Molly Ivins December 24

AUSTIN, Texas — Peace on Earth. Good will toward men. It's always easy to use Christmas as an ironic premise to examine just how bestial man's inhumanity to man is at this particular yuletide — an exercise that one can sum up by concluding that it's an insult to beasts to call it bestial.

True, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute now counts 25 official wars going on around the globe, but that's down from 35 at the end of the Cold War. The long-running Angolan civil war has just broken out again; Rwanda recently provided a spectacular example of genocide in our time; the Taliban in Afghanistan is going for a new record in human rights abuse; and we ourselves have just thoughtfully stopped bombing Iraq yet again. But rather than cruising the human misery front, let's take a serious look at how we might usefully resolve conflicts, stop wars and curb abuses.

The first thing to remember is that it can be done and in fact is done quite frequently. But it's amazing how many people still believe that "war will always be with us" and that "you can't change human nature." You probably can't change human nature, but you can change human behavior.

After 800 years of killing in Northern Ireland over who represents the correct flavor of Christianity (the religion of peace and love), there is peace today on the Emerald Isle. And of all the places on Earth with long, tangled histories of hatred and recurring violence — the Balkans, the Middle East — Ireland has ranked right up there for 800 years. It can be done.

The Nobel Peace Prize has failed to find a recipient only 19 times in 97 years — suspended during World War I and II and some years when the committee could not reach a decision. But there were always candidates.

Let me begin with a modest proposal: Why not put some resources into peace? Amazingly enough, it pays off. Given the amount of money we spend on the War Department, it's criminally stupid not to put at least half that much into peace.

We have a War College — why not a Peace College? We have military service academies — why not academies turning out diplomats and peacemakers? There are defense think tanks all over the land; the few groups funded to think about peace, like the late Winston Foundation, are outmanned and outgunned, as it were.

One of the single most useful things we could do to encourage peace on Earth is to stop encouraging our own weapons export industry. We Americans are the merchants of death on this globe; we sell more arms around the world than anyone else by a long, long margin.

And much of that arms trade is taxpayer-subsidized.

We have yet to sign a number of important weapons-control treaties, including the ban on land mines. Even Princess Diana, who before her death was not considered a great brain, had the sense to see that that was desperately needed — and she had the courage and persistence to work for it.

Supporting the United Nations is another minimally decent move, starting with the painful matter of our long-overdue dues. It's easy to make fun of the United Nations, but it does do effective peacekeeping when the folks who run it get their acts together.

In addition, the organization supplies an invaluable commodity: accurate information. The U.N. figures on economics, population, health, education, etc., are the best and are used by scholars everywhere. If the United Nations didn't exist, we'd have to invent it for the information alone.

True, the organization is sometimes silly and maddening (like the Congress that criticizes it), but as Winston Churchill said, jaw-jaw-jaw is better than war-war-war. I think Ted Turner should have gotten far more praise from the media and the public than he did for his extraordinary contribution to the United Nations; I notice that Bill Gates' far smaller contribution to vaccinations got much bigger play. (That's what a public relations operation can do for you.)

Then too, almost unnoticed, U.N. diplomats like Brian Urquart are capable of trotting around the globe, quietly putting out small wars here and there. Urquart is the man who realized that ridicule can be an effective tool of diplomacy.

As Chapter 72 is our long-running feud with Iraq's Saddam Hussein recently proved, we also need to start thinking outside the envelope. In other words, instead of going through this same sorry, useless charade of a minuet with Saddam, which always ends the same way, why not try a completely different approach?

What does he want? He wants the sanctions lifted. All right, let's start offering him some new deals. He does something we want — we lift a sanction; something else — we lift another one. How hard is it to figure out that what we're doing doesn't work and that we need to try something else?

One thing we don't need to do is spend more money on our military. Congress is already appropriating more than the Pentagon asked for — for pure pork-barrel purposes. And the Republicans are muttering about making "neglect" of the military an issue. In order to justify a military buildup, we'd have to have an enemy. And since we already spend more than the entire rest of the world combined on the military — if you exclude our allies, we spend twice as much as the rest of the world combined — spending even more seems a little silly.

Why not try making our few enemies less hostile toward us instead? It's cheaper.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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