Johann Christoph Arnold (“www.ChristophArnold.com”:www.ChristophArnold.com) is an author and a pastor with the Bruderhof Communities (“www.bruderhof.com”:www.bruderhof.com).

Bush is nothing if not persistent when it comes to perceived world bad guys. Just yesterday he told an audience in St. Louis that Hussein is “a dangerous, dangerous man with dangerous, dangerous weapons.” Despite the repeated use dangerous, the rest of the world is unconvinced. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder still talks about “peaceful solutions” and Germany and France is putting the brakes on war in the U.N. Security Council, waiting for evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction to turn up.

It must frustrate our president to see that all these years of military sanctions against Iraq have been working. All the evidence uncovered by the U.N. inspectors prove that we can “win without war,” as one current slogan goes, and that we have in fact been winning. We’ve kept Saddam Hussein from rebuilding his military after the Gulf War. U.S. isolation of Iraq has been successful despite its numerous flaws. Saddam is not a threat.

Which brings us to real threats and to North Korea. President Bush and his team of war mongerers have been so busy looking at Iraq that they’ve given North Korea just sporadic attention. Recently-declassified reports show that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has known much more about North Korea’s nuclear bomb making over the last dozen years than anyone’s been admitting.

The C.I.A. has known that North Korea and Pakistan have been trading nuclear secrets. Pakistan has been showing its ally of convenience how to build the centrifuges that process weapons-grade uranium. North Korea in return has provided the missile technology that gives Pakistan the nuclear reach to destroy arch-rival India. Now that we know President Bush knew all about this history of what we might call “dangerous, dangerous” technology trade, why did he cozy up to Pakistan following September 11th? He so wanted wars with Afghanistan and Iraq that he normalized relations with a country far more dangerous. If a Pakistani or North Korean nuclear weapon goes off in New York City it will kill a whole lot more people than Osama bin Laden’s four hijacked airplanes. What happened on September 11th was terrible but it’s nothing compared to what a enemy with resources could do.

There are real threats to world peace, far more “dangerous, dangerous” than Iraq. The United States needs to drop its president’s obsessions and look squarely at the world and who we’re allied with. And when we reset our policies we wqcan use Iraq as our model. For as the U.N. inspectors have proven, we can create peace through diplomacy and we can isolate troublemakers through smart sanctions.

What a tough lesson for U.S. leaders bent on war.

President George W. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft are just such opportunistic leaders. Under the cloak of fear and the blind of terrorism, they are trying to strip away civil liberties in this country.

It is true that we must review our privacy laws and security policies following the horrors of the airplane hijackings. We must see if some judicious re-balancing might create more security while keeping true to the spirit and traditions of American liberty.

But George W. Bush and John Ashcroft are not the men for careful, judicious review. With every day that goes by, with every press conference or speech, it is becoming clearer that they are using the times to grab power. The Attorney General in particular is sullying the heroism of those who died on September 11th trying to rescue their fellow Americans. He is a coward in the unfolding national drama.

MASS ARRESTS

Over 1,200 people have been arrested and detained since September 11th. Hundreds of them remain in jail. There is no evidence that any of them aided the September 11th hijackers. Only a handful of the detainees are suspected of having any connection with any terrorists. Attorney General Ashcroft has refused to give basic details about these people–including their names!. He has defended the secrecy by implying that jailing such large numbers of foreigners might maybe have prevented other terror plots, though he’s never provided any evidence or given us any details.

His is a legal standard based on the fear and paranoia level of he and his President are feeling. But we here in America do not lock up anyone based on our paranoia. We need evidence and the evidence of someone’s skin color or national origin is not enough.

The evidence of skin color and national origin was enough in one other time in American history: the shameful rounding up of Japanese-Americans in World War 2. Political opportunities saw the possibilities in American’s fear following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and we constructed concentration camps. Many of those sent there were full American citizens but they had no choice. There weren’t enough clear-headed, decent Americans then to say “enough,” to demand that the U.S. live by it’s birthright mandate to ensure freedom. The property of Japanese Americans was also taken and given to politically-connected landowners who had long coveted it. It was a dark moment in American history. Now, in 2001, we are once again locking up people based only on the country of their origin.

KANGAROO COURTS

President Bush has by sleight of hand declared that suspected terrorists can be tried by United States military tribunals. This is an extreme step. We have judicial processes that can try criminals and the United Nations does as well. The only reason to use the military tribunals is out of fear that other courts might be more fair and more just. They might be more deliberate and take longer to weigh and consider the evidence. They will surely be seen as less credible in the eyes of the world, however. We will have lost any moral leadership. But more importantly, we will have lost the true meaning of American liberty and justice.

DOMESTIC SPYING

Yesterday, November 30th, John Ashcroft announced a further grab of political power, another attempt to erode civil liberties. He is considering allowing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to begin spying on religious and political groups in the U.S.

The New York Times says: “The proposal would loosen one of the most fundamental restrictions on the conduct of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and would be another step by the Bush Administration to modify civil-liberties protections as a means of defending the country against terrorists.”

For those of you who don’t know the history. These restrictions against open spying were put into place in the 1970s when the extent and abuse of former spying became known. The F.B.I. had a widespread network that actively tried to suppress political groups.

Figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., were not only under constant surveillance by the F.B.I. They were harassed, they were blackmailed. Often incriminating evidence would be placed on them and rumors spread to discredit them in their organization.

The federal government actively suppressed political dissent, free speech, and organizing. The regulations Ashcroft wants to overturn were put into place when the extent of this old spying and dirty-tricks campaigning was exposed.

President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft are using the fear of terror to return us to an era when domestic spying and abrogation of liberties was the norm. When fear of foreigners and political dissent gave U.S. officials powers far beyond those that democracy and security require.

The words you read right now are a gift from the U.S. founding fathers and from generations of good Americas who have stood up boldly to demand continued liberty. Like the fire-fighters of September 11th, dissenters and free speech advocates are normal people who were called by the times to be heroes. Our country and are world needs mores heroes now. Speak out. Demand that our freedom not be another victim of September 11th.

The United States has today begun its war against terrorism in a very familiar way: by use of terror. Ignorant of thousands of years of violence in the Middle East, President George W. Bush thinks that the horror of September 11th can be exorcised and prevented by bombs and missiles. Today we can add more names to the long list of victims of the terrorist airplane attacks. Because today Afghanis have died in terror.

The deaths in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania have shocked Americans and rightly so. We are all scared of our sudden vulnerability. We are all shocked at the level of anger that led nineteen suicide bombers to give up precious life to start such a literal and symbolic conflagration. What they did was horrible and without justification. But that is not to say that they didn’t have reasons.

The terrorists committed their atrocities because of a long list of grievances. They were shedding blood for blood, and we must understand that. Because to understand that is to understand that President Bush is unleashing his own terror campaign: that he is shedding more blood for more blood.

The United States has been sponsoring violence in Afghanistan for over a generation. Even before the Soviet invasion of that country, the U.S. was supporting radical Mujahadeen forces. We thought then that sponsorship of violence would lead to some sort of peace. As we all know now, it did not. We’ve been experimenting with violence in the region for many years. Our foreign policy has been a mish-mash of supporting one despotic regime after another against a shifting array of perceived enemies.

The Afghani forces the United States now bomb were once our allies, as was Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. We have rarely if ever acted on behalf of liberty and democracy in the region. We have time and again sold out our values and thrown our support behind the most heinous of despots. We have time and again thought that military adventurism in the region could keep terrorism and anti-Americanism in check. And each time we’ve only bred a new generation of radicals, bent on revenge.

There are those who have angrily denounced pacifists in the weeks since September 11th, angrily asking how peace can deal with terrorists. What these critics don’t understand is that wars don’t start when the bombs begin to explode. They begin years before, when the seeds of hatred are sewn. The times to stop this new war was ten and twenty years ago, when the U.S. broke it’s promises for democracy, and acted in its own self-interest (and often on behalf of the interests of our oil companies) to keep the cycles of violence going. The United States made choices that helped keep the peoples of the Middle East enslaved in despotism and poverty.

And so we come to 2001. And it’s time to stop a war. But it’s not necessarily this war that we can stop. It’s the next one. And the ones after that. It’s time to stop combat terrorism with terror. In the last few weeks the United States has been making new alliances with countries whose leaders subvert democracy. We are giving them free rein to continue to subject their people. Every weapon we sell these tyrants only kills and destabilizes more, just as every bomb we drop on Kabul feeds terror more.

And most of all: we are making new victims. Another generation of children are seeing their parents die, are seeing the rain of bombs fall on their cities from an uncaring America. They cry out to us in the name of peace and democracy and hear nothing but hatred and blood. And some of them will respond by turning against us in hatred. And will fight us in anger. They will learn our lesson of terror and use it against us. They cycle will repeat. History will continue to turn, with blood as it’s Middle Eastern lubricant. Unless we act. Unless we can stop the next war.