'WAR MENTALITY' THREATENS DEMOCRACY, RULE OF CIVIL LAW

Drugs, Crime And Now Terror Targeted

OUR "WAR mentality" is destroying the very values we wish to preserve. We
are sacrificing the values for which we are fighting. It is very important
to be clear about these values and about how they can be preserved and
promoted. Do we believe in the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness within the framework of democracy? If we want our children to
inherit a better world based on these values, then we must consider how
these goods are realistically protected and enhanced.

We are obsessed with the idea that what we value can be protected if we
make "war" on what is against our values. At the moment, our thinking is
dominated by the "war on terrorism." But this is only the most recent
manifestation of our war mentality. Some decades ago we saw ourselves in a
war between "the Free World" and communism. Four million Southeast Asians
and nearly 60,000 Americans died in that war. We were at war in Vietnam, we
were told, to defend the Free World.

Did this carnage create a more peaceful and free world order? Through the
1980s, and even to the present, the United States provided billions of
dollars in weapons and training to horrible right-wing dictatorships in
many countries, from Indonesia to El Salvador and Guatemala, as part of
this war against communism. Within the United States, Sen. Joe McCarthy and
his successors used the power of government to persecute Americans who were
identified as enemies according to this war. The "collateral damage" was
immense. The values for which we were fighting only decreased in the world.

The meaning of the concept "war" includes the idea of all-out conflict with
the intent to destroy an enemy. It includes the idea of causing suffering
to the point where the enemy is either dead or surrenders to our will. It
implies the throwing aside of ordinary legal and moral restraints and
entering into a kill-or-be-killed, no-holds-barred attitude. "Collateral
damage" - unintended death and destruction - are acceptable because, under
the war mentality, we are fighting for our very survival.

We continue to think "war." We have spent millions of militarized dollars
on the "war on drugs" at home and abroad. Cocoa crops in Colombia are
sprayed with deadly herbicides, at the same time destroying the beans, rice
and livestock that nearby peasant farmers need to survive. This "collateral
damage" is acceptable. Immense resources have been invested in the "war on
illegal aliens" to the point where the Texas-Mexico border looks like a
combat zone of barbed wide, concrete barriers, militarized patrols,
prisons, surveillance systems and surprise raiding units. Thousands of
innocent Hispanic Americans have had their lives terrorized or destroyed by
the INS.

We have mobilized the nation for the "war on crime," allocating hundreds of
millions of dollars for zero-tolerance laws, court systems, enhanced police
forces and a gigantic prison industry. Many thousands of innocent people
are in jail or on death row due to the excesses of this war on crime, but
this collateral damage is considered acceptable.

And now, for the last three years, our total domestic and military
resources have been mobilized for a worldwide "war against terrorism,"
which has produced collateral damage to civil liberties.

The rule of democratically legislated law carefully distinguishes between
the rule of civil society and war. "War," for example, is considered such
an extreme calamity that only Congress has the authority to declare it
under our Constitution. The rule of law in human affairs serves to promote
peace as well as justice. Democratically enacted law provides nonviolent
mechanisms for resolution of conflicts between citizens, groups and the
government with respect to citizens. If we want peace within our country,
or within the world, we must promote good civil law, equally applicable to
everyone, with all our strength, intelligence and resources at our disposal.

Human beings are not likely to become peaceful angels who can live without
laws in the near future. Our only option is to promote peace and justice at
home and abroad through enforceable, democratic laws, ultimately on a
worldwide scale. Under good law, violators are justly apprehended and
prosecuted, while the authorities themselves are carefully circumscribed in
their powers so they do not violate freedom, peace or justice.

But as a country we are heading in the opposite direction. Our war
mentality has led us to militarize our police and security forces so that
the crucial line between civilian police and military war-making functions
has been obliterated. We are on a permanent war footing, and the values we
cherish have become collateral damage of the drive to win against the
"enemy" at any cost. Our war mentality leads us to go to war against
Afghanistan or Iraq, rather than working to build a world of law applying
to every person and country. Only a world of democratic law for everyone
could prevent these countries, or law-breaking citizens within these
countries, from threatening us.

Our war mentality leads us to go to war against our own citizens as well.
We are sacrificing liberty for security, despite warnings of our founding
fathers. Ben Franklin told us that those who would sacrifice liberty for
security, deserve neither. We are rapidly destroying our own freedom,
democracy, peace and justice, rather than working to build a world order
where the rule of civil law really protects and promotes "liberty and
justice for all."

GLEN T. MARTIN is professor of philosophy and religious studies at Radford
University and president of International Philosophers for Peace.