If Ever The Twain Shall Meet...

...John McCain and Barack Obama could beat swords into plowshares

In a recent speech delivered in Prague, Barack Obama called for the global elimination of nuclear weapons.

"I state clearly and with conviction America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," Obama announced. His stance remains at odds with American nuclear policies that weakly pursue non-proliferation elsewhere in the world -- in places such as Iran and North Korea, while failing in Israel, India and Pakistan -- while continuing to maintain stockpiles of nuclear weapons at home.

Those aresenals have long been maintained under the pretences of deterrence.

In a more reecent speech, John McCain called fof continued work on the US anti-ballistic missile shield.

McCain's comments were made in response to a recent missile launch by North Korea. "I believe there is no more compelling argument for missile defense capability than what just happened with the North Korean launch," McCain explained.

Many intellectuals, such as Freeman Dyson, have long opposed the missile defense shield -- otherwise known as the Strategic Defense Initiative -- because they argue that such counter-measures can only lead to increased proliferation by the United Statess' nuclear opponents.

Under conditions in which the United States continued to maintain nucear weapons, and especially under a doctrine that allows for first use of nuclear weapon, this was certainly true.

But with the Cold War long over, and the American nuclear doctrine that allowed for first use but not first strike -- reserving the right to use nuclear weapons to repel an invasion by the now-non-existent Soviet Union -- clearly outdated, a new possibility has evidently presented itself that was never present during the Cold War: the combination of SDI with complete nuclear disarmament.

Considering that the missile shield has yet to work, and whether or not it ever will work remains questionable, this may be a moot point.

But a successful missile defence shield would allow the United States to wean itself off of what the Plowshares movement calls "the idolatry of nuclear weapons".

The Plowshares movement -- the name given to the largely-Catholic movement that vandalizes nuclear weapons sites and pours their own blood on them as an act of civil disobedience (even if an act of civil disobedience fused with vandalism) argues that nuclear weapons became a false idol when the United States became politically and psychologically dependent upon them. Moreover, they argue this "idolatry of nuclear weapons" has become ecclesiastical, as few American politicians (at least until now) will refute the need for such weapons.

When Plowshares activists damage missile components and missile sites with hammers they are acting to help bring the prophetic events of Isaiah 2:4 to fruition. This passage reads:

"And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more."

Their spilling of their own blood -- usually drawn for weeks in advance of their protest, and smuggled in bottles -- is meant to symbolize Jesus Christ's self-sacrifice at the time of his crucifixion.

Clearly, the Plowshares movement does this in pursuit of a national redemption -- one similar to the kind that the Biblical Christ offers through his death and resurrection.

Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain have been shy about their Christian religious beliefs. Many of those in the Plowshares movement -- who, if anything, enjoy increased legitimacy in the post-Cold War world -- must feel encouraged by each man's support for nuclear disarmament.

McCain has declared his support for Obama's disarmament agenda, although Obama remains lukewarm to the missile defence shield.

Barack Obama needs to understand that, although costly, a successfully-developed issile defence shield would grant the United States the security necessary to pursue complete disarmament.

The United States unilaterally disarming will not rid the world of nuclear weapons. France, Britain, China, Russia, Israel, India and Pakistan will continue to have them. Iran and North Korea will continue to pursue them.

While the threat of a nuclear launch against the United States -- or any other western country -- is nearly non-existent today, it cannot be ruled out that there will not be such threats in the future. The United States needs to be prepared to meet them, and nuclear deterrence has clearly become an oudated model.

It's also important to note that, according to Christ's own example, the United States turning its nuclear cheek wouldn't entail passively accepting evil, but rather retaliating nonviolently -- in the case of missile defence, through the destruction of incoming missiles.

Realistically, SDI and nuclear disarmament are policies that can only be pursued together.

With any luck, Barack Obama and John McCain share the wisdom to recognize this.

A Dr Strangelove For All Times

Stanley Kubrick laughs in the face of nuclear war

For nearly 50 years after the conclusion of World War II, the world lived in fear of nuclear holocaust.

It was at the very height of this fear -- in 1964 -- that Stanley Kubrick produced Dr Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

In this classic film, Kubrick made the case that the terrors inspired by nuclear weapons were minor compared to the fear that should have been inspired by the human frailty, stupidity and greed of those in control of the world's nuclear arsenals.

The film begins auspiciously, as orders to attack the Soviet Union are issued to American bombers circling at their advance staging points.

When told to issue attack orders Captain Lionel Mandrake (played by the incomparable Peter Sellers) is immediately skeptical. When he's told orders to go to condition red are not an exercise, he seems perplexed by the very idea. Later in the film he insists that the orders simply must be an exercise.

His suspicions that General Ripper (Sterling Hayden) isn't on the level eventually lead him to confront him. When he deduces that Ripper is acting under his own prerogative Mandrake insists on calling the bombers back under his own authority.

Ripper has prevented this, but Mandrake displays what may -- in its own way -- be the only sane response to the prospect of nuclear war. Disbelief is the only sane response to the prospect of initiating nuclear warfare with its inevitable promise of mutual annhiliation.

There's certainly something both unsettling and contradictory about the notion of "nuclear combat", as expressed by Major TJ "King" Kong (Slim Pickens).

Nuclear war promised little resembling combat, instead merely offering a mutual exchange of overwhelming firepower.

In the situation room at the Pentagon, General "Buck" Turgidson (George C Scott) seems to buckle under the weight of the stupidity inherent in the system's design. In an effort to take human judgement out of the realm of decision making in regards to nuclear war the chiefs of staff have left themselves entirely unable to recall the bombers. Having sacrificed command in control ironically in the name of command and control, they've rendered themselves almost entirely impotent in the face of impending disaster.

The idea that a pair of doomsday weapons could actually be less destabilizing than common human frailty and stupidity is an unsettling (if amusing) idea, but that is precisely the idea Kubrick puts forth with Dr Strangelove.

When confronted over the United States' own doomsday device by Soviet Ambassador Alexi de Sadesky (Peter Bull), President Muffley seems to legitimately believe there is no such device. Hilariously, Sadesky says his source was the New York Times.

Then again, after the long and arduous ordeal that was the George W Bush Presidency, it seems far less than implausible that a newspaper would know more about that's going on in the United States than the President.

More humourously yet, the Soviet doomsday weapon is designed to detonate not if anyone activates it, but if someone attempts to deactivate it. The idea seems rather simple -- that, left unimpeded, doomsday devices would provide a stabilizing influence over nuclear affairs. In fact, the attempts to contravene nuclear holocaust lead instead to an increasing threat level.

As Freeman Dyson has noted, efforts to contravene nuclear holocaust through projects such as the Strategic Defense Initiative had not the stabilizing influence its designers would have hoped, but rather a destabilizing influence -- leaving Soviet leaders with few viable alternatives other than to build enough missiles to overwhelm SDI in order to eliminate the possibility of a retaliation-proof American attack.

(It's important to remember that American nuclear doctrine allowed for first use of nuclear weapons, while Soviet doctrine did not.)

SDI clearly wasn't a doomsday weapon. However, like a doomsday machine, SDI reveals the shortcomings of the notion of deterrence. Deterrence, as described by Dr Strangelove (Sellers again) is the production of fear in the minds of the enemy -- making them too afraid of retaliation to even dare a first strike.

Making the enemy too fearful only spurs them to create new weapons in order to reestablish a balance of power -- or even to re-tip the balance of power in their favour.

In the end, this kind of fear leads to a state of affairs in which annhiliation is nearly inevitable.

The same vein of thinking applied to the construction of nuclear arsenals can also be applied to the post-war environment, just as Dr Strangelove does when he dreams up a plan in which survivors of a nuclear war would take refuge in mineshafts, under conditions in which women would drastically outnumber men, and be encouraged to breed vigorously.

In the end, President Muffey and his administration simply allow the weapon to detonate, revealing another factor that led to a destabilization of the global nuclear order -- the belief that one could establish a favourable post-holocaust order, even one beneficial to oneself.

In Dr Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick reminds us that the only thing more terrifying than nuclear weapons are the people who were given control of them.

A Dr Strangelove For Our Times

Warning: the following post contains significant spoilers about the film The Watchmen. Those still interested in seeing this film should consider themselves forewarned.


Threat of nuclear holocaust looms over Watchmen

As time passes since the end of the Cold War, nuclear weapons have drifted further and further from the human imagination.

Since the prospect of nuclear holocaust has become a thing of the past the perceived relevance of nuclear weapons to international affairs has diminished.

The recent release of The Watchmen -- originally written by Alan Moore during the Cold War -- may inspire the reemergence of nuclear weapons back into the human imagination.

The ticking of the doomsday clock hangs heavily over The Watchmen. Woven immaculately in with the film's plot against the hunt for a hero killer is a plot about an alternate history Cold War in which the fate of the world hangs over jockeying between the United States and the Soviet Union over Afghanistan.

In this history, Richard Nixon has been elected President for three consecutive terms -- despite the unconstitutionality of the proposition -- the United States won the war in Vietnam, and Dr Manhattan (Billy Crudup) keeps a protective vigil over the world, wielding powers that conceivably allow him to avert a nuclear war.

Dr Manhattan essentially represents the ultimate Doomsday weapon. Throughout the film, he is credited with preventing the Soviet Union from carrying out the full extent of its ambitions for fear of the United States launching a nuclear reprisal with near impunity.

To emulate the language used in Dr Strangelove -- and reiterated by Freeman Dyson in Weapons and Hope -- Dr Manhattan presents both a doomsday gap and a superhuman gap which the Soviet Union cannot fill. The United States even uses him to win the Vietnam war -- many of the Viet Cong insist on surrendering to him personally, believing him to be a god.

This sentiment is echoed by a nuclear scientist in the film who insists that "...'God exists and he's American'."

However, he takes that sentiment to a logical conclusion when he adds, "If that statement starts to chill you after a couple of moments' consideration, then don't be alarmed. A feeling of intense and crushing religious terror at the concept indicates only that you are still sane."

In many ways, the existence of an interventionist God could -- and maybe even should -- terrify even the most faithful religious believer. The notion of God as a citizen or even partisan of any particular country should be considered even more terrifying.

The film presents Dr Manhattan as humanity's only hope -- the one thing that prevents the two most powerful forces on the planet from unleashing nuclear armageddon upon the planet. Dr Manhattan replaces the doctrine of MAD -- Mutually Assured Destruction -- with a doctrine of Unilaterally Assured Protection.

Yet the principle of Unilaterally Assured Protection does nothing to avert nuclear proliferation. If anything, UAP encourages further proliferation. As a fictional version of Eleanor Clift notes at the start of the film the idea that Dr Manhattan will prevent nuclear holocaust provides both Cold War beligerents with the motivation to make an open-ended commitment to nuclear proliferation.

The United States can do so secure in the notion that, if a nuclear war were to occur, they could expect Dr Manhattan to protect them first. The Soviet Union can be expected to do so out of fear -- hoping that they can build enough bombs to overwhelm Manhattan and the United States in a preemptive strike and destroy the entire American nuclear arsenal before it can be launched in retaliation.

(Although it's imporant to note that the nuclear doctrine of each country -- Soviet doctrine allowing for first strike but not first use of nuclear weapons and American doctrine allowing for first use of nuclear weapons but not first strike -- could have been expected to prevent such an outcome, provided they do not change.)

Even under Manhattan's protection, as Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode) notes, there are no guarantees. Even if Dr Manhattan stops 99% of the bombs, the remaining 1% would still kill every living thing on Earth.

It's worth noting that Dr Manhattan's promise of Unilaterally Assured Protection renders him akin to the Strategic Defense Initative -- the United States' proposed anti-nuclear missile shield. Freeman Dyson noted that techologies such as SDI led to three possible futures: an arms control future, a technical follies future, and a "live and let live" future.

In the real world, American commitment to the SDI led to enhanced tensions between the United States and Soviet Union that led to renewed commitment to anti-proliferation and arms reduction treaties.

In Watchmen, however, Dr Manhattan -- the god-like missile shield in human form -- upsets the delicate balance of power maintained in the real-world Cold War. Yet what emerges isn't an arms control future, a technical follies future (the extent of Dr Manhattan's power renders him immune to technical folly) nor a "live and let live" future.

Instead, Dr Manhattan's existence leads to a desperate future in which each side measures their ability to sneak enough atom bombs through the protective shield to annhiliate the other side.

The existence of the ultimate deterrent -- Unilaterally Assured Protection -- does nothing to reduce tensions.

But protection which is unilaterally assured can also be unilaterally withdrawn. Resultingly, humanity would be faced by a continuing need to ensure that Dr Manhattan continues to care about humanity. But there is no guarantee that anything that powerful would continue to care. It most certainly wouldn't need to.

When Dr Manhattan and Silk Spectre (Malin Ackerman) split up, Manhattan retreats to Mars where he indulges himself in the watch building exploits of his past.

With his last human link to the world severed, Dr Manhattan seems to feel no more motivation to protect the world. The protection he once unilaterally assured is now unilaterally withdrawn.

In the absence of the ultimate deterrent, the Soviet Union makes their move on Afghanistan. In response Nixon sets a two-day deadline for Dr Manhattan's return -- something considered akin to setting a deadline for God's intervention -- after which Nixon will give the order to launch a nuclear barrage of the Soviet Union.

In the end, Adrian Veidt seems to conclude that the only way out of the dilemma is to convince both sides to become united in their terror of Dr Manhattan -- something akin to uniting rival believers in terror of God. Oddly enough, Dr Manhattan reaches agreement with him. One could only wonder if an interventionist God would be so generous.

Planning For the Battlegrounds of the Future

Canadian army using sci-fi to prepare for future missions

As the Canadian Armed Forces look toward the future there's a clear premium on preparing professional soldiers for the operations of the future.

In an intriguing initiative, the Canadian Forces contracted science fiction author Karl Schroeder to produce Crisis in Zefra, a book about a peacekeeping mission set in an African city state 20 years in the future.

That was in 2005. Now, the army is set to have Schroeder pen a sequel.

The first Zefra book attempted to predict battlefield conditions in the year 2030. Zefra II will be set another ten years after that.

Of course, there are issues with trying to plan future military engagements around what one expects today.

For one thing, predictions about the future have been notoriously unreliable.

Even the most gifted individuals have had difficulty predicting future developments based on current realities. Countless children's books predicting the world of the future can attest to this.

20 years ago few people had predicted how central the internet would become to global civilization. 20 years before that many individuals doubted the commercial value of the personal computer.

Schroeder himself seems to recognize this as he admits that 2040 "is just far enough in the future that nearly everything we say is likely to be wrong."

"On the other hand, there are things that we know are coming down the pipe in the next 20 years or so and we can extrapolate from those what might be possible afterward," Schroeder explains. "So although what we end up doing will have a hugely speculative element to it, the foundations of the speculation are likely to be pretty solid."

Even if the predictions he's making are almost certainly bound to be incorrect, Schroeder asserts that there's still value in the attempt.

"That’s like painting your windshield black and driving out on the highway, as far as I’m concerned. You need to be able to look as far ahead as you can, even if it’s foggy and you can’t quite make things out," he insists.

Even if such predictions often seem to be cloudy, they often still have great merit. For example, in the December 1999 issue of Playboy magazine, Scott Ritter predicted the United States would suffer a minimum of 100,000 casualties during the act of defeating Saddam Hussein alone.

In reality, the United States suffered a comparatively negligible number of casualties during the fight against Saddam and has suffered the overwhelming majority of its casualties during the counter-insurgency effort since.

Yet Ritter's article could have persuaded many more Americans against the Iraq war, even if his specific projections proved to be inaccurate.

In particular, there seem to be some significan issues with some of the hardware-related predictions that Schroeder has made, including a "smart dust" that provides wi-fi connectivity to soldier's communication kits and weapons featuring IFF (Identify Friend/Foe) modules that won't allow them to fire in situations in which civilians may be endangered.

"A lot of guys in the military will raise their eyebrows over that and go, ‘Uh-oh, I see all kinds of pitfalls with that one.’ But it’s an interesting idea," mused Lieutenant Colonel Mike Rostek.

IFF technology is far from a new concept in military development. As Freeman Dyson notes in Weapons and Hope the need for such technology became evident as far off in history as the 1940s when British bomber commands started deploying anti-aircraft weaponry that could fire beyond visual range.

Interestingly, as a Mennonite, Karl Schroeder doesn't consider himself predisposed toward military-themed writing. "I was raised as a pacifist," he explains. "But the way I reconcile that is I’m a strong believer in a foreign policy philosophy called human security, which is championed by Lloyd Axworthy, which basically states that the state doesn’t deal just with other states. When there’s a crisis, it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a military crisis or a natural disaster or whatever, you intervene to save people. And, actually, Canada has acted on that philosophy for a number of years, and as a way of employing the army, I’m entirely in favour if it."

Attempting to predict the battlefields of the future may not be entirely reliable, but it very much is a worthwhile enterprise.

Whether or not Schroeder's work pays dividends in terms of preparedness for future conflicts is something that Canadians will have to wait 20 years to see, but it will be well worth the wait.

The Nightmare of Biological Warfare

Zombies-cum-biological warfare has been a theme of many recent movies -- 28 Days Later and the utterly-gone-to-shit Resident Evil films merely being a few of them.

Metallica has rarely backed away from dealing with the moral dilemmas underscoring warfare. Songs such as "One", "For Whom the Bell Tolls" and "Disposable Heroes" -- considered almost universally to be among their most classic works -- have addressed the human costs and horrors of armed conflict.

In the recently released video for "All Nightmare Long", off of their worthy recent effort Death Magnetic, Hetfield and company place the moral horrors of chemical warfare within the context of the Cold War.

The video uses the historic Tunguska explosion to set the table for the video, in which two fictional Soviet propaganda films, "Volcano Tunguska and the Revival of Organisms" and "Closing the Gap" are used to outline an insidious Soviet plot to use biological warfare to destroy the United States and replace it with a communist state.

In the video, a living spore is discovered in the ashes of the Tunguska explosion, reanimating dead animals. Taken for further study, Soviet scientists quickly discover that the spore can be used not merely to return the dead to life, but to reconstitute entire creatures from a few errant cells, or even heal injuries to the living.

In "Closing the Gap", a Russian propaganda film laments the Soviet Union's early inability to match the United States in the nuclear arms race. Soviet weapons tests, however, reveal new deposits of the reanimating spore, apparently lost at some point during the Second World War.

Further studies reveal two further details about the spore: animals reanimated by the spore tend to be extremely aggressive, and it quickly dies when exposed to radioactive Barium. The former discovery makes the spores militarily useful. The latter makes it controllable.

The film asserts that "An atomic US threatens the world with unchecked capitalist imperialism! They feed on the exploited and the spoils of war!"

The film also proposes the fictional Soviet solution to this threat: "We will feed them to their own!"

The Soviet plan involves sending a high-altitude balloon over the United States and dropping the spore from high altitude to be spread by wind. The dead are reanimated and turn violent. Naturally, they prove exceptionally hard to to control.

All that is left is for the Soviet Union to drag its feet, not deploying aid until it is too late. In the aftermath, the Soviets are left free to build a Communist state in the United States.

The stark immorality of such a scheme seems obvious, and it's the same moral dilemma faced by nearly any other biological war tactic -- biological warfare conducted on such a scale can't possibly discriminate between the guilty and the innocent.

Such tactics are all too reminiscent of total warfare, something humanity would be far better off having left to the pages of history. Yet total warfare continues to reemerge in all too many familiar patterns: civil and ethnic conflicts such as those in Rwanda and Darfur, and across the entire range of terrorist campaigns being conducted across the world today.

Sadly, biological weapons have provided those eager to engage in such conflict with the perfect weapon with which to do so.

The potential consequences of biological warfare go far beyond their applications during conflict. Zimbabwe's Minister of Information and Publicity, Dr Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, has recently blamed an outbreak of Colera and Anthrax on the use of the illnesses as biological weapons during civil conflict in that country. Furthermore, Ndlovu blames the United States and Britain for providing the weapons.

Realistically, there can only be one solution to the threat posed by biological weapons. Just as with landmines and, more recently, cluster munitions, a global ban on biological weapons needs to be pursued.

As Freeman Dyson notes, even Richard Nixon was able to see the wisdom of that.

The nightmare threat posed by biological warfare simply cannot be tolerated by any civilized society. It's time for the world to wake up.

Lions for Lambs Raises Important Questions About War on Terror

What would a win in the war on terror look like?

"Do you want to win the terror?" Senator Jasper Irving (Tom Cruise) asks. "This is the quintessential yes or no question of our time."

Janine Roth (Meryl Streep) shuffles uncomfortably in her chair. Like many Americans -- like many citizens in countries participating in the War on Terror (including in Canada) -- she probably knows her instinctive answer to that question. But then again, a question is nagging in the back of her mind: what do we do next?

Irving, an up-and-coming young Senator (annointed as "the future of the Republican party" by Roth herself) doesn't really seem to have an idea.

Lions for Lambs, Robert Redford's recent political drama about the war on terror (focusing almost entirely on Afghanistan), asks this question. Even if we all share Irving's single-minded desire for "a win", what precisely do we do next?

Lions for Lambs also inspires an even more important question: what, precisely, would "a win" in the war on terror look like? Just as Iraq has exposed the importance of the question of what we do following a military victory, we must also be very cognizant of this question.

If addressed from the point of view of pure elementary logic, it seems very simple: victory in the war on terror entails the elimination of terrorism. At its most simplistic, the idea of winning the war on terror suggests that we will one day live in a world without terrorism.

We desperately need to reconsider this answer. It's nothing more than a pipe dream.

In order to determine the truth of this, we need look no further than another historical pipe dream, one that allegedly originates from the opposite side of the political spectrum as the war on terror: the idea of a world without nuclear weapons.

In Weapons and Hope, Freeman Dyson -- a notable anti-nuclear weapons activist -- asks what he felt to be the most important question of the Cold War period: what would a nuclear weapons free world look like?

In the end, Dyson determines, it's virtually impossible. Once released from the lamp, the Nuclear genie could never be forced back inside.

Equally sadly, the idea of a terrorism-free world is equally impossible. Like nuclear weapons, terrorism is a genie that can never be forced back into the lamp. So long as individuals consider themselves oppressed and have a much more powerful enemy they want to fight, terrorism will always be a tempting option, be it as a form of societal intimidation or as asymetrical warfare.

In the single minded desire to win the war on terror, we need to be very cognizant of how we conceptualize victory.

Secure homelands are clearly an integral part of that concept. Whether we like it or not, we will have to engage the rest of the world -- both militarily and diplomatically -- in order to attain that security.

We must also avoid sinking to the depths of our opponents. Mutually Assured Destruction can come about from the careless disregard of the principles our civilization was built upon as from unrestrained escalation of the conflict abroad. And while dismantling terrorist networks by force is an absolute necessity, we must also ensure that terrorism doesn't become a bogeyman that can be exploited to push political agendas -- that is, if it hasn't already (and there's a good deal of disagreement on this).

Most importantly, we must ensure that our troops are fighting for what we tell them they are.

That's the responsibility of those of us on the home front, as Lions for Lambs reminds us. Whether we support the war on terror or not, it's our responsibility to hold our leaders accountable, and to ensure that our fighting men and women aren't put at unnecessary risk.

Certainly, we must win the war on terror. By the same token, we do ourselves -- and those who are fighting in this war -- a grave disservice if we fail to understand what victory in this conflict means, and how it will be won.

We must all do our part. We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of allowing our fighting men and women to do all the heavy lifting for us.

Out of the Mouths of Babes

Naivete at heart of Canadian "peace" movement

When Robert Batsch brought his daughters Jamie, 18, and Robyn, 12, to Saturday's "Pan-Canadian Day of Action Against War in Afghanistan", he probably thought he was making some kind of grand point.

"War is not the answer. You don't fight to create peace," he insisted.

His older daughter, however, made a far more interesting point.

"[The government] shouldn't be making decisions that not everyone agrees with," Jamie Batsch announced.

This particular comment really only marks a growing trend toward institutionalized naivete within Canada's so-called "peace" movement (which, as alluded to in a previous post, becomes highly suspect when the "peace" it envisions doesn't really resemble anything like peace).

The incredibly naive suggestion that the government should require complete consensus before making any kind of a decision (when, precisely, will everyone agree with a decision that has been made?) notwithstanding, what is truly surprising is that this naivete is only echoed in the words of the elder Batsch. One can expect such naivete from an 18-year-old with little surprise. It's when one hears it from a 49-year-old that it becomes alarming.

Jell-O Biafra once said that "fighting for peace is like fucking for cellibacy."

While to Biafra and those who think like him, such a statement may seem like a truism, the fact is that history entirely contradicts it.

While Biafra, Batsch and their cohorts may loathe to admit it -- often engaging in protracted rhetorical gymnastics in order to avoid doing so -- history has proven to be full of beligerents who simply had to be fought. Those who suggest that peace can be attained simply by not fighting has clearly neither dealt with a schoolyard bully, nor paid sufficient attention to their history books.

It should be unsurprising that those who espouse pacifism would have difficulty measuring their beliefs against the shadow of a belligerent. Yet, some pacifists have managed to find the wisdom necessary to do so.

Consider the example of Freeman Dyson, who had to resolve his own pacifist beliefs against the threat posed by Adolph Hitler. He relates them in Weapons and Hope:

"…We had made our break with the establishment and we were fierce pacifists. We saw no hope that any acceptable future would emerge from the coming war. We had made up our minds that we would at least not be led like sheep to the slaughter as the class of 1915 had been.

We were not so naïve as to blame our predicament upon Hitler. We saw Hitler only as a symptom of the decay of our civilization, not as the cause of it. To us the Germans were not enemies but fellow victims of the general insanity. … We did not bother to read Mein Kampf.

We seized upon non-violence as the alternative to never-ending bombs and death. We were not sure whether Hitler could be successfully opposed with non-violence and turned from his evil ways, but at least there was a chance. With bombs and guns we were convinced there was no chance. If the worst came to the worst, if we opposed Hitler non-violently and he killed us, we should be dying for a good cause. That would be better than dying for Mr Churchill and the empire.

We had grand visions of the redemption of Europe by non-violence. The goose-stepping soldiers, marching from country to country, meeting no resistance, finding only sullen non-cooperation and six-hour lectures. The leaders of the non-violence being shot, and others coming forward fearlessly to take their places. The goose-stepping soldiers, sickened by the cold-blooded slaughter, one day refusing to carry out the order to shoot. The massive disobedience of the soldiers disrupting the machinery of military occupation. The soldiers, converted to non-violence, returning to their own country to use on their government the tactics that we had taught them. The final impotence of Hitler confronted with the refusal of his own soldiers to hate their enemies. The collapse of military institutions everywhere, leading to an era of worldwide peace and sanity.

…If our program did not make sense in terms of immediate practical politics, the idea of fighting World War II in order to save the Czechs or Poles or the European Jews made sense even less. We could see clearly that however badly we might suffer in the coming war, the Czechs and Poles and Jews would suffer worse.

…Above all, we were strengthened by the certainty that our program was moral and the society around us was immoral."

Just as Canada's so-called "peace" movement would surely insist, Dyson and his cohorts at the time believed that only they had learned the lessons of history, and only they, with their pacifist beliefs, could claim a moral position during this time of conflict.

However, as the war progressed, Dyson and his friends changed their minds, in part because of the concessions their fellow pacifists made to the belligerents of their time:

"Our little band of pacifists was dwindling. … Those of us who were still faithful continued to grow cabbages and boycott the OTC, but we felt less and less sure of our moral superiority.

For me the final stumbling block was the establishment of the Petain-Laval government in France. This was in some sense a pacifist government. It had abandoned violent resistance to Hitler and chosen the path of reconciliation. Many of the Frenchmen who supported Petain were sincere pacifists, sharing my faith in non-violent resistance to evil. Unfortunately, many of them were not. The worst of it was that there was no way to distinguish the sincere pacifists from the opportunists and collaborators. Pacifism was destroyed as a moral force as soon as Laval touched it.

Gradually it became clear to me that what had happened in France would also happen in England, if ever our pacifist principles were put into practice. Suppose that we succeeded in converting Mr Churchill and a majority of the British people to the gospel of non-violence. What then? We would nobly lay down our arms and impress our moral superiority upon the German invaders by silent noncooperation. But the English equivalent of Laval would soon appear, to make a deal with the Germans and make us contemptible in their eyes."

Unfortunately, activists such as Batsch doesn't share Dyson's wisdom. They lack his ability to measure their beliefs against the realities of the conflict at hand, and choose the lesser evil over the greater.

Few will answer that war is not an evil in and of itself. War is what Michael Ignatieff would describe as a moral hazard, and it in turn leads to other moral hazards.

However, there are times at which war, as a moral hazard, is necessary because the alternative, as physical hazard, is not permissable.

Allowing the Taliban to rule Afghanistan so they may continue to harbour terrorists as a passive-aggressive act against the Western world is no more permissable than allowing Adolph Hitler to sieze control of Europe so he may do as he wills.

Furthermore, neither of these alternatives to war -- in present as in history -- actually qualifies as peace. Therein lies the quandry for the pacifists among the modern peace movement, well-intentioned though many of them may be, and are.

So just as young Jamie Batsch doesn't seem to understand the concept of democracy -- only democratic paralysis results when the government is obligated to act only under conditions of complete public agreement -- the elder Robert Batsch doesn't seem to truly understand the concept of peace, and fails to comprehend that while fighting is not a peaceful act, sometimes not fighting is actually less peaceful.

And while he may have thought that he was making some kind of grand point by parading his young daughters in front of newspaper reporters, in the end, he's really only demonstrated the remarkable ability of two generations of Batsch's to miss the point.

So much for truisms.