Most average people don’t want war

I attended the Lebanese Heritage Days at the Our Lady of Lebanon church this weekend—I make it a priority every year. The food’s always awesome, the music is great. And so are the people.

This year’s event had the unfortunate and troubling escalation of violence between Lebanon and Israel as a distant backdrop.

If you’re not from the Middle East, the situation is probably in the background for you. If you’re from the region and have family and friends there, I’d guess it would be very much in your thoughts, as it was in the thoughts of so many people with family in the region attending the festival this weekend.

While I was there, Tony Koury, an active member of the church and longtime organizer of the festival, asked for a moment of silence for those in the region who had been killed or were suffering as a result of this latest conflict. Koury also asked festivalgoers to pray for peace in the region, because “Lebanon is a nation of peace.”

Many may well disagree fiercely at that statement, but I think its important to look at the context in which it’s made. It’s not as if Hezbollah has any reputation for peaceful activities; I’m sure Lebanese people are very much aware of that. In fact, I overheard more than one conversation about the situation, and the word used to describe radical factions by those who presumably know was “the crazies.”

Contrary to popular belief, the average person from the Middle East does not want to live in the dark ages, impose their religion on others, blow anything up or kill infidels. They just want to live peacefully, pursuing happiness and prosperity while raising their families.

If you were to ask the average person on the streets in Beirut if they wanted to engage in a bombing campaign with neighboring Israel, I’d bet an overwhelming majority would have answered with a resounding “NO!”

And I bet if you ask the average person on the streets of Israel, if they thought essentially starting a war with neighboring Lebanon by bombing them, even in a retaliatory move, with a distinct possibility of personal danger to themselves, they’d similarly disapprove.

Average residents of both nations would probably rather just go on with their lives peacefully pursuing life, liberty and happiness, just as they strive to everywhere else in the world. We’re used to thinking of those ideals as being some exclusive right of the United States, but the truth is, we merely defined those terms first. Those are and always have been the natural ideals of all people around the world, even if many of them never have the good fortune to be able to realize them.

So, if the majority of people of two reasonably modern, liberal (by comparison to others in the region) countries don’t want to engage in what amounts to a war, why is there one?

For that matter, when a majority of Americans disapprove of the war in Iraq, why are we still there?

The answer lies in the difference between a government and it’s people. Ask the average person anywhere, in any country, whether they’d like to go to war with a neighboring county, or quietly tend their home, family, business, etc. while attempting to find happiness and prosperity. I’m again betting just about anyone sane, jingoism aside, chooses Door Number Two when they’ve got any personal stake in the issue.

But there’s a large part of the problem: sanity. Mostly, megalomaniac types, both individuals and committees with governmental or paramilitary ties, not regular sane people, declare war. These folks may be “sane” from a clinical standpoint (or not...), but they make decisions that could be termed insane, or at least pathological, in a heartbeat. After all, how many sane people enter the arena of national (any nation) politics? And how good is that collective group’s reputation for considering “the little guys” when they run the world?

Decisions made for personal gain, political power, and revenge trump any restraint necessary to the security of the civilians.

In fact, the more recent trend has been to involve civilians as the target of attacks, a departure from the idea that such attacks are what differentiate the black hats from the white hats. In the modern age, the armies of the world wear caps permanently stained a dark grey.

The only good reason to go to war is to defend your country from direct invasion. It’s been a while since that was the reason for a major conflict. The wars we see today tend to be of the “pre-emptive” (the “get them before they get us" mentality) type, and the trend is growing, as nations pat each another on the back and send sympathy and encouragement for aggressive offensive actions in the name of defense.

So when my neighbor calls Lebanon a nation of peace, he’s correct. If a nation is its people, and a majority of its average, everyday people are against a war and are, in fact, in line to become its victims, then, they ARE peaceful.
It’s the governments, and those that seek to govern, we have to watch out for.

(Note: To see more complete coverage of the situation in the Middle East, as well as viewpoints of some actual people affected by the conflict between Lebanon and Israel, go to news.bbc.co.uk and click on “Middle East” on the left-hand side of the screen.)

(Originally published in The Easton News, July 20, 2006)