Op-Ed: Lighting the candle of peace

By Robert C. Koehler

This is the first sentence of a column I cannot write . . . of a “war” I cannot win. There’s just no way to condense the psycho-spiritual devastation of an unleashed nuclear bomb into words. All I can do is ask a question that has no answer: What is the opposite of Armageddon?

Can a collective human embrace be larger, more intense and powerful than collective suicide? Is “peace” a force in its own right, or just a brief moment of quiet while humanity reloads?

OK, no answers, just a bit of context with which to ponder the ongoing U.S.-Israeli war on Iran (and throughout the Middle East). Lawrence Wilkerson – retired U.S. Army colonel and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell – put it this way in a recent interview with Democracy Now: “This is a war with long legs and I think Trump has completely misinterpreted it. The only one who has interpreted it correctly is Bibi Netanyahu and I think he’s ready to use a nuclear weapon, should it become as bad as it looks right now.”

One alleged reason we’re waging a war on Iran is because it has nuclear “capability,” which we need to obliterate for our own safety. Apparently, only the boss countries – the world leaders, the conquerors and colonizers – can be trusted to have nukes. USA! USA! This club also includes Israel, which in fact possesses a large number of nuclear warheads and may actually use one if the war it started comes back at it with too much ferocity. In other words, if Iran’s retaliation is too successful: “. . . winning against such insatiable enemies could provoke a cornered Israel to turn the war nuclear,” according to the publication Jacobin. “A Trump adviser recently warned that Israel might use a nuclear weapon against Iran.”

Let’s take a moment to let this sink in. The Iran war could go nuclear. Here’s where things get incomprehensible: horrifically unimaginable. The human race has far more skill at murder than it has at understanding, conflict resolution . . . sanity.

The Jacobin piece continues: “Israel has a large nuclear arsenal, officially undeclared, of over one hundred warheads that it built with the help of the French and hid for a decade from the Americans. It can be deployed by submarines as well as long range missiles and is considered by Israeli planners to be the ‘Samson option,’ named after the last biblical judge of Israel who tore down the columns of the temple of an ancient fertility God to destroy the Philistines. It may resort to using this weapon if it feels it is existentially threatened.”

Samson brought the temple down on himself as well, as I imagine you know. Could an ancient story be more relevant to the present moment?

This is where I lose any sense of what to say. First of all, I don’t believe it’s possible to turn a nuclear assault into a verbal abstraction: “Gosh, Iran was just nuked.” If that happens, we’ve just inflicted hell on all of humanity. We’ve stepped – collectively – beyond the brink of evil. There may be no recovery from such an action.

Indeed, “recovery” is only possible, in all likelihood, before such an action occurs: before the nuclear missile hits. Recovery has to start happening right now – and it is, or so I hope. Something’s happening. More than 3,000 No Kings Day protest rallies happened around the country on March 28, all of them nonviolent, even if many were full of outraged citizens. Protest is not enough, of course, but it’s yet another beginning. Let this be the match that lights the candle.

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, and his album of recorded poetry and artwork, Soul Fragments.