerry, the democratic candidate, criticized the Bush’s administration’s strategy and management of the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he did not question the fundamental commitment to open-ended war.[3]  President Obama may – may – have a deeper commitment than his predecessors to limiting the use of military force.  But the pull of this new militarism is so strong that he is unlikely to be able to resist.  If he does say “no” to the next Iraq or the next Afghanistan, and there will be one, his opponents will almost certainly attack him as a liberal wimp, or a well-meaning but misguided idealist with no military experience, perhaps even a coward.  In today’s political climate, that might be enough to turn him out of office.  

            I want to highlight just a few features of this reality, this new militarism.  The most visible is the size of the standing military force we now maintain.  This is a relatively new phenomenon in American history.  Once upon a time in America, armies were raised from among the citizenry in response to a specific crisis, and then disbanded after the crisis passed.  Within one year after the end of the Civil War, for example, the Union Army had been reduced from one million to 57,000 men, a reduction of nearly 95 percent.  The same practice was followed after the end of World War II, when the U.S. army was reduced by nearly ninety percent, dropping from more than eight million to less than one million within two years, even though the United States had by then taken on global post-war responsibilities.[4]   This historical pattern reflects a central concern of the American Founders, who were well aware of the dangers of large standing armies.

            Today, however, this policy has been abandoned.  The nature of modern weapon systems means that our military capacity can no longer be measured simply in terms of the numbers of troops.  Even so, the troop levels are telling.  There are about 1.5 million U.S. military personnel on active duty today.[5]  This is second only to China, which has over two million.  Russia, by the way, is fifth, with about one million active duty personnel, approximately two-thirds the U.S. level.[6]

            A more important indication of the new militarism is the enormous build-up of strategic weapons.  Here are a few tidbits to chew on.  We are the only nation on earth that has even one large attack aircraft carrier, and we have eleven.  Ten of these are Nimitz class nuclear-powered carriers, each of which carries ninety (90) fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters and can operate continuously for twenty years without refueling.[7]  These are now slated to be replaced by a group of even larger Ford class carriers, the first of which will cost five billion dollars and is scheduled to emerge from the Northrop Grumman shipyard in Newport News, Virginia, in 2015.[8]  

We see a similar picture when we look at air power.  The U.S. Marines alone have more attack aircraft than the entire British Royal Air Force, and this is the smallest of the three American service branches that operate their own air force.[9]  The Air Force, Navy, and Marines together have a combined force of approximately 3,500 fighter and attack aircraft.  In comparison, neither the Russian nor the British air force has even a thousand.[10]  And this fleet of American war planes does not just sit on the tarmac at military bases in the U.S. or even on aircraft carriers.  Nearly two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the globalized American Empire continues to be maintained by more than 700 foreign military bases in more than 100 different countries, as well as by hundreds of ships, submarines and strategic aircraft that are constantly on the move all around the globe. [11]

            This enormous military establishment is not cheap.  We spend more on the military than at any time in our past, both in real dollars adjusted for inflation and as a percentage of the federal budget.  By some calculations, we spend more on defense than all other nations in the world combined.[12]  The upshot is that we have the strongest military machine the world has ever seen; no other nation or bloc of nations even comes close.  Yet no one seriously argues that we need this much military power for actual defense.  As Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer notes, “U.S. military spending and policy [are] largely divorced from any credible threat or vital security need.”[13] Instead, the military establishment’s primary mission is what Bacevich calls “global power projection.”[14]

            The result, as Jonathan Schell notes, is that “for the first time in its history” the United States finds itself “in possession of a gigantic military force with no particular enemy to fight.”[15]  This is precisely the danger the Founders had warned against.  The events of 9/11 seemed to offer a way out of this anomalous situation.  From the perspective of the new militarism, the significance of 9/11 is that we now had a new enemy.  And as Schell points out, “by identifying this target as generic ‘terrorism’ rather than as Al Qaeda or any other group,” and by calling the campaign a “war,” we gave ourselves a justification – Schell calls it a license – to undertake “military operations anywhere in the world.”[16]  America’s military domination was converted from a matter of simple fact into a matter of imperial policy.  This policy was formalized in a 30-page document called the National Security Strategy of the United States of America (NSS) issued by President Bush in September, 2002.[17] 

The Theology of Violence

            I think it can help clarify what is at stake if we think of the new militarism not simply in political terms, but in theological terms.  Cornel West argues that “aggressive militarism” is one of the central dogmas of American empire,[18] and I see this dogma as supported by a deeper theology of violence.  In this theology, violence is what brings us salvation, and the military is the divine instrument chosen for this purpose.  Theologian Walter Wink calls this “the myth of redemptive violence.”[19]  Like religious mythologies everywhere, its story is ritualistically told and retold, and in this way passed from generation to generation.

The basic story line is always the same.  Think of every western movie you have ever seen, including modern equivalents such as Star Wars and its clones, every police or detective story, every superhero story.  In every case, there is bad violence, symbolizing the evil we must conquer.  And in every case, this bad violence is overcome by good violence.  The good guys bring the bad guys to justice by applying superior force, and sometimes superior intelligence, either capturing or killing them in the end.  This same mythological narrative is repeated in children’s cartoons and video games, many of which are cast in explicitly militaristic terms.[20]  Our children learn the salvific power of military force and other forms of violence at an early age.  This worldview, the myth of redemptive violence, is so deeply engrained in us that it seems perfectly normal. 

Aesthetics of Militarism

            An important cultural sign of the new militarism is what Bacevich calls “a new aesthetic of war.”  We can see this in the way Hollywood films about the military have changed over the years.  In the great World War I films such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Paths of Glory (1957), warfare is depicted as “barbarism, brutality, ugliness, and sheer waste.”[21]  The films of the post-World War II era continue to emphasize the death and cruelty of war, but with this important difference: these are now portrayed in terms of heroism and sacrifice.  More importantly, the war itself is portrayed as serving a greater cause, one the soldiers themselves clearly understood.  Think of films such as From Here to Eternity (1953) and The Longest Day (1962).  I’m sure you can name your own examples.  In post-Vietnam films such as Apocalypse Now (1979) and Platoon (1986), we see a return to the World War I aesthetic.  The strong antiwar message is conveyed through gruesomely realistic combat scenes and by showing how the madness of war infects the soldiers who fight in it. 

            Beginning in the 1980s, however – not coincidentally during the Reagan administration, a new kind war film begins to appear.  The soldier is no longer a disgruntled or mad antihero, but instead has been converted into a courageous hero figure.  Yet these films do not simply return to the World War II aesthetic.  The soldiers are no longer fighting for a great moral or national cause; instead, their primary loyalty is now to other soldiers.  In films like Black Hawk Down (2001) and the mindless but popular Rambo films (1982, 1985, 1988, and 2008), we see this message played out in the context of rescue; in more recent films such as Jarhead (2005) and We Were Soldiers (2006), we are told of soldiers’ courage and bravery in the face of impossibly difficult situations.  The significant point is that the justness of the war has been replaced by what theologian Patrick McCormick calls the “warrior’s code in which soldiers are fighting only for their fellow comrades.”[22]  This view reflects the new militarism because it does not require a just cause or any other larger moral context.  It is simply combat.  And this all happens without any need for law, international cooperation, or democratic debate.[23]  In fact, these traditional restraints on war are portrayed as getting in the way.

            Meanwhile, the non-combat films of this period give us a new image of the military as an institution.  In An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), the hero goes to the Navy’s officer candidate school where he “overcomes adversity to achieve manhood and find true love,” as Bacevich nicely puts it.  But the plot is really irrelevant.  The real message is that the military is a worthy career choice, one that offers even a misfit loner “a way to be somebody.”[24]  

            The most important film of this type is Top Gun (1986), where high-tech warfare becomes glamorous and even has its own upbeat soundtrack.  In place of the dirt, blood, disease, and bad food that have always been the soldier’s lot, we learn that we can win a war without missing a meal.  As Bacevich describes it, the world of the modern American warrior is one of “warm California sunshine, hot motorcycles and classic cars, leather jackets ..., sleek-bodied aircraft flown by sleek-bodied men, [and] beautiful women.”[25]  Not only is the military a worthy career choice, it is way cool.  The larger point is that by depicting “soldiers, military life, and war itself in ways that would have been either unthinkable or unmarketable in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam,”[26] these films contributed to public acceptance of the new militarism by tapping into a longing for more positive images of the military.  

Consequences of the New Militarism

The Normalization of War

Let me turn now to some of the implications of this new militarism both for the nation and for our ability to respond to questions about the morality of war.  The most important of these is the normalization of war, which Bacevich describes as “a tendency to see international problems as military problems and to discount the likelihood of finding a solution except through military means.”[27]  

Once upon a time in America, peace was seen as the normal condition, even if it was occasionally interrupted by war.  Political leaders were extremely reluctant to send troops into harm’s way in foreign lands.  No more.  Since the 1980s, our leaders have been quick to label world events as crises, and to respond by sending troops.  Preparing for and actually waging war “has become ‘the normal state and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.’”[28]  And the American public not only accepts this, but cheers it on.  As Bacevich says, “Today as never before in their history Americans are enthralled with military power,”[29] readily accepting “the prospect of war without foreseeable end.”[30]  Here again we see the theology of redemptive violence at work, both reflecting and reinforcing the belief that war is what will save us.

An important symbol of this public attitude is the slogan “support the troops.”  This has become a mantra in American political discourse, partly because it expresses a shared sensibility.  After all, who among us would say that we do not support our women and men in uniform.  But there are some problems here.  For one thing, by reducing public debate to a simplistic bumper-sticker notion, this slogan undermines the deeper moral analysis we should be engaged in.  These days merely raising hard moral questions can be perceived as unsupportive, and any sort of nuanced analysis is out of the question. 

More importantly, as McCormick points out, this slogan promotes the myth of redemptive violence by “viewing the soldier as the one who solves problems.”[31]  This also places an unfair burden on soldiers, who may be expected to solve problems they simply cannot solve.  Supporting the troops in this sense means more than providing them with appropriate weapons and protective body armor, or turning out to cheer returning troop carriers.  It also means making their service meaningful by supporting the cause for which they are fighting.  How often have you heard someone say “I was originally against going to war in Iraq, but now that we’re there we have to support the troops by seeing it through?”  But what exactly does this mean?  One common view is that ending the war prematurely – before we have “won” – would dishonor the sacrifice made by those who have already served, and especially those who have died.  We don’t want our soldiers to have died in vain, so we always have a reason to continue the war. 

            The normalization of war makes our traditional moral reference points seem inadequate or even irrelevant.  How do you apply the central premise of the just war tradition, the principle that war is morally acceptable only as a last resort, when war has become a permanent state?  What this says to me is that rather than debating the morality of particular wars, or perhaps in addition to doing this, we should be debating the moral implications of militarism itself.  Yet in today’s political climate, even to suggest this is to invite attacks on one’s patriotism.  The morality of militarism is apparently the one public debate we cannot have.    

National Identity

            Another consequence of the new militarism is a shift in our national identity.  War is no longer simply a practice we sometimes use in specific circumstances.  Instead, as Bacevich notes, our high-tech weaponry and the soldiers who use it “have come to signify who we are and what we stand for.”[32]  In other words, in the new militarism war is not just about what we do, it is about who we are. 

            War is deeply embedded in our national narrative – in the stories we tell about ourselves as a people.  These foundational stories contain within them, and reflect back to us, the moral values we cherish.  Stories of war have always been part of the American story, and as these stories are told and retold over time, they become self-legitimizing.  Theologian Stanley Hauerwas puts it this way: “war continues to seem necessary because we have found no way to tell the stories of our lives in which war does not play a role.  We cannot get rid of war because ... [w]e quite simply cannot comprehend a world without war.”[33]  

            The entrenched place of war in our national narrative also affects our ability to apply the traditional tools for moral evaluation.  Hauerwas argues that the just war tradition is itself part of this narrative, and that as a result it inherently legitimizes war.  This is more than a claim that the just war criteria can be manipulated or that they are not applied rigorously enough.  The problem is that the very process of engaging in just war analysis “unwittingly functions as part of the logic of war.”[34]  In other words, the just war tradition inevitably undermines its own effectiveness simply by treating war as a rational human enterprise.

            Yet there is an even deeper problem.  Some observers have pointed out that war has a positive moral dimension we need to recognize before we can adequately respond to it.  These commentators are not arguing that war is a positive moral good.  What they are getting at is the role war plays in our structures of meaning.  Hauerwas and his co-authors put it this way: “We suspect that among our deepest moral intuitions is the presumption that war is necessary if we are to live worthy lives.”[35]   

            Chris Hedges, a former New York Times war correspondent who spent more than fifteen years covering wars on the ground all over the world, makes this point in the title of his powerful book, War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.[36]  Here is what he says about his own war experience:

I learned early on that war forms its own culture. The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by myth makers—historians, war correspondents, film makers, novelists, and the state—all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism, power, chances to rise above our small stations in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that has a grotesque and dark beauty.

Hedges continues:

The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living. Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. … [War] gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble.[37]

            I’m sure many of you have experienced war first-hand, and I would be interested to hear your take on this during our discussion.  My own direct experience of war is the result of the many trips I made to El Salvador in the 1980s.  When I first read Hedges’ interpretation I resisted it.  The war and the suffering it caused repulsed me, and I was sure that whatever truth he was articulating did not apply to me.  But if I am honest with myself, I have to acknowledge the hold this war had on me.  A kind of bizarre attraction paradoxically seemed to accompany the deep revulsion I felt.  Many images remain with me two decades later: helicopters strafing poor civilian neighborhoods, the sounds and smells of gunfire and mortar shells, people running for cover as military vehicles and armed foot soldiers – many of them young boys with M-16s in their hands and fear in their eyes – swept down the streets in front of me, the bloodied and wounded bodies laid out in makeshift infirmaries in school cafeterias and hotel lobbies.  As much as I identified with the people and wanted help end their suffering, I recognized that I also felt a kind of privilege – I hope it was not pride – that I was there to bear witness.  The war in El Salvador had touched something deep inside me, something profoundly meaningful.  Certainly this experience has become part of my own story.

            Meaning-making is one of the primary roles of religion in our lives.  This means that war, by providing this kind of meaning-making experience, takes on a certain religious aspect.  It certainly has many of the ritual trappings of most religious traditions, including days of festival and celebration, special forms of music, ritualized reenactments of its founding stories, rites of belonging and passage, and above all the centrality of sacrifice.  War’s religious nature is one reason it is so deeply embedded in our national psyche.  The irony is that our moral presumptions about war have been turned upside down.  If war is inevitable, if it is a source of meaning in our lives, then the idea of abolishing it or even limiting it not only seems naïve, it seems wrong; it threatens us with a loss of meaning.

How to Respond?

            So where does this leave us?  How might we respond to these hard realities and also address the moral question we started with?  I am quick to say that I have no easy answers; in fact I do not think there are easy answers.  But I do have a few suggestions to share and I hope you will add your own during our discussion.

            First, we need to continue our prophetic tradition by speaking out in protest.  To speak prophetically is to speak out against injustice and suffering, and to call society and its leaders to account for the misuses of power that lead to injustice and suffering.  Religious liberals have a long tradition of this kind of prophetic practice, and we need to recall and draw on that tradition today.  Both the pacifist and just war traditions are prophetic in the sense that they provide frameworks for holding our leaders morally accountable for the wars they undertake in our names.  We can of course continue to use these traditions to evaluate and critique specific wars and calls for war.  Yet as I have indicated, these approaches do not offer an adequate response to militarism.  We also need to direct our prophetic voice toward militarism itself.

            This will not be easy.  To do this well, to speak in a way that has a chance of being taken seriously, will require a deeper understanding of complex international and military issues than most of us have, myself included.  It will not be enough to argue that militarism is bad because it inevitably leads to war; in fact, in our culture today we cannot even assume that others will agree that reducing war is a good thing.  We will need to make the case that a militarized American empire not only is not necessary for national defense, but that it in fact weakens our security and threatens the core democratic values in whose name we have built it.  Our discussions about these issues should lead to debates about what real security actually means and the conditions it requires.  This will be long-term work, and in today’s political climate, it will likely involve some risk.  Anyone who opposes our slide into militarism and endless war is likely to be dismissed out of hand or even condemned as unpatriotic.  But it is important that this prophetic voice continue to be heard in the public discourse.

            A second thing we can do is tell a new story.  War may be embedded in our national narrative, but its meaning can be reinterpreted and other stories can be told.  We can teach our children the stories of successful nonviolent movements for social change in all parts of the world, and we can teach them the skills and mind-sets necessary to sustain these practices.  Moreover, if war is sustained by the mythology of redemptive violence, then we need to begin constructing mythologies of redemptive nonviolence.  As Schell has said, “the days when humanity can hope to save itself ... with force are over,”[38] and we need stories that reinforce this message.  This is not a new idea.  After all, the principle that nonviolence is what saves us lies at the heart of Christianity, the tradition out of which Unitarian Universalism emerged. 

            We can also reinterpret the meaning-making role of sacrifice in our historical narrative.  I noted earlier how the tendency toward perpetual war is fed by the widespread belief that stopping a war dishonors those who have already made sacrifices in it.  I see the logic of this mind-set, but I have to say that I have never really understood it.  Surely there must be a way to honor those who have sacrificed without requiring more dying and killing in their names.  We don’t demand a cycle of perpetual equivalent sacrifice in other contexts.  Most of us have parents or grandparents who worked hard all their lives, saving their money, denying themselves even small luxuries so their children could stay in school, perhaps even go to college, and have better lives than they had.  In other words, they sacrificed precisely so that their children would not have to make the same sacrifices.  We honor their sacrifice by expressing our gratitude and by making the best of the opportunities they made possible.

            We construct a similar narrative on a social level.  The very possibility of an African American President in the United States emerged out of the struggles and sacrifices of previous generations.  President Obama regularly speaks of standing on the shoulders of those who came before him.  In a very real way, his presidency is their presidency.  Hilary Clinton does the same thing when she aligns herself with the suffragists and others whose past struggles made it possible for her to become not just a token but a serious and legitimate candidate for the American presidency.  Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor also situates her own accomplishments within the larger context of the sacrifices of her forebears.  These are but prominent examples of a common American story; none of us ever starts from scratch.

            So why is it that in war, we feel that each generation has to repeat the sacrifices of the past?  How is that honoring their sacrifice?  I have a hard time imagining a veteran of either World War saying to his grandchildren: “Look at the sacrifice I made.  I was wounded in the war, and lots of my buddies were killed.  I will feel dishonored, that it was all in vain, unless you find your own war in which to fight and die.”  The veterans I know may hope their children and grandchildren would be willing to make these sacrifices if they were truly necessary, but I suspect that their most fervent hope is that their children and grandchildren will be spared this task.  We honor them by building on the freedoms they helped sustain and by creating the better world they envisioned, a world that can learn to solve its problems without war.  In fact, I would argue that our current militarism dishonors these veterans by telling them in effect that we did not learn the lesson their sacrifice was meant to teach us, and by threatening the very democratic principles and freedoms for which they made that sacrifice. 

            Something else we can do is to write the doctrine of American exceptionalism out of our national narrative.  This doctrine is based on the biblical idea of a people chosen by God for a special purpose and therefore deemed to be of special worth.  Sadly, we know the history of racism and genocide that are among the legacies of this doctrine in its American form.  Today the principle of American exceptionalism tells us that we don’t have to play by the same rules as other countries, that we are above and therefore exempt from international law and not answerable to international institutions.  This is an astonishingly arrogant posture, but it is one that is fully compatible with the American militaristic empire.  Ironically, we sometimes claim to be exempt even from our own rules – the basic democratic principles of our Constitution – even as we seek to impose these same principles on others by force.  In the current reality of American empire, I think the right biblical analogy is not that we are the new chosen people, but that we are the new Rome.[39]

            Finally, I believe we need to continue and deepen our commitment to peacemaking in all its forms.  Many of these are identified in the new Statement of Conscience on Peacemaking proposed by the UUA Commission on Social Witness, and I won’t take the time to go through them here.  The important point is that these kinds of activities represent a constructive alternative to militarism.  They respond to the question: If war is not the answer, then what is?  In fact, we should integrate these kinds of peacemaking practices into our national narrative.  Just as war has long been part of our story, we need to write a new chapter in which war gives way to peacemaking as representing the core of our national identity.

            In the end, this will require a spiritual transformation, a new way of looking at the world and our place in it.  As Bacevich says, the normalcy of war “cries out for a close and critical reexamination … [of] the fundamentals of U.S. military policy.  Yet a meaningful reexamination will require first a change of consciousness, seeing war and America’s relationship to war in a fundamentally different way.”[40]

            This will require hard work and sustained commitment.  But we must begin.  It can help if we recall that the present reality of militarized empire is the result of choices, and that we can make different choices.  As Schell reminds us, “No irrevocable decision has been made.”[41]  At least not yet.  Perhaps our grandchildren, or their grandchildren, will one day look back and honor our choices for peace in the same way we now honor our forebears’ sacrifices in war.  Let us hope they will see our actions as a worthy effort, an important step on the long road toward breaking the vicious cycle of violence. 

            Thank you.

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