The Declaration of Peace

By Ken Butigan
May 10, 2007

The momentum to end the U.S. war in Iraq has accelerated dramatically over the past twelve months. Responding to the growing catastrophe on the ground and building on four years of work, the U.S. anti-war movement – led prominently by Iraq War veterans, military families, religious leadership, the Hip Hop community, and longtime peace and justice advocates – significantly contributed to framing the November 2006 mid-term congressional election as a referendum on the war. The clear mandate for peace that swept the new Congress into power last fall has been reinforced since then by thousands of demonstrations, interfaith services, and sit-ins.

In spite of this monumental effort, however, the war goes on. The Bush administration is committed to an open-ended occupation, and Congress has been tentative in putting its mandate to end the war fully into effect.

After four years of peacemaking we are driven to ask, “Is there really any way that this war can end?”

The temptation is to conclude, reluctantly, that this cannot or will not happen any time soon, and therefore our choices are either to give up altogether or to continue on “because it’s a good thing,” though with a nagging sense that we will not actually make a difference, like Don Quixote valiantly but ineffectually tilting at implacable windmills.

It is understandable to feel frustrated and powerless by the fact that our best efforts haven’t stopped the crushing destruction being wreaked in Iraq. Yet, despite the profound challenges it faces, the anti-war movement has in fact made enormous progress and is moving steadily toward ultimately ending this policy. Now more than ever, we have the chance to contribute to the moral and political conditions to end this tragic war.

And we have an even greater opportunity. As part of this next stage of making peace, we are called to envision, encourage, and contribute to an historic national and international turn from peace through violence to peace through justice and nonviolent options.

We stand at a crossroads poised between two fundamental options: American Empire or A New Direction. The U.S. occupation in Iraq is embedded in the former; but our work to end this war offers us an opportunity to choose the latter. As the momentum continues to build for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq, we have an opportunity to engage in the great spiritual practice of our time: ending this war as a first step in setting a dramatic new course for our nation and our world.

Just as this new course will call us to challenge the structured violence of war, so too will it invite us to challenge all the structures of violence that feed this war and that this war feeds: the structured violence of racism, poverty, sexism, homophobia, and ecological destruction; the structured violence that chooses destruction over meeting human needs; and the structured violence that threatens new war-making instead of developing strategies that respond to the roots of war, like the Global Marshall Plan and the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals.

This New Direction will be a long-term process of transforming the world so that its structures support justice and the well-being of all. Not only will this mean setting our societies on a new footing (committed to a nonviolent world whose core strives to put into practice what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the love that does justice”) but, it will also mean, inextricably, that we as persons, organizations, and communities of faith and conscience will be invited to embark with deliberate intention on the nonviolent life: the journey that frees us in our core from patterns of violence and injustice so that we can engage in the impossible but necessary sacred work of mending all the personal, interpersonal, social and structural broken circles through the power of courageous connection, compassion, cooperation, and transformed community.

This comprehensive transformation, however, will not happen spontaneously. It will require deepening and broadening the peace movement through education, community-building, and action.

For us to take the next step in ending the war and engaging in the process of challenging the large systems of violence in which this war is rooted, we must:

• Assess the impact the peace movement has had on this policy to date;
• Identify the challenges and opportunities of the movement’s current stage;
• Develop a strategy that integrates messaging and action;
• Engage in the transformation of everything that upholds the systems, cultures and structures of violence; and
• Create systems, cultures, and structures committed to creative nonviolence for the dignity and justice for all.

Assessing What We Have Accomplished – and Where We Are Going

To move forward, we must first grasp where we are. To help us do this, we turn to the ideas of the late Bill Moyer, a longtime activist and strategic thinker. Moyer developed a comprehensive framework for understanding how social movements work, based on an analysis of the history of movements that successfully achieved their goals. The following summary is drawn from his writings, including his 2001 book published by New Society Publishers, Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements. History tells us that nonviolent social movements have played a key role in bringing about significant social change. Around the world, nonviolent movements have fostered democracy, struggled for freedom, taken action for justice, protected the earth, and toiled for the survival and dignity of human beings everywhere. In the United States, many specific changes in public policy — women’s suffrage, the eight hour work day, steps to curb racial segregation, environmental safeguards, stopping the Vietnam War, limiting nuclear testing, creating the American Disabilities Act, winning labor contracts for the migrant poor through the United Farm Workers, and many others — were the direct consequence of nonviolent social movements.

Nevertheless, in the midst of most movements, social activists often believe that their movements are failing. Moyer noticed this and developed a model that would not only highlight how movements are often succeeding — even when they seem to be losing or stagnant — but also to empower activists to navigate the life-cycle of a movement to successfully create social change.

Two Kinds of Power

How is it, Mohandas Gandhi asked himself in the midst of the struggle for the liberation of India, that 350,000,000 Indians were controlled by 100,000 British troops? To be sure, a highly developed colonial apparatus of incentives and disincentives – including the ongoing threat and actuality of violence and repression – kept this system intact for over 100 years. But this is precisely why Gandhi devoted enormous time and energy to empowering the Indian people to transcend their fear and to dramatize their freedom. He understood that the system itself ultimately depended on massive cooperation and consent. Therefore what the Independence movement required, he reasoned, was neither strategies of violent change nor fatalistic passivity (“someday things will change”) but massive non-cooperation and withdrawal of consent. The people were propping up the system; the people would have to find ways to remove those props.

These and many other examples illuminate two different understandings of social and political power, which Moyer framed as The Power Elite Model and The People Power Model. Each of these models, Moyer asserted, leads to opposite movement strategies.

For Moyer, The Power Elite Model holds that society is organized in the form of a hierarchical pyramid, with powerful elites at the top and the relatively powerless mass populace at the bottom. The elites, through their dominant control of the state, institutions, laws, myths, traditions, and social norms, serve the interests of the elites, often to the disadvantage of the whole society. In this model, power flows from the top to the bottom. Since people are powerless, social change can be achieved only by appealing to, petitioning, and persuading powerholders to change their policies.

The People Power Model, on the other hand, maintains that power ultimately rests in the hands of the population. Even in societies with strong elites, the powerholder’s power is ultimately dependent on the cooperation, acquiescence, or support of the mass public. Moyer depicts this model as an inverse triangle, with the people at the top and the power elite at the bottom. People Power is the model used by successful social movements.

Successful social movements do not therefore depend primarily or directly on appealing to the powerholder (as in the Power Elite Model) but on alerting, educating and mobilizing the populace or general citizenry. It is the populace that, by its tacit or active consent and support, upholds the policy in question. When it is mobilized, the populace creates change by “leading the leaders” by withdrawing support for the status quo and creating the conditions for the powerholder to move off her position and to support an alternative.

As Moyer writes, “The power of movements is directly proportional to the forcefulness with which the grassroots exert their discontent and demand change. The central issue of social movements, therefore, is the struggle between the movement and the powerholders to win the hearts (sympathies), minds (public opinion), and active support of the great majority of the populace, which ultimately holds the power to either preserve the status quo or create change.” Powerholders will not change their policies until there is overwhelming pressure from the general population. To succeed, the movement’s chief focus therefore must be the general population of ordinary citizens, not the powerholders directly.

Why the Populace Responds: The Movement Upholds Society’s Central Values

How does the movement convert and mobilize the majority? By dramatizing in many creative ways that society’s central values and sensibilities have been violated, and that the movement is working to address this violation. These values often include equality, fairness, democracy, justice, security, and peaceful conflict resolution. In reality, society in most cases only pays lip service to these values; it typically violates them on a regular basis. Nonetheless, these enshrined ideals are often a central part of the vision and self-understanding of a society. Social movements create campaigns and actions that demonstrate how these central values are being undermined and that invite the larger public to take steps to support ways to call for an alternative. In part it does this by exposing the “myths and secrets” that Powerholders use to carry out their social policies.

The Life-Cycle of Social Movements

Alerting, winning, and mobilizing the majority to exercise its People Power does not happen overnight. It takes time to amass this People Power. For Moyer, this process involves a series of phases that build on one another. When the movement does not achieve its goal early in the process, it is because it has not yet unleashed the power of the majority. This can lead to frustration and even to people leaving the movement.

While we don’t criticize a sophomore in college for not graduating yet, we often criticize a social movement because it hasn’t “graduated” by meeting its overall goal. Like a college student, a movement goes through a series of stages that build on one another until it reaches “graduation.”

Moyer created a model to understand these steps. His “Eight Stages of Successful Social Movements” framework is designed to help us see the journey a movement takes to amass People Power and to accomplish social change. It has the added benefit of helping those in the movement to overcome a chronic sense of failure, powerlessness and the belief that they are always losing because, although it has not achieved its final goal, a social movement is often successfully meeting the sub-goals required to pass from one stage to the next as it build and broaden the People Power needed to create change.

The Eight Stages of Successful Social Movements

Moyer’s “Eight Stages of Successful Social Movements” include:

1. Normal Times: Business as Usual. A critical social problem exists that violates widely held values. The general public is unaware of this problem.
2. Failure of Official Institutions. Many new local opposition groups form. Use official channels: courts, hearings, lobbying Administration and Congress. This stage often exhausts the traditional remedies of the system.
3. Ripening Conditions. Recognition by the public of the problem grows. More active groups are created. Longtime advocacy groups lend support and visibility. Recognition by the public of the problem and its victims slowly grows.
4. Take-Off. A catalytic event occurs that starkly and clearly conveys the problem to the public. Dramatic nonviolent action/campaigns are organized. Organized actions show how this problem violates widely held values. The problem is put on society’s agenda. The Movement “takes off.”
5. Activist Failure. Despite action, the goal of the movement is unachieved. Powerholders are unchanged. Numbers are down at demonstrations. Despair, hopelessness, burnout, and dropout occurs. It can seem that The Movement has ended. (In fact, the real work now begins. Virtually every successful nonviolent social movement goes through this phase.)
6. Winning and Activating Majority Public Opinion. The movement deepens and broadens. It finds ways to involve citizens and institutions from a broad perspective to address this problem. Growing public opposition puts the problem on the political agenda. Official channels are used with some success. Nonviolent actions are used at key times and places. There is often a new catalytic event. The Movement promotes alternatives, including a paradigm shift (e.g., a nonviolent foreign policy). The consensus of the powerholders on this issue fractures. Powerholders begin to split. The political price that some Powerholders have to pay to maintain their policies grows to become an untenable liability. Powerholders promote bogus reforms and create crises to scare the public. 60-75% of the public opposes official policies, but many fear the alternatives. However, support for alternatives is increasing.
7. Success. The majority now opposes current policies and no longer fears the alternative. Many power-holders split off and change positions. Power holders try to make minimal reforms, while The Movement demands real social change. The Movement finally achieves one or more of its demands. The Movement raises larger issues and proposes better alternatives and a true paradigm shift.
8. Continuing the Struggle. The struggle to achieve a more humane and democratic society continues indefinitely. This means safeguarding the gains won as well as pursuing new ones. Building on this success, we return to Stage 1 and struggle for the next change.

By proposing this “social change road map,” Moyer does not mean to imply that social change is quick. Many of the movements he studied took years or decades to achieve their success. Even more pointedly, Moyer does not intend to suggest that social change is easy. He would be the first to stress that it is enormously difficult to achieve. It requires challenging deeply entrenched conditions, policies, social arrangements and customs from which powerful people, groups, and institution benefit. It means struggling against chronically violent and unjust structures. It involves significant commitments of time, energy, resources, and risk, including, in some cases, the risk of one’s life. Moyer’s movement life cycle is not intended to minimize or overly simplify these realities. Instead, it is offered as a resource for navigating and understanding these realities.

Applying This Model

Moyer’s model helps us trace the journey of the movement seeking to end the U.S. war and occupation in Iraq.
The slow emergence in 2001-2002 of the Bush administration’s resolve to attack Iraq (Stage 1).
The efforts of the peace community in late summer and early fall of 2002 to organize, on short notice, efforts to persuade Congress not to back a resolution of support for war that handed the administration a blank check (Stage 2).

After the resolution passed overwhelmingly, the emergence of growing, coordinated opposition that knit together long-established peace groups with new initiatives like the Iraq Pledge of Resistance and that sought to counter what Moyer calls the “myths and secrets” cloaking the policy, including then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech at the United Nations “certifying” Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (Stage 3).

Stage 4 – Take-Off – was a combination of the Bush administration’s relentless aggressive rapidity in early 2003 and the peace movement’s pro-active organizing. Fifteen million people marched in the run-up to the invasion. The New York Times called this massive, ad hoc international peace community “the second superpower.” This monumental outpouring of opposition, it was felt by some, just might force cooler heads to prevail.

This, of course, did not happen. On March 19, 2003, President Bush pulled the trigger, invading and occupying a sovereign nation that had not attacked the United States, even as it was cooperating with UN weapons inspectors bent on unearthing the purported justification for this military strike: weapons of mass destruction. Instead, such weapons rained down on the people of Iraq — and an enduring occupation of the country commenced.

Not only did the Bush administration’s brazen (and, as we now know with verifiable certitude, unfounded) attack on Iraq further decimate a society already reeling from twenty years of war and twelve years of economic sanctions, it had a simultaneously destructive impact on the peace movement. Organizing continued, but the momentum that had been dramatically building before the war began to slip. Frustration and feelings of ineffectiveness undermined ongoing movement building. Numerous stalwart organizers kept their “eyes on the prize,” continuing to build this international effort, but many participants who had marched with heady enthusiasm only days or weeks before were jolted by the launch of the war and now felt they hadn’t made a difference. Participation in myriad movement initiatives fell. Numbers at demonstrations plummeted. And just as the power of this movement began to diminish, the open-ended U.S. occupation took hold (Stage 5).

The Movement’s Present Challenge and Opportunity:

Completing Stage 6 (Winning Majority Public Opinion)

Although the movement lost momentum immediately after the war began, the anti-war movement did not die. In fact, it started to spread in many creative and enduring ways. It organized itself, forming local, regional, and national organizations, coalitions, and networks. It launched a series of action and education campaigns. And it played an important role in the process of building a solid majority opposed to the war by keeping the issue on society’s agenda. The movement has firmly entered Stage 6.

In the past year, the impact of this growing People Power has reshaped the political landscape on the question of the war. As late as mid-July 2006, the Democratic leadership in Congress was deeply divided on espousing a position on troop withdrawal, and Democrats running for Congress had been cautioned by Democratic Party strategists to not mention Iraq. The strategy was to avoid the topic altogether, hoping that the Republicans would be blamed for the policy and the Democrats would reap the benefit by default. This began to shift in mid-summer, as grassroots efforts organized by many peace organizations and networks intensified their work in local Congressional districts to organize constituents and voters to mobilize a nationwide call for members of Congress to support a withdrawal of troops and closure of bases. For example, The Declaration of Peace (I was involved in organizing this initiative) was a broadly based campaign launched in late spring 2006 that was endorsed by over 800 national and local organizations. It called on U.S. Senators and Representatives to support withdrawal as part of a comprehensive peace plan, including an Iraqi-led peace process; the campaign culminated in late September with 375 events across the nation.

In addition, there were a variety of vigorous anti-war initiatives organized by MoveOn.org, TrueMajority, United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), CodePINK, Hip Hop Caucus, Veterans for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, Gold Star Families for Peace, the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance, American Friends Service Committee, and others. In the face of the worsening situation on the ground in Iraq and this increased grassroots organizing at home, the Democratic leadership in late July coalesced around a call for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, which became its central focus in the November elections.

Since November, the peace movement has launched a dramatic “full court press” on the new Congress to end the war. These efforts have been strengthened by relentless, coordinated campaigns lobbying Congress; dozens of nonviolent sit-ins across the U.S. organized by The Occupation Project; a march attended by hundreds of thousands of people in Washington, D.C. organized by UFPJ; hundreds of local events held across the nation marking the fourth anniversary of the war in mid-March organized by The Declaration of Peace and many other groups; and the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq, where 3,500 people from across the U.S. gathered in ecumenical strength for prayer and action in D.C., and where 222 people were arrested as they prayed for peace in front of the White House after a dramatic ecumenical service at the National Cathedral.

Now the anti-war movement is preparing to move to the next stage.

Toward a Strategy for Moving from Stage 6 to Stage 7 (Success)

As we begin to address the question of what is required in this crucial time of “turning,” it is important to again acknowledge the sheer difficulty of social change, especially as it approaches accomplishing its goal. Deeply entrenched interests and assumptions uphold and seek to legitimate this policy. They do not easily concede their power, as Frederick Douglass said more than century ago. To effect a withdrawal of troops from Iraq will require a vast effort; to see the emergence of a comprehensive peace plan – including a peace process led by the Iraqi people and supported by the international community; closure of U.S. bases in Iraq; U.S. reparations; and money for human needs at home, not war abroad – will require a much more monumental endeavor. Finally, more challenging still will be the effort to set a fundamentally new course for U.S. foreign and domestic policy.

Nevertheless, each of these changes is possible. As Schopenhauer once wrote, “Truth passes through three phases. First it is ridiculed. Second, it is fiercely and violently opposed. Third, it becomes self-evident.” It is now becoming self-evident that this war must end. In this next phase, the movement must increase this sense of “being self-evident” and inevitable. This will require many steps, including increasing its de-legitimacy; increasing the visibility of the opposition; increasing outreach to Congress and the administration; and increasing and widening support for a comprehensive peace plan.

Below are a number of suggestions for organizing this increasing “inevitability.” These campaigns and initiatives by themselves, though, are not enough. They must be grounded in a fundamental reorientation that challenges and transforms our deeply rooted belief in the power of violence to create peace, justice, and security.

Great social movements dramatize the fundamental moral crisis of their age and offer a clear choice to their societies. They often dramatically change the terms of the debate about certain fundamental aspects of their cultures. The current movement to end the war in Iraq has the potential to do this. This will require finding creative ways to challenge the matrix of structural violence in which this war is embedded and all the other forms of structural violence that this war replicates and reinforces: racism, sexism, poverty, homophobia, economic inequality, and a systemic unresponsiveness to human need in communities and in the wake of Hurricane Katrina (when $700 million a day is spent on war).

But it will also mean our undergoing personal, communal and societal transformation of our “structural violence self” through action, reflection, prayer, and collaboration with others that opens us to wrestling with the sheer terror of the U.S. aggression in Iraq and what it means for each of us: What is our complicity? How have we cooperated? What are the ways we can clearly and unmistakably withdraw our consent? What would this require of me? If I weren’t afraid, what would I do? How can I unleash my faith? My creativity? My hope-against-hope? My truest self?

In the transition from Stage 6 to Stage 7, the strategies discussed below will be more effective and powerful if they grow out of:

• A growing national movement of Circles of Compassion and Zones of Nonviolence – part of existing communities or organizations or newly minted — in which we can safely ask these and other questions – and then support one another in following these threads into action.
• A growing national movement of Circles of Compassion and Zones of Nonviolence – part of existing communities or organizations or newly minted — unleashing their creativity to help America grasp what is really happening in Iraq.
• A growing national movement of Circles of Compassion and Zones of Nonviolence – part of existing communities or organizations or newly minted — that pool their moral, spiritual, and political capital and spend it freely in meditation, action, connection with others, and preparation for crossing together into the crossroads that is upon us. Such communities, networks and meet-ups will become increasingly equipped to complete what Moyer says is Stage 7’s task: the process of “winning the hearts (sympathies), minds (public opinion), and active support of the great majority of the populace” – and translating this active support into increased visibility of the public’s opposition to the war and building a consensus for a positive alternative: a comprehensive plan for peace.
  This will further undermine the older consensus for the war, set aside pseudo-solutions advanced by some Powerholders, and strengthen an even more far-reaching and fundamental critique of war as a purported way to address complicated international problems. A strategy to achieve these objectives will depend on two components: Messaging and Strategic Action.

The Message

While President Bush said last fall that he had retired his oft-repeated phrase about the administration’s strategy in Iraq – “staying the course” – it nevertheless remains his singular approach, even when disguised as a “surge.”

Increasingly brittle in its struggle with the Congress over Iraq policy, the administration is flying in the face of polling that indicates overwhelming public support for a solution. The president’s intransigence will therefore likely move more and more “undecideds” into the opposition. Why? Because they want a solution and, not seeing one from the White House, will decide that the withdrawal option is better than sticking with the status quo. As Moyer puts it, in Stage 7 “the majority now opposes current policies and no longer fears the alternative.”

In light of this, this is the moment for framing the movement’s approach to address a last remaining question (and one the administration incessantly alludes to bolster its case): will U.S. withdrawal leave a vacuum that will create chaos?

Having asked this question of many analysts, the same response is often offered: Given the catastrophe that the U.S. invasion unleashed and that has reigned during four years of occupation, there is no guarantee that the transition will be a smooth one. On the other hand, a surer guarantee is that if the U.S. war and occupation continue, the daily bloodshed will also continue. It is for this reason that on May 8, 2007, for the very first time, a majority in the Iraqi Parliament – 144 out of 275 members – signed a legislative petition calling for the U.S. to withdraw its troops from the country. Here the parliamentarians were reflecting Iraqi public opinion, as indicated in a September 27, 2006 poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org that found that seven in ten Iraqis want U.S.-led forces to commit to withdraw within a year. An overwhelming majority believes that the U.S. military presence in Iraq is provoking more conflict than it is preventing…” In this stage, it will be necessary to tell the truth: the Iraqi people and their elected representatives have called on the United States to leave.
And, even more sobering, it will be necessary to tell another truth: Continued U.S. presence in the country does not lessen the violence but increases it. Many analysts now stress that the increasing violence in Iraq is less about religious differences and more about a struggle between nationalists and collaborators.

In April, activist and analyst Tom Hayden’s long article in Common Dreams entitled “Stop the Dirty War” analyzes in detail “the new de facto U.S. policy in Iraq: to support, fund, arm and train a sectarian Shi’a-Kurdish state, one engaged in ethnic cleansing, mass detention and murder of Sunni Arabs.”

University of Michigan Professor of Middle Eastern and South Asian History, Juan Cole, explores this theme further in The Nation (April 9, 2007). For Cole, continued U.S. occupation of Iraq and its suppression of the Sunnis has allowed Shiites and Kurds to avoid compromise. “The key to preventing an intensified civil war,” Cole writes, “is U.S. withdrawal from the equation so as to force the parties to an accommodation.” But, Cole adds, a peace process must accompany this withdrawal: “The civil war must be negotiated to a settlement, on the model of the conflicts in Northern Ireland and Lebanon.” Here we come to the last important component of a strategic frame: the need to support a Comprehensive Peace Plan as well as “troop withdrawal” and “defunding the war.” Here is a framework for a Comprehensive Plan of Peace that the Declaration of Peace has been supporting for the past year:

• An end to all funding for U.S. military operations in Iraq.
• Safe and rapid withdrawal of all U.S. troops and coalition forces from Iraq, with no future deployments.
• Support for an Iraqi-led peace process, including a peace conference to shape a post-occupation transition.
• No permanent U.S. military bases or installations in Iraq.
• Return control of Iraqi oil to the people of Iraq, as well as complete sovereignty in their economic and political affairs.
• Support for reparations and reconstruction to address the destruction caused by the U.S. invasion, military occupation, and 13 years of economic sanctions.
• Establish a U.S. “peace dividend” for job creation, health care, education, housing, and other vital social needs at home.
• Increased support for U.S. veterans of the Iraq war.
• No war against Iran or any other nation. In this phase, we must strengthen the growing majority’s resolve to end the occupation by telling the truth about the U.S. role in Iraq and by calling for a comprehensive plan for peace.

Strategic Nonviolent Action

Taking a cue from Moyer’s ideas, the transition from Stage 6 to Stage 7 requires two fundamental strategic action tracks: organizing dramatic, public, nonviolent action (including acts of conscientious, nonviolent civil disobedience) to clearly tell the truth about the war and to embody the withdrawal of consent from this policy; and secondly, inviting people from all walks of life to clearly signal their support for an end to the war and for a comprehensive peace plan through what Moyer called “people participation activities.”

Supported by campaign framing, nationwide teach-ins, strategy meetings, nonviolence trainings, and logistical support, the movement will set and organize days of nonviolent action, including in September 2007 (before Congress completes work on war funding for the new fiscal year’s budget) and in March 2008 (on the fifth anniversary of the war). In addition, the first day of every month could be designated Peace for Iraq Day in the U.S. and around the world, a time set aside for many kinds of public witness for peace in Iraq.

Within this framework, “People Participation Activities” would be organized and encouraged, including:

• Every religious service – in synagogues, churches, mosques, sanghas, Quaker meetings, etc. –followed by “Prayer in Wartime”: a group (inside or outside the building) praying for and reading the names of the Iraqi and U.S. war dead.
• Organize delegations of local civic and religious leadership to visit every member of Congress to call on them to end the war and to support a comprehensive peace plan.
• Organize monthly forums and community meetings on ending the war, in communities across the country.
• People everywhere begin to wear an article of clothing, a button, an armband – some object that communicates your longing for peace.
• Make a daily phone call to the offices of our members of Congress. This call includes reading the names of the war dead.
• Participate in a nationally organized gasoline fast and boycott focused on one oil producer.
• People across the U.S. post a video on YouTube describing their commitment to take steps for peace and to end the war. Send the link to their entire email list. Encourage others to do the same.
• Organize a monthly public “Die In” in cities across the U.S.
• Commit to participate in and promote the power of interfaith initiatives seeking to end the war, including the Network of Spiritual Progressives, and Clergy and Laity Concerned About Iraq.

And many other creative efforts to call, clearly, for peace.

The great spiritual practice of our time is to take hold of one another’s hand and cross into the crossroads of peace and justice. Together we will enter the mystery of this time and invite the People Power that is deepening and broadening in our society to definitively create the political and moral conditions for ending the U.S. war and occupation in Iraq and for setting our society on a new course for a just and lasting peace.

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Ken Butigan is on the staff of Pace e Bene Nonviolence Service, a nonprofit organization that leads nonviolence workshops and trainings for personal and social change and consults with organizations and social movements to create effective strategies for social change. In January 2006, he was an initiator of The Declaration of Peace, a nationwide grassroots action campaign working to end the U.S. war in Iraq. In 2003, State University of New York Press published Pilgrimage Through a Burning World: Spiritual Practice and Nonviolent Protest at the Nevada Test Site, his study of a faith-based anti-nuclear testing campaign.