A little more peace on earth

One of the good things left over form my Secret Service days is the unusual distribution lists I’m still on. I was sitting in my sofa with my feet up on the coffee table looking though some of the security and anti-terrorist newsletters when Cindy made her comment.

“The New Year always makes me think of peace on earth, and good will toward men, but I swear the world just seems like a more dangerous place every year.”

“Actually I think crime stats are down in The District this year.”

“I don’t just mean locally,” she said. When she got to her feet I knew she was actually climbing up on a soapbox. “I mean the whole world. I mean the slaughter in Darfur. Terrorists in Bali. Insurgents trying to overthrow the government in Thailand and a dozen other countries. I’m talking about Iraq getting ready to head into a civil war, thanks to us.”

That got my attention. “Thanks to US? You’re going to blame that tribal bullshit on US? Baby the U.S. is the cure over there, not the problem.”

“Didn’t mean to attack your hero, the great Dubya,” she said, dropping into my recliner. “But you have to admit, it gets worse every year.”

Well that got me thinking about the stuff I’d just been reading. “Actually, hon, despite what you see in the press, it’s not really true. The intel teams that track that kind of thing report that since the end of the Cold War, armed conflict and political violence have decreased. The world is really a more peaceful place than it was.”

She looked at me with that lawyer’s face she gets sometimes. “Well, if that’s true, why hasn’t this change gotten any attention?”

I took a long slow sip of my coffee then. I didn’t want to attack the press. Again. But there didn’t seem to be any way around it. “Baby, I hate to say it but the press just pays a lot more attention to wars that start than to those that end. And there’s no central source. I mean, no international agency collects global info on political violence. There are some good people trying though. Check this out.”

I tossed her a copy of the Human Security Report http://www.humansecurityreport.info/, an independent study funded by five countries that the Oxford University Press publishes. It’s a pretty good document because the authors collected a wide range of scholarly data that doesn’t get much publicity. They also check specially commissioned research. The result is a clear picture of global security that will surprise most people. It shows that after fifty years of growth, the number of armed conflicts started to fall in the early 1990s and has continued to do so. As she leafed through it I saw skepticism and hope fighting for dominance on her cute face.

“Wow. In 2003 there were 40 percent fewer conflicts than in 1992. Conflicts with 1,000 or more battle-deaths fell by 80 percent. Genocides dropped by 80 percent too. Of course, that’s the number of conflicts, not the number of people slaughtered, but still. Hannibal, honey, how do you account for this trend? I mean, it doesn’t make sense with what I see on the news.”

“You’re just more aware of the battles,” I told her. “I think the Cold War drove a lot of the conflicts after World War II. The U.S. and Russia did a lot of fighting by proxy. When they stopped, the U.N. finally stepped up and started doing something about global security. There are four times as many U.N. peacekeeping operations and missions today as there were before the Berlin Wall fell.”

“That’s interesting,” Cindy said, leaning back and crossing her arms. “So how do you explain the genocide in Rwanda, Srebrenica and the ongoing slaughter in Darfur? “

“Don’t misunderstand me, babe. There have been some horrible failures. But my point is that the successes don’t get the same publicity. What about the violence that was stopped in Namibia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Eastern Slovenia, East Timor, and probably a few more places I’ve forgotten?”

I had pulled those names from another Study I had lying there beside me. I tossed the study by the RAND Corporation http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG304/ to her. She just about caught it.

“That report says that diplomacy works. Half the peace agreements negotiated since World War II have been signed since the end of the Cold War. What do you think of that?”

“I think there’s going to be a war right in here if you throw another thing at me!” Cindy does this mad thing when she’s not. But then she stood up and walked over and gave me a kiss.

“Seriously lover, thank you.”

“What, for fighting with you on New Year’s Eve?”

“No,” she said. “Well, yes actually. I was on my way to being too bummed out to get my party on, but you made me realize that the world isn’t going to hell in as big a hand basket as I thought. And I guess, if you look around, there really is a lot more peace on earth than there was a few years ago.”

“Yeah,” I told her, “but there’s no doubt we could use a whole hell of a lot more.”