(excerpt): In reference to your February 18th editorial, “Terrifying Reminder," war harms millions more innocents than terrorism does, so can we save some of our righteous indignation for war, too? (excerpt): To all war’s victims on all sides—dead soldiers and their broken-hearted families, the maimed and their caretakers, all whose love, energy, money and talents are wasted on destruction—war is as senseless and cruel as terrorism. (excerpt): We cannot prevent all injustices, but we can avoid adding to their sum.   more »

(Excerpt): For instance, thanks to our current civic dialogue on torture, we now realize that the decision to torture, like the decision to go to war, only seems “simple” when we see “others” as “not-us,” “different,” and in terms of “us/them;” the decision to torture is infinitely more complicated when we view all people as valuable, “us,” “ours,” one community. We’ve also learned that torture undermines founding American principles of respect and support for human life, is often counterproductive, ineffective, unreliable, and misleading, endangers our own imprisoned soldiers, weakens our alliances, and creates endless new enemies.   more »

Regarding the op-ed Obama’s China Card of 4/8/09: John Wohlstetter’s sinful offer to China of a poisoned diplomatic apple would serve only to heighten geostrategic tensions. Why aggravate our banker China, our most influential ally in negotiating with North Korea, when China could well be the very country most-motivated to partner with Obama’s smart-power, win-win efforts to find peaceful and mutually-advantageous solutions to the global problems shared-in-common by China and her trading partners, neighbors and debtors? Immense U.S. profits already accrued from China’s WTO membership will only grow during China’s historic rise—if unresolved energy shortages, climate change, nuclear proliferation, war, terrorism, trade wars, worldwide crime and disease and other such global conundrums don’t make future international trade moot. Increased enmity with China could even lead to war, which never prevents catastrophe, being itself a catastrophe. Our closest allies have with impunity violated far more UN Security Council resolutions than has North Korea. Let’s retire our lingering sentimental attachments to obsolescent strategies like sword-rattling and stick-shaking, along with defunct foreign policies that bully, threaten, and subsidize massive war-profiteering, approaches which have only moved our tiny blue planet steadily closer to nuclear nightmare.   more »