Maltby Letter

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President George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” war mongering and his missile defense program are no way to win friends and influence people.

Jonathan Schell, reporting in his “Letter from Ground Zero” (The Nation, April 1, 2002), says, “In short, at exactly the moment New York and Washington, reeling from the attacks of Sept. 11, were awakening to their helplessness in the face of possible nuclear attack, our government was moving to relegitimize the use of nuclear weapons in general and throwing down the nuclear gauntlet to the Middle East in particular — the very part of the world from which New York and Washington and other cities most fear attack.”

Did it ever occur to our president that he might have had the intelligence and mental capacity — even the compassion for peace that he touts — to initiate non-combative proposals for peace in the world? It’s obvious he did not.

However, the United States Institute of Peace, an independent, non-partisan federal institution created by Congress to promote the prevention, management and peaceful resolution of institutional conflicts, said in its special report, “The Diplomacy of Counterterrorism: Lessons Learned, Ignored and Disputed”: “The use of military force is rarely successful at stopping terrorism over time, since it tends to drive existing groups even further underground, can lock a government into an unproductive tit-for-tat escalation with terrorists and can increase international alienation against the United States.”

Jonathan Schell asks: “Did the decision-makers in Washington reflect, when they gave themselves the right to launch nuclear attacks on the Middle East and elsewhere, that they might inspire those targeted to do likewise to us? Did they forget that there is no defense against nuclear arms and no rescue for those attacked by them?”

Maybe President Bush should give the United States Institute of Peace proposals a fighting chance.