(by Ron Kraybill unless otherwise stated)

Documents are in downloadable Word or PDF files.

Paxblog is a blog maintained by Riverhouse editor Ron Kraybill, containing Op Ed length essays with alternative perspectives on national security. To subscribe, go to Paxblog and scroll to the botom of the page.

Lefties in the Military, a Peacemaker in the Whitehouse? made note of the fact that the US military officially had begun to consider "stability operations" and suggested that a few learnings in the limits of force as a tool for security were filtering upwards from Iraq. Published to the Blog January 17, 2006.

"Still Marching into Hell?" is an update of the earlier piece described below, published to the blog on January 12, 2006.

For Better at the UN. Published October 18, 2005, this piece highlights the contribution of the United Nations, noting that a recent study credits the UN as one of the causes of reduction in war casualities.

"Marching into Hell: What to Expect in Iraq" Op ed length essay written late 2004 predicting that each "victory" by American forces in Iraq will prove to be hollow. Why? Because American leadership fails to grasp the nature of the war we are in and thus plays into the hands of those they seek to defeat.

Suicide Bombers. Interview in September, 2004, with Vital Theology magazine on what motivates suicide bombers - humiliation and helplessness - and what we need to do in response to create security.

Destroying Terrorists Weakens Our Security. Op Ed essay written in October, 2001, just after 9/11. It begins: "To make ourselves safe from terrorists, we must outsmart and outmaneuver them. We must understand what our attackers want and what they expect us to do. To our great peril, we have allowed anger and misplaced confidence in military operations to distract us from the realistic analysis required to secure our future. As a result, day by day we make the world less safe for ourselves." It argues that our security demands that we deprive bin Laden of significant military response abroad. "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything you see is a nail." America was in love with a president with a small imagination at the time this piece was written, a man surrounded by manipulators skilled at directing grief towards violence. Publishing this piece felt like trying to light a candle in a mighty gale. The Washington Post ran columnists calling for war, but gave no space to perspectives like this one. Today America, Iraq, and the world pay the price.

It's the Hornets, Fellers, Not the Bears. Essay written in 2002 asserting that the real danger to American security is stirring up hornets (ie: local hatred against us in regions where we intervene) as a result of a big bear hunt. The only sustainable path to security: we have to actively address the misery of the world we live in so as to remove the causes that motivate those who turn to terror as a method for change. This essay brought hoots from conservative readers mesmerized by a president peddling tragic untruth to build support for invasion of Iraq. Naive, unrealistic, they said...... And once again, history shows that it was the "realists" who turned out to be naive.

It's the Hornets, Fellas, not the Bears. Powerpoint presentation on national security that shows why the approach to national security the US has relied on for the last 50 years is out-dated and actually increases our vulnerability. Written in the run-up to the Iraq War, the presentation is remarkably prescient in anticipating the tragic outcomes the Iraqis and Americans are now wrestling with. More importantly, it outlines the only sustainable alternative to force as a means of security: we have to actively address the misery of the world we live in so as to remove the causes that motivate those who turn to terror as a method for change.

For the Healing of the Nations: Lessons from International Peacebuilding Experience for Post 911 USA. Powerpoint presentation containing a number of frameworks used at the Conflict Transformation Program at Eastern Mennonite University, where the author teaches, for analyzing the current realities of conflict in our world, and constructive responses.

God's Way on Security. Essay showing that God has long called human beings away from reliance on weapons and chariots for security, pointing us to doing justice and caring for the hurts of our world as the only sustainable priority for creating human security.

Fighting Laws of Human Nature. Op ed essay written March 2003, just after the US invasion of Iraq arguing that the invasion is doomed to failure because it violates fundamental dynamics of human societies, such as "identity trumps freedom.

Soaps and National Security. Op Ed piece asserting that if our worst enemies had tried to come up with a disinformation campaign to discredit the United States, they couldn't have created anything more effective than the garbage pumped out of Hollywood, screened every day of the year in the slums of most countries of the world.

Nonkilling Global Political Science by Prof. Glenn Paige, retired from the University of Hawaii, is a full-length book manuscript you can download as a PDF file. Paige fought in the Korean War and has since devoted his life to exploring non-violent ways of addressing human conflicts. This is a carefully argued case for the feasibility over time of creating a world where political science actively supports "nonkilling" as a response to conflict. Paige has numerous other excellent essays on nonviolence as well as religion and conflict on his website.

Power Under: Trauma and Non-Violent Social Change by Steven Wineham is a well-written, deeply engaging reflection on the role of trauma in locking humanity into cycles of violence. Wineman recounts his own chronic trauma as a victim of family abuse as a boy but moves well beyond in developing a framework that directly addresses the primary political reality of our time. Trauma of people/nations currently acting as aggressors (whether Islamic extremists or American "liberators" in Iraq) underlies much of the violence of our world. This is a book that in quality of thought and writing deserves to be selling for $25 in bookstores, but the author has released for free to the public in PDF form.