A peacemaker’s case against the U.S. Institute of Peace

Not a public peep was heard to counter George W. Bush’s war advisers — the slam-dunkers and cakewalkers —who urged the president and Congress to dispatch troops to Afghanistan in 2001 and to Iraq in 2003. Protests are not voiced when civilians are killed by U.S. and NATO forces, recurrences that are all but routine. The institute takes no position on whether the nation’s military policies are bankrupting our economy or that it’s time to stop fighting fire with fire and fight it with the water of nonviolence.

Instead of speaking truth to power, whisper it in the institute’s hallways or on coffee breaks at conferences. Congress says don’t agitate, just cogitate. Don’t criticize, just theorize. Sit in the boat, don’t rock it. Favor world peace, but don’t oppose U.S. wars.

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(James O'Brien For The Washington Post)

Without doubt, a fair number of mid- and upper-level people at the institute would like to speak out — to help bring the nation to its senses, well aware of a futile foreign policy of bringing adversaries to their knees. But they can’t. They know that Congress, the balm-demanders, probably would blast the institute as a haven of anti-war blame-America-firsters. With little choice, the institute behaves.

The chairman of the 10-member bipartisan board for the past seven years is J. Robinson West, a Bush appointee who served in the Reagan administration as an assistant secretary of the interior in charge of offshore oil policies and before that as a deputy assistant secretary of defense for international economic affairs. In 1984, he founded the PFC Energy company. Little in his professional background suggests either a competency in peacemaking or ties to the American peace movement. The vice chairman is George Moose, a former ambassador posted by the Reagan administration to Benin and Senegal.

With occasional exceptions — I have in mind Kerry Kennedy — presidential appointments to the institute’s board serve as a homogenized dumping ground for academics, corporate executives, Republican or Democratic party loyalists, and others of the well-paid and seemly mannered with no reputations as boundary-pushers. They have little hands-on experience in peace education or peace training, much less sweaty antiwar activism. They are more suited for patronage appointments to harmless presidential commissions, if their yens to be seen as players can’t be controlled.

Over the years, I can’t recall any pacifists from the War Resisters League, the Catholic Worker, the Washington Peace Center or — horrors! — the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee being given a seat on the board.

On the last day of the institute’s presence at 1200 17th St. in downtown Washington, and a week before Monday’s opening day of headquarters at 2301 Constitution Ave., I met with five staff workers.

All the things they told me about their worthy labors — overseeing research grants given to scholars, training programs in conflict resolution, field work in conflict zones, book publishing, helping schools create peace-studies programs, essay contests — are efforts I admire and support.