Two days after the Utah delegation to the Department of Peace conference visited the office of Senator Orin Hatch, the front page of the Salt Lake Tribune contained an article quoting the Senator as saying "Those who prepared only for the military defeat of Saddam's forces committed such a profound error that it will be a lesson learned in the history books long after we're gone." I applaud the Senator for making this bold and heroic statement. This Senator has publicly been in lock-step with the Bush Administration on policies of war since the beginning. This causes me to reflect on the deepening sobriety at every level of society with respect to the war. It is a sobriety like waking up in the morning after a night of drinking and realizing all the "profound errors" committed the night before in an inebriated, over-exuberant state.

As in drunkenness, we felt powerful and lucid and glorious, but now, in the morning, we wonder what in the world we could have been thinking.

In this sober state of mind, we see clearly that even the mightiest military force on the planet, a force that can shock and awe us with regime change in a mere six weeks, cannot build a lasting peace in four years. We see as never before that the tools of violence are irrelevant and obsolete in this world steeped in terrorism and nuclear weapons, when a rogue group of extremists can, in a single act of atrocity, cause the creation the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act and the Transportation Security Administration. Whether herding through airport security, cleaning up after hurricane Katrina or hearing that we are somehow unable to sustain dialog with North Korea, it has never been clearer that our peacebuilding technologies are in their primacy. They could be much more effective and humanitarian.

But it is the primitive state of peacebuilding in which exists the greatest potential for human evolution. In the past 30 years the number of Peace Studies programs at universities in the United States has grown from a dozen or so to over 300. One of the greatest attributes of the human species is that we will relentlessly seek solutions to even the most complex of problems. We will increase our solution-seeking capacities until we find the solutions or until those solution-seeking institutions supercede the problems they were originally trying to solve.

Senator Orin Hatch is the minority leader in the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee. He and his friend and colleague, Senator Ted Kennedy, the chair of the committee, are in a unique position to institutionalize the sobriety of peace in our government by creating a United States Department of Peace. I feel certain that Senator Kennedy can be persuaded. But a bi-partisan effort would be much more effective. Senator Hatch's thought have led to words. Now words must lead to action.