Ah, the irony of peacekeepers - why do we send troops with guns to keep the peace?  Of course I understand the logistics; when entering a hostile environment where people want to kill you and/or the people you are trying to protect it only makes sense to be armed with retaliatory force should it be necessary.  However, what if, under certain circumstances, a true “peacekeeping” force, without weapons and with the intention of creating peace and not just safety, were unleashed on a hostile environment? 

There are people in this world, plenty of them, that see our presence in Iraq as an occupation, not as an effort to spread democracy and peace to an oppressed region.  Our military driving through the streets in armored humvees with automatic rifles does not help this image at all.  In fact, those who believe us to be the oppressors see these images and nod along with the insurgents that fire at our troops.  They say to themselves, “If an army occupied my country, my city, I would fight them off as best I could.”  This PR war cannot be won with artillery; we cannot convince the world that we are peace keepers when we carry weapons on a foreign land.

There seems to be two resolutions to this problem through conventional tactics.  Either we destroy the insurgency or beat the people into submission (or bribe them into submission), or we pack up and leave.  To beat down everyone that resists our presence would require incredible resources and time, if it is possible at all.  To pull out and leave would be a demoralizing defeat for our country and most likely leave the region in a more powerful and threatening position than it was to begin with.  There must be another solution.

What if, instead of meeting the insurgent resistence with power, we met it with compassion and tolerance?  Don’t get me wrong, I believe our troops serving in Iraq are working as compassionately as they can under their present orders, and I admire them for their efforts to help those in need regardless of the bullets being fired in their direction.  I can’t imagine the courage and compassion it must take for our troops to work every day for the betterment of a country and a people that sometimes don’t seem to want their help.  However, as long as the media focuses on the guns, and ignores for the most part the humanitarian aid, the war is lost.  So what if we bend and expose ourselves to the insurgency, we allow ourselves to be the vulnerable bringers of aid and comfort, we make ourselves the victims at the hands of the savage insurgents?  Then the paradigm is shifted, and the world will become our ally in our efforts to help Iraq.

This is my proposal: we train and prepare 20,000 or more people, volunteers for the US Army of Peace, in the languages and the skills necessary to help redevelop ravaged areas and mend ethnic conflicts in Iraq.  Of all the anti-war people in the US there has to be at least 20,000 of them willing to enlist in a military program that trains them to rebuild instead of destroy.  It can be similar to a Peace Corp, only trained with the specific skills necessary to address Iraqi tensions and reconstruction issues.  These fighters will not carry weapons, though they should probably be equipped with armor and all the tools they will need for their particular objective.  But in addition, they will all be outfitted with cameras linked directly to the internet, broadcast in real time to a website available to the entire planet, unedited. 

Can you imagine the outcomes now?  Either these ambassadors of peace, unarmed peaceniks with nothing but promised aid on their agendas, will be unleashed on a populace that truly needs all the help they can get, and this will communicate more than soldiers that we truly mean to help.  Or these brave and valiant souls will become martyrs for the cause and the insurgents will suffer horrible PR consequences.  These unarmed men and women, working to resolve conflicts and rebuild schools, being fired upon by insurgents, will not sit well with anyone in the world, and retribution will be swift and from everywhere.  The media could not avoid covering such immediate news, it would be available to everyone and undeniable.  Of course if any bloodshed occurred it would be tragic, but it would not take many instances for world opinion to sway and snuff out the killers.  Either way, the end result would be true peace keeping; insurgents would find they have no one to fight and the US would be able to bring the aid promised to a ravaged country that needs our help.  The game would shift, and we could not lose.  Its just a thought - Peace Bringing instead of Insisting on Peace at Gunpoint.