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Searching for Security  
Alice Frazer Evans

Since September 11, 2001, the search for security has been the unrelenting theme of US national and foreign policy.  In this search we would do well to heed the insight of a remarkable man of peace seeking security for his own nation.  

When Nelson Mandela was elected president in the first all-race election in South Africa, he and other members of the African National Congress had the awesome responsibility of shaping a new democratic, non-racial, non-sexist government for South Africa. In combating the evil of apartheid, Mandela reminded his colleagues to use their new power wisely and to avoid “becoming what we hate.”

Since the end of the Cold War, the US has indisputably emerged as the most powerful nation in the world. We have the capacity to affect economic, social and cultural patterns throughout the globe. This role offers great opportunities but also presents Americans with an enormous challenge to use our power wisely. 

Plowshares staff members have the privilege of working much of the year in Africa, Indonesia and China. Close friends in many nations make it possible to respond to Scottish poet Bobbie Burns’ plea to “see oursel’s as others see us.”  Following 9/11, our office e-mail was filled with words of sympathy and mutual anguish from around the world. Less than two years later it is painful to hear the increasing level of suspicion, hostility and fear these same friends now have for the US.

In recent polls taken in Great Britain and the Middle East the most feared nation in the world was not Iran, Iraq or North Korea but the US. Overseas friends and allies see us denouncing accepted international agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol; becoming isolated from historic European and Asian allies; seeking to buy allegiance from governments, such as Pakistan, that we have criticized for massive human rights violations; and withdrawing promised funds for international programs, such as maternal health care, that could save the lives of thousands of women and children. On a single weekend in February more than 9 million people in some 300 cities around the world conducted non-violent, humanitarian rallies to urge the United States to reconsider its focus on military resolution of conflicts, beginning with Iraq. 

Much of our nation’s rationale for relying on force is based on fear of terrorist attacks similar to those of 9/11. However, in our desperate search for security, our nation, which is built on religious tolerance, seriously risks becoming what we hate. Much of the world sees the US pursuing an anti-Muslim crusade, epitomized by war on Afghanistan and Iraq.  The massive bombing campaigns on Iraqi cities provide justification for Islamic militants to recruit hundreds if not thousands more new terrorists. We - and all the world’s citizens - become less, rather than more, secure. 

Fear is leading a nation built on principles of democracy and freedom to adopt laws that drastically curtail civil rights. Non-citizens can be arrested and detained based only on suspicion; law enforcement and intelligence agencies now have broad access to citizens’ personal medical and financial records with little if any judicial oversight; and the FBI is now free to conduct surveillance of any public meetings, including religious services, without any evidence that a crime has been (or may be) committed [Ref. USA PATRIOT Act (Public Law 107-56)].

Fear has led a nation that purports to value peace to disregard the pleas of allies and disavow internationally accepted treaties of nuclear disarmament while investing billions of dollars in new nuclear weapons and an unproven defense system. A nation that values democratic dialogue is turning from diplomacy to dependence on military power.

Rather than responding in fear, consumed by our own need for security, our nation has the status and capacity to lead the world in making it a safer place for all.

Urge our government to use our wealth and power to build global collaboration to insure the stability of all nations. Nobel laureate Oscar Arias, former President of Costa Rica, reminds us that if the wealthiest countries redirected only 5 percent of the amount they invest in arms to the needs of the poor, in 10 years we could guarantee basic health, education, food, and clean water for every nation in the world.

Openly challenge the climate of fear that leads Americans to acquiesce to drastic limitations on civil liberties, to stereotype all Muslims as terrorists, and to humiliate law-abiding foreign nationals by fingerprinting them as common criminals.

Implore our leaders to use the status of our nation to seek global peace by abdicating our role as the world’s largest arms supplier.  

Call for the destruction of all weapons of mass destruction, no matter who possesses them.  

Follow the path illuminated by Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, to focus our energy on the development of “weapons of  mass salvation” – “the arsenal of life-saving vaccines, medicines, health interventions, emergency food aid and farming technologies.” 

The world today is both interconnected and interdependent. Only stability and peace in the world will bring security to the US.  I pray that our nation will have the humility to listen to our friends and allies with “ears that hear,” that we will have the courage to be motivated less by fear and more by a vision of human dignity and development, and that we will have the wisdom to turn away from the path toward becoming what we hate. This could indeed lead us toward what Martin Luther King, Jr. saw as “the strong path to peace."

This article is a revised version of an editorial submitted to Agnes Scott Magazine.