Whether in the short run the UN’s ability to promote peace increases or decreases depends on whether groups like the CSUN invitees will undertake the long term effort to:

- empower the UN militarily, financially, judicially, and politically to prevent war between

states and control the causes and excuses for war.

- make such empowerment safe, legitimate, and politically acceptable by democratizing the UN

Thank Bush I for letting the UN prove what arms control advocates asserted over fifty years, that verification in fact can control arms. The post Gulf War UN inspections of Iraq were so successful that they have wound up embarrassing Bush II, it would seem, leaving no WMD for discovery after the Iraq War.

Thank Bush II for persuading the public, as arms control advocates also asserted for fifty years, that WMD constitutes a threat that no degree of American superempowerment will avert.

With the "highest levels" in the United States now admitting both that WMD proliferation is unacceptable, and that international verification is feasible, one might think that only a short step remains toward building world security. Politically, though, the step is immense, because peace and arms control groups don’t take politics seriously enough to capitalize on current events by taking the essential political steps.

The "highest levels" have painted the country into a corner by insisting that (i) the US must never reduce its own arms or submit to independent arms control verification, and (ii) the US is entitled to impose arms control on the rest of the world on the grounds that Americans inescapable (sic) have the most enemies, due to our God-blessed role as enforcer of the right as we see the right. With the occupation of Iraq already wearying the press and public, in order to maintain these unreal givens as long as possible, the government will have to complete the militarization of the US, through more wars and greater domestic thought and political subjugation.

The task of groups like the CSUN invitees is to discredit these fantasies and propose an alternative, feasible, means to control WMD and stop war. The proposal must center on empowering the UN to do what the United States now agrees should be done, which is to outlaw WMD, but which the United States will not accept as applying to the United States, and cannot do alone even as to other nations. The UN needs greater powers, not only to control arms, but to prohibit war. Global democracy is the prerequisite to empowering the UN, and must begin at the municipal level for the following reasons.

Power is accessible at the municipal level, whereas power at the national level, until power has been achieved locally, requires wealth and media access. At the municipal level, the public can be engaged, organization achieved, lessons learned, leadership developed, and the next generation’s thinking influenced.

CSUN took a stab at this two or three years ago with its short lived municipal program. The plan was to send teams to six or eight city and town elected bodies and ask them to appoint one of their number or another local citizen to attend the first annual meeting of a skeleton, shadow international legislative assembly. The participating communities would be asked to place election of the local delegate on the next municipal ballot, a simple but potentially far reaching step.

I believe that peace groups are impeded when it comes to thinking ambitiously enough to contribute to security, by a number of factors. Peace groups make little effort to coordinate with one another or to work toward a common goal, which if you think about it is an argument for thinking long term, as long term planning submerges immediate disagreements. Peace advocates, in my opinion, have little real confidence in democracy because, coming from elite colleges as so many of them do, they have little respect for the common person’s intelligence. This saps vitality from politics, and, absent great wealth, politics is the only route to power. Also, peace advocates tend, I think, to disdain power. They are content to let the powers that be hold power, relying on lobbying and persuasion, both futile endeavors in the face of the private interests that motivate the powers that be.

My suggestions for peace groups, accordingly, is to appeal to the very accessible democratically elected bodies in local communities, in this and other nations, to give instant birth to an international body that is capable of evolving into a source of legitimacy for international powers of peace enforcement. Based on fourteen years experience as an elected municipal official, and based on success in founding the Cambridge Peace Commission, Cambridge Arts Council, and other citizen groups, I see these advantages:

- Access to local press and television

- Access to the ears and minds of the general public, as distinguished from the already persuaded

- A laboratory for experimenting with ways to think globally while acting locally

- A forum for cross-border collaboration

- Initiation of the decades-long process of inventing a representative system for billions of people speaking many languages, as distinguished from millions speaking one

- A counter to the spreading acquiescence to militarism, empire, and thought control as the "only" possible responses to the real and admitted peril of WMD