To give you a taste of what our keynote speaker, Jack Nelson Pallmeyer, has to offer in terms of analysis of peacemaking and faith, here’s a  re-print of an article Jack wrote for The Other Side.  Here he weaves together the threads of military and economic domination and sets against them the concepts of authentic religious peacemaking.

It’s a good read, and it makes me eager to hear what he has to say on Sunday, March 12 at the ICPJ annual meeting/40th Anniversary Celebration.

By the Sword

By Jack Nelson Pallmeyer

The United States is arguably the most militarized country in history. What often goes unacknowledged, even by those actively struggling for peace, is the way in which U.S. militarization buttresses policies of corporate economic domination that perpetuate injustice and poverty throughout the world.

The magnitude and global reach of U.S. militarization are hard to contemplate. U.S. military spending is nearly $400 billion a year, approximately $750,000 per minute! According to the Center for Defense Information, the U.S. military budget is more than the combined military budgets of the next twenty-five nations, and more than twenty-six times the combined spending of the seven nations named as U.S. enemies (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria). Military expenditures in the 2003 fiscal year budget are $78 billion more than when George W. Bush took office. This increase alone is larger than the entire military budget of any other nation.

Congress devotes nearly 53 cents of every dollar of federal discretionary spending to the military. The remaining 47 cents are divided between a myriad of often-underfunded programs. In my home city of Minneapolis, we’ve seen a dramatic slash in teachers, programs, and busing for public schools because of a $30 million budget shortfall–one that could have been averted by transferring forty minutes of Pentagon spending.

Each year U.S. forces train approximately 100,000 foreign soldiers in at least 150 institutions within the United States and in 180 countries around the world. U.S. Special Operations Forces and intelligence agencies have a long history of training military and paramilitary soldiers who either have committed or go on to commit major human- rights atrocities. Yet there is little or no U.S. accountability for the actions of the government and insurgent forces we have trained.

Dig beneath the surface of this militarization and you’ll quickly uncover the guiding role of corporate economic interests. U.S. foreign policy has deep roots in the distorted power of an entrenched military-industrial-congressional complex and a corporate-led global economic system.

Within the complex web of U.S. military policy, we see a dominant thread of oil politics. Afghanistan is a primary example. The United States had plans to invade Afghanistan even before the September 11 attacks, because the Taliban (despite millions of dollars of promised bribes) had refused to allow a U.S. consortium to build an oil pipeline there that would help control Central Asia’s oil supplies. The war on Afghanistan has left thousands of civilians dead, fed the fires of anti-U.S. sentiment in the region, and left the country nearly ungovernable. But it accomplished its principle mission: placing a government in nominal power that will allow the pipeline to be built. In short, the war was a boon to oil companies and arms-makers, the same groups strongly advocating a U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The military-oil connection is also evident in Colombia. U.S. Plan Colombia was developed after extensive lobbying by a coalition of U.S. companies with business interests in Colombia. Occidental Petroleum’s vice president Lawrence Meriage helped shape a U.S. policy that seeks to dominate Colombia’s oil resources and dramatically increase U.S. weapons transfers under the cover of the war on drugs. According to Colombian human-rights activist HŽctor Mondgag—n, many recent massacres in that country occurred in regions near the oil reserves where companies have “strong ties with paramilitary groups.” He continues: “When the U.S. supports the Colombian state, they are supporting genocides.” Plan Colombia has also enriched U.S. weapons manufacturers. Sales to Colombia of Blackhawk helicopters alone top $400 million.

In Venezuela, we have seen a U.S.-orchestrated coup that sought to topple President Hugo Chavez. The reason? Venezuela’s economic ties with Cuba and Chavez’s desire to control the volume and price of oil produced and exported by his country.

These current situations are part of a historic pattern. Since World War II, U.S. policy has been guided by a desire to maintain and expand U.S. economic, military, and political power in a world that is characterized by massive injustice. As George Kennan, the most important U.S. foreign-policy planner in the post-World War II period, stated in 1948: “We have about 50 percent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population. . . . Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. . . . We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. We should cease to talk about vague andÉunreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization.”

Maintaining disparity without concern for human rights, development, or democracy necessarily means a foreign policy based on violence and repression. We saw this clearly in the 1980s. At the same time that the United States was supporting repressive military action in El Salvador and Nicaragua, training radical Islamic extremists in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and helping Saddam Hussein develop biological and chemical weapons, we were also using international debt as leverage to force policy changes throughout much of the so-called third world. U.S.-led institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) imposed structural adjustment programs that further destabilized smaller nations. Poor countries were forced to slash their budgets for social services such as health and education, limit wages, undercut environmental protections, shift agricultural production to the export sector while cutting supports for local production, open their economies to foreign goods and investment, and privatize key economic sectors. The successful combination of repression and structural adjustment laid the foundation for the institutionalization of gains through more recent trade agreements like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Today, U.S policy involves further institutionalization of economic leverage and power as instruments of foreign policy through the WTO and efforts to expand free-trade agreements in the Americas. At the same time, we see an intense remilitarization that bears little relationship to authentic U.S. defense or security needs. As William Hartung, Director of the World Policy Institute, writes: “This new military spending spree has little to do with fighting the war on terrorism. More than one-third of the $68 billion in weapons procurement funding in the Pentagon’s latest budget proposal is set aside to pay for big-ticket Cold War systems. . . . None of these systems are necessary to carry out the President’s war on terrorism. The Pentagon budget proposal is great news for Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and United Defense, but it’s a colossal waste of taxpayer money.”

The present military build-up is driven by two factors. First, the military-industrial-congressional complex is closely linked to the economic interests and priorities of the Bush administration, and those interests have been aided by post-September 11 fears. But the other factor driving remilitarization is the destabilizing nature of corporate-led globalization. As the corporate-dominated international system widens economic inequalities, undermines indigenous cultures, erodes democracy, and destroys the environment, it feeds international resentment. Militarization is the U.S. response to people and nations who dare to organize and protest rather than accept “their place” as roadkill on the investment highway.

The arrogance of U.S foreign policy furthers such resentment. In the past several years the United States has unilaterally withdrawn from the Kyoto environmental accords aimed at reducing global warming; refused to support the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and to sign an International Land Mines Treaty; undermined international efforts to curb the sale of small weapons; refused to ratify a treaty for the creation of a permanent International Criminal Court; blocked U.N. efforts to sanction Israel for brutal violence against Palestinians; pulled out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; moved forward on a missile defense system and the militarization of space in opposition to the stated wishes of nearly every country in the world; and undermined international efforts to provide significantly greater development assistance to poor nations. If arrogance breeds contempt, then it is little wonder that unilateral U.S. policies that place it above international law are generating a bumper crop of hatred and resentment.

A global system unwilling to accommodate itself to the needs of poor majorities and the earth itself inevitably depends on repressive militaries and police in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to maintain order. This helps explain why U.S. forces are involved in training for counterinsurgency in places like the Philippines, Indonesia, and Colombia, which are notorious for attrocities and human-rights abuses. Those who urge the United States to pursue the militarization of space and the building of a defensive Star Wars shield often argue that doing so is prudent in a world where the unmet needs of poor majorities breed profound resentment.

The fact that corporate-led globalization needs a military enforcer is acknowledged and defended by Thomas Friedman, author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. “The globalization era,” Friedman writes, “may well turn out to be the great age of civil wars” between “winners and losers within countries.” Friedman views the United States as the “ultimate benign hegemon and reluctant enforcer.” He continues: “Sustainable globalization requires a stable power structure, and no country is more essential for this than the United States. . . . The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.”

Jesus lived in a world that was unjust, violent, and dangerous like our own. Rome dominated first-century Palestine through a combination of brutal force and sophisticated propaganda. It ruled with the assistance of compliant client kings like Herod and with the help of religious leaders who controlled the people through the Jerusalem Temple.

Many Jews were oppressed within the Roman- and Temple-dominated system. They hoped for an imminent reversal of fortune based on human or divine violence. As promised in their sacred text and stories, salvation was understood as the crushing defeat of enemies within history (Exod. 14:30, 15:1-5; Ps. 18:43-48a; Isa. 25:9-12) or at the apocalyptic end time (Dan. 8:17, 10:14, 11:35, 12:13; Matt. 3:7-8,10,12). Many placed hope that the glorious reversal described by the prophet Isaiah would be realized through their own violence supplemented by God’s power. God would come “with vengeance,” would “save” the people and “spare no one” (Isa. 35:4; 47:3). The oppressed would receive God’s favor and become oppressors.

Jesus saw these messianic and apocalyptic hopes as dangerous fantasies. In the midst of a deadly spiral of violence–oppression, rebellion, and repression–Jesus embraced nonviolent resistance. He taught love of enemies (Matt. 5:43-44) and told parables exposing the inner workings of the oppressive system, including one depicting the futility of violent rebellion (Mark 12:1-12). He blessed peacemakers (Matt. 5:9), warned that “all who take the sword will perish by the sword” (Matt. 26:52), and modeled nonviolent resistance (Matt. 5:38-42). Jesus’ nonviolence was rooted in the character of the nonviolent God he embraced (Matt. 5:45).

Christianity today is gravely and starkly disconnected from the nonviolent Jesus. Although 84 percent of U.S. adults identify themselves as Christians, the United States is the functional equivalent of the Roman Empire that dominated first-century Palestine. While claiming to follow a Jesus who challenged and was executed by the oppressive system of his time, many Christians today conform to, embrace, and benefit from the U.S.-dominated global system, and offer uncritical support for the militarization that makes the oppressive system possible.

In this context, Christians need to take the nonviolence of Jesus seriously. We must confront U.S. militarization and challenge the complicity of our churches. Our task in the coming years is to offer and live out an alternative global vision, one that addresses the economic, social, political and environmental needs of all people and the planet we inhabit.

There are many avenues for creative action. We can work to close the School of the Americas, support efforts to create a U.S. Department of Peace, help build a global nonviolent peace force, and expand the “Every Church A Peace Church” network. We can continue to challenge the abusive power of the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization. We can demand that our nation develop an alternative energy policy, and work to demilitarize our nation’s budget and foreign policy, as well as our own hearts and minds.

Never has the futility of violence been more evident in our world than today. Yet never has our nation been more dominated by political and economic groups who benefit from militarization. Our efforts to work for justice, to embrace nonviolence, and to build a broad-based movement for peace are of vital importance. In the spirit of Jesus, we must rediscover our blessed roots as peacemakers.

From The Other Side Online, © 2002