The Problem with Peace

I've been thinking about peace lately. The word itself seems to be in fashion these days, especially with the multi-front war that our nation is fighting against Islamofascism (while our government stubbornly refuses to frame it in such terms, resorting to abstract and feel-good concepts like "terror"). There are the obvious anti-war protesters who hold rallies in our nation's streets, waving around signs that say "No Blood for Oil" and "Bring Our Troops Home." These are your run of the mill, Sixties-era demonstraters. Then you have the quiet types, the people who have lawn signs that say "Another Neighbor for Peace" and "War is not the Answer." Then, of course, there's the radicals who spit out charges against the President and all supporters of the war, labeling them "Nazis," "Profiteers," "Baby-killers," ad nauseam. All of these folks and more comprise the anti-war movement as we know it today. They say that they want peace... but what does that mean? If we simply lay down our weapons and open our arms to our enemies, won't they see that they're wrong to kill innocents and embrace us?
In short, no.
Such a simplistic view of peace demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the enemy as we know it. The enemy is a radical idealogy of unbridled hatred and its proponents, and these thugs have gone to great lengths to show their uncompromising hostility [v. 26-31] against who they perceive to be the 'infidel.' They'd like us to lay down our arms in a gesture of universal brotherhood; we'd be much easier targets. However, can one really believe that a contextually-undefined word like "peace" or "love" will sway the hearts and minds of terrorists who would fly airplanes into buildings, strap bombs to women and children and send them into urban centers, and make snuff films out of the beheading of journalists?
In the preceding graf, I said that "peace" is contextually-undefined. When we've got people crying out for peace in our current situation, what do they mean? Do they mean an immediate end to the conflict in Iraq, as in "a complete withdrawl of all U.S. military forces?" That would bring about a substantial increase in conflict and terror, because the forces against whom we are fighting (Al-Qaeda and their allies) would come upon the country with renewed vigor and bloodlust once we left. In this case, "peace" really means "genocide," which makes me think of Psalm 35:20... "For they do not speak of peace, but against the quiet ones of the land they plot treacheries..."
Or do they mean an increased effort to diplomatically engage the enemy with talks of compromise? In the companion book to the Limited Edition of U2's magnum opus "How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb," one of the band members writes:

We expect little of our politicians and what little we expect is that they stick to their guns, they shouldn't. They should put them down and go talk to the enemy.

If the mindset of our enemies was different, this might be possible. But as long as our enemies hate us simply because we are free, we are Westerners/Americans, and not subscribers to their radical idealogy, this will never happen. Nonviolent protest is also a no-go, and don't hearken back to the days of Gandhi and how he caused a revolution in India: he believed that any form of violence against the enemy is wrong, even when you're a Jew trying to escape a concentration camp.
As Mark Steyn put it in his column in the March 5th issue of National Review,

"We are confronting violence with violence, when what we need is nonviolent conflict resolution that's binding on all sides"--i.e.... well, i.e., whatever. Half the time these assertions are such enervated soft-focus blurs of passivity, there's nothing solid enough to latch on to and respond to. But when, as they often do, they cite Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi, I point out that we're not always so fortunate as to find ourselves up against such relatively benign enemies as British imperial administrators or even American racist rednecks. King and Gandhi's strategies would not have been effective against fellows who gun down classrooms os Russian schoolchildren, or self-detonate at Muslim weddings in Amman, or behead you live on camera and then release it as a snuff video, or assassinate politicians and as they're dying fall to the ground and drink their blood off the marble. Come to that, King and Gandhi's strategies would not have been effective against the prominent British Muslim who in a recent debate at Trinity College, Dublin, announced that the Prophet Muhammad's message to infidels was "I come to slaughter all of you." Good luck with the binding nonviolent conflict resolution there.

You may accuse me of oversimplifying things when I say that the enemy hates us because we are free. Osama himself has stated the contrary, right? Let's see...

We fight you because we are free and because we want freedom for our nation. When you squander our security, we squander yours.

Instead of murdering innocent people, why don't they seek peaceful negotiations with us, seeing as they are the ones bringing forth complaints against us? They're just trying to keep our nose out of their business, right? (If you take mass murderers at their word, I guess so...)
Their business can aptly be described as "Murder, Inc." They are the ones who want to bring the world under sharia law at any cost because that is what their idealogy commands.

Or we could define peace as "peace for everyone," which is what Greg Boyd put forth in a radio interview last year (I don't have a link yet, I'm working on it...). The problem with "peace for everyone" is that this means peace for America and the rest of the civilized world and peace for the terrorists simultaneously. Peace for us means being safe from terrorist attacks. Peace for them means either subjugation of us under sharia or us all being killed. These ideas of peace cannot coexist because they are mutually exclusive.
Running in the same vein is the idea that says, "well, if we give the terrorists what they want, they'll leave us alone, right?" What do the terrorists want? They want us to stop supporting Israel, stop promoting democracy in the Middle East, and a whole host of other things. What would happen if we did as they asked? Israel would find itself under increased attack and possible destruction (depending on your viewpoint of the end times, etc.), the terrorists would crush any hopes for democracy that any nation in the Middle East has and convert them all to radical Muslim theocracies (which, if applied to the entire Middle East, would serve as a catapult for violent takeover of other nations). Another word for giving evildoers what they want is "appeasement," which is what Neville Chamberlain tried in the Thirties; giving Nazi Germany permission to annex Czechoslovakia and use that as a springboard for invading Poland. Funny thing is, the whole invasion thing wasn't brought up at the meeting... Hitler promised that if he was given Czechoslovakia, he would stop there. The powers-that-be took him at his word and acceded to his demands. And as David Zucker said, "we all know how that turned out." (New antiwar slogan: "Put the peace back in appeasement")
While war is never truly hoped for or wanted, sometimes it is what is necessary to ensure the safety and security of a nation. The alternatives of inaction, appeasement, or compromise would be much worse than the sacrifice being paid, for all three would result in widespread destruction and chaos. In America today, we live in a relative peace in the sense that we are safe and secure from the enemy, and the only reason that we have that is because we took the fight to the enemy's doorstep instead of letting him past our threshold.

Now, am I mocking or condescending to those who are against the war and hope for peace? Not in the least. I too hope for peace, but I also believe that the only true peace that we can achieve is peace through victory. In our present situation, peace by any other means is suicide or worse.