Our government’s suggestion after 9/11 that we stock up on duct tape to protect ourselves against terrorism was clearly an outmoded response to a vastly misunderstood threat. This is much like when the government taught our schoolchildren of an earlier generation to hide beneath their desks to protect themselves from a nuclear attack. The decision to wage a global “war on terrorism” is to react in a way just as obsolete -- and much more dangerous.

Terrorism is a strategy -- not an identifiable adversary. As we’ve seen in Iraq, rather than defeating terrorism, the chaos and divisions of war provide fertile soil for nourishing its growth. This is perhaps best expressed by the respected international mediator John Paul Lederach who suggested that going to war to defeat terrorism is like hitting a mature dandelion with a golf club -- it only creates another generation of terrorists.

But war is not only inept at halting terrorism, its costs are devastating. It destroys the crucial civil processes it is designed to protect, wastes and ravages everything in its path and decimates all that we cherish: our world’s vulnerable children, beloved families, homes, schools, communities and traditions. War’s legacy is death, pain, grief, poverty, disease, starvation and … more war.

And each time we wage war we risk the possibility that weapons of mass destruction will be unleashed. Nuclear weapons are currently in many more hands than ever before and the United States threatens to use them in any war. The concept of a “just war,” long a mainstay of our foreign policy, disintegrates when the unjust result of any war could be a nuclear clash more terrible than we can possibly imagine.

To continue to use war for our security in these times is a response deeply rooted in ancient survival patterns, but rendered obsolete by the destructive power of modern nuclear, chemical, biological and conventional weapons. We wage war at our own peril, seeking security but risking annihilation.

In this time of unprecedented global connection we have a new opportunity to discover some profound truths. We know that the fates of all the world’s people are intricately entwined; that whatever diminishes or enhances the security and well-being of any one of us does the same for all of us; that building relationships is the foundation for resolving our differences; that within diversity lies the prospect of new, creative solutions, and that there are many concrete examples of practical, effective alternatives to the obsolete behavior of war.