There is growing evidence that the universal need for peace and peace-building is becoming mainstream, common sense. Below is a New York Times discussion in which conservative historian Max Boot endorses the creation of a Department of Peace. I added emphasis to the paragraph about that.

Link to full article

Max Boot, Dec. 21, 11:38 AM ET:

I am afraid that the lesson most people will draw from the Iraq War is similar to the lesson drawn from Vietnam: that the United States should turn inward, giving up its leadership role in the world, at least temporarily, while it licks its wounds. That defeatist outlook led to the serious setbacks the West suffered in the late 1970s, from Afghanistan and Iran to Angola and Nicaragua, before we bounced back during the Reagan-Thatcher years. I hope that this time around we realize that a retreat into isolationism or quasi-isolationism would constitute an overreaction to the (likely) failure of one particular intervention.

Granted, we need to be more careful in the future about deploying our armed forces, especially on protracted counterinsurgency missions. Whenever possible, we should rely on indigenous allies, aided by small numbers of American advisers, rather than dispatching large numbers of American troops. (The model counterinsurgency, from my viewpoint, was the one in El Salvador in the 1980s, when a mere 55 Special Forces trainers helped a democratic government to defeat a Marxist uprising.) And if we do deploy American troops, we'd better be sure that they have the capabilities to carry out their assigned mission.

But rather than dramatically scaling back their missions, I would argue for increasing their capabilities. And not only the capabilities of the American military but also of the government as a whole. One of the biggest problems we've seen in Iraq is the inability of the civilian side of government to carry its share of the counterinsurgency and nation-building burden.

An urgent priority is to create a Department of Peace to match the capabilities of our Department of War (a.k.a. the Department of Defense). We've gotten very good at conventional military operations, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but we're very weak when it comes to rebuilding war-torn societies. Admittedly this is a difficult job for anyone, but we make it all the harder because of a lack of institutional capacity. Neither the Pentagon nor the State Department nor the U.S. Agency for International Development is really geared up for this important assignment. The result is that much of the burden is unfairly placed on our men and women in uniform.

We desperately need to beef up our civilian nation-building capacity by creating a new agency that will have funding to plan for, and to carry out, future contingencies, so that we are never again presented with a situation such as the one Iraq, where the bureau charged with running Iraq was created just two months before the invasion began. We don't begin planning for major military operations just two months in advance. Why should peacekeeping, stabilization, or occupation missions be any different?

There are other lessons I draw from the Iraq War about institutional shortcomings that we need to rectify. For a start, we need to make the interagency process more effective -- to get various government departments, such as State, Defense, and CIA, to work more closely together. This may require legislation along the lines of the 1986 Goldwater Nichols Act, which brought greater unity to the different branches of the armed forces.

We also need to enhance knowledge of foreign languages and cultures within not only our armed forces but also within other branches of governments. The Iraq Study Group reported that of 1,000 people in the US embassy in Baghdad, only six are fluent Arabic speakers. That's not acceptable. We need a multifaceted effort to address this knowledge deficit akin to the crash program we undertook early in the Cold War to enhance knowledge of Russia and China.

There is much more that needs to be done in other areas such as improving Information Operations (the Pentagon has no assistant secretary in charge of this vital area), expanding knowledge of counterinsurgency techniques (a new Army-Marine Counterinsurgency Manual will help), expanding the size of the active-duty Army and Marine Corps (far too small to handle all the tasks thrown their way), beefing up civil affairs and psychological warfare detachments, and increasing the number of special operators.

Reading this list of recommendations, you might well object that this is tinkering around the margins. It doesn't constitute a fundamental reconceptualization of America's role in the world. You're right. I don't think we can afford to give up the leadership position we have been thrust into, willy nilly, by the forces of history. The urgent priority now is for the U.S. to get better at the tasks we have to perform as the world's policeman"”a role we inherited from the British Empire.

It would be nice if we didn't have to take on all these onerous duties. But if we don't do it, who will? The United Nations? NATO? France? Don't make me laugh. Either we do it, or no one else will, and there is a general realization in the world that, however unpopular the U.S. may be, an American retreat into isolationism wouldn't serve anyone's interests. Indeed even as the U.S. remains bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq, we hear understandable pleas for intervention in Darfur.

The global demands on the United States are not likely to abate in the foreseeable future. We had better rise to the challenge or suffer the consequences, as we did after Vietnam. The sooner we can overcome our emerging Iraq Syndrome, the better.