In 1997, dozens of countries from around the world signed a land mine ban treaty. Our State Department conservatively estimates there are about seventy million active land mines in sixty countries around the world. The treaty, proposed by a Canadian homemaker, and endorsed by the U.N., Princess Diana, and the Pope, outlaws the use of anti-personnel mines due to the horrible effects they have for generations on postwar civilian populations. The United States, however, will not sign this treaty because we are using land mines extensively in our ongoing border cold war in Korea.

In 1998, an international effort, endorsed by UNICEF and former President Carter, proposed a treaty to outlaw the use of minors in combat. The signing countries agree to end practices which currently have ten and twelve year olds toting automatic weapons and young girls of eight being used to detect land mines. The United States, because it actively recruits seventeen-year-olds for our military, will not sign this agreement.

In 1999 after a decade of negotiation, Salt II was completed to control the proliferation of nuclear weapons. It hs been accepted by every potential nuclear power on the globe, except rivals North and South Korea, India and Pakistan. This agreement includes Russia, inspite of the fact that they may have complied with the Salt I treaty and we have not. Our Senate refused to ratify the SALT II treaty, citing the doubts about the verification provisions in the agreement.

Our refusal to agree to these treaties exposes our real arrogance and reinforces an international image of our country as the great bully. Former President Carter has said "We must remember that the United States did not create Human Rights, rather Human Rights created the United States". However, our rejection of these international peace agreements indicates a feeling that if our nation would have to change to comply with these standards; there must be something wrong with the standards. We simply shall make no accommodation for peace.

In the last several years I’ve had the privilege to travel around the world in my work. In my travels, particularly in Saudi Arabia and Canada, I’ve found people open to discussing their image of our country and the relationship we have with them. I believe you would find the foreign press will reinforce my anecdotal reports that around the world the United States is perceived as a militaristic people, a great bully who can be counted on to flex it’s muscle, often for peace, sometimes just to flex it.

I wonder whether we as a people, shouldn’t reevaluate the costs, to our society and our psyche of this role.

I don’t need to speak here of the horrors of war. Some of you have recently been reminded of this horror if you’ve made it to the cinema to see "Saving Private Ryan" or "the Thin Red Line". Maybe one or two in this room have witnessed this horror first hand. For you I have gratitude and sympathy in equal measure. You know war is not glorifying, it is dehumanizing. Is not our continuing national obsession with the preparation for and threat of war, just as dehumanizing?

In the "Good War", the United States was the "Sleeping Giant". Like the Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart screen heroes of the day, the country was very slow to anger, but terrible in it’s wrath when it could take no more. The U.S. stood by while Germany and Japan attacked ally after ally, in "strong and silent" restraint, until it could be restrained no longer.

When America did enter the war, the country was unified in it’s resolve and unqualified in its success. The result was that our country, while taking fewer casualties in Europe than Canada in World War II, was given the respect and appreciation of the world for the victories. And the resulting National self-satisfaction and "glory" was just enough to serve as salve for the deep wounds that war always causes.

Since the World War II, the US has been intoxicated with it’s success and power. With much more ready fists and trigger fingers, like the screen heroes portrayed by Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, and Chuck Norris, we’ve been ready to enter fights around the globe.

In fact, like the true bullies that we are, we’ve readily entered fights with weaklings, like Grenada, Panama, and Haiti just to remind our friends, and our enemies, of our power. Like a schoolyard bully, who fights for really no reason, there seems little reason to "break up" the fight and beak off the campaign. We are still fighting in Bosnia and Iraq. And there is little reason to look forward to the conclusion. For the bully, however, every conflict, win or lose, is unsatisfying. When one loses, there is no conviction behind the sacrifice and the loss is doubled. When one wins, there is a hollow undeserved feeling.

In this intoxicated binge of a half century since World War II, we have built the Greatest Warrior Nation the world has ever known. In World War II, Hitler's troops roared across Europe with a combination of discipline and mechanization that shocked the world. However, the Greatest Warrior nation the world has ever known (with a good bit of help from some friends) vanquished Hitler and took over 100,000 lives in two days in Japan to defeat Hirohito.

In the thirteenth century, Genghiss Kahn’s brilliant logistics and superior technology swept opponents before his Mongol calvary with remarkably few losses. On some of those same battlefields, America endured only 125 casualties in Desert Storm (some from friendly fire) while destroying over 3800 tanks, 1400 armored personnel carriers, and 141 planes and taking 60,000 prisoners and perhaps as many lives. In Serbia, we may have taken thousands of lives with only the loss of two U.S. soliders.

Two thousand years ago Rome bestrode the world like a colossus, with soldiers from Damascus to Wales. Today, the US has force well over two times the size of the Roman legions at it’s height around Mediterranean and the sun truly never sets on the American military empire with a half million personnel outside of North America.

We here in this room are responsible for the greatest warrior nation the world has ever known.

Colonel David Hackworth fought in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, was awarded seven bronze stars and a purple heart. He has since been to Somalia, Bosnia, and Kuwait as a military correspondent for Newsweek and authored the book "Hazardous Duty", which I recommend to you. Hackworth feels we could have a more effective military and spend 160 billion less per year, about 60% of what we now spend. He suggests radical military reform to eliminate bearuacracy and duplication between the services. He decries a military anxious to purchase newer and more high tech bombers while our foot soldiers, the "grunts", have outdated personal weapons, no body armour, inferior rations, and low pay. Thousands of our lowest paid soldiers, "grunts", are paid so little, they qualify for food stamps.

This year we will spend around $270 billion on our military. We will spend another 188 billion on the interest on prior military spending in the deficit. This does not include veterans benefits or retirement pay. This amounts to 41% of the federal budget (not including social security). Our budget is more than three times the combined budgets of China, North Korea, Cuba, Iraq, and Libya combined and just larger than the next ten largest military budgets in the world combined. Do any of these next ten military budgets represent our enemies? Even China in this number has "most favored nation" status.

Who are our enemies? What do we fear? After the cold war, the greatest threat to America perhaps is terrorism, and our stealth bombers and aircraft carriers don’t protect us from this. In fact our image as the great bully makes us more vulnerable to terrorism. In a sense, with our inappropriate level of military power and aggressive foreign policy, for small countries and political entities we are terrorists, and terrorism is an appropriate response. Remembering our missile attacks in 1998 on Afghanistan and Somalia, without declaration of war, attempt at extradition, or warning, may remind us of a terrorist action. Now more than ever, the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.

Ironically, we are a predominantly Christian nation. Yet the personal example of nonviolence and the words of the "Prince of Peace" is lost across the millennia on the greatest warrior nation the world has ever known.

We are no different here. Five days a week we work, tithing almost 10 percent of our wages to our martial cause. On Sunday we come here, drop a few coins in the plate and talk and sing about peace.

Why do I stand here whistling in the wind, whining about this to you?

After World War II, around the time of my birth, our society undertook the great struggle of the modern civil rights movement. Though incomplete, great progress has been made over the last two score years. This effort has been forty years in developing, it make take another forty years, but it is a struggle for the nation’s soul, and we are winning it. And this great struggle began right here - in the pulpits of Unitarian Universalist and other churches. It began right here - in the hearts and consciences of our people.

I call us to a new struggle. One that is no less for our collective salvation and no greater a task. It is time for the giant to sleep again.

In this election year, a few of the Republican Presidential candidates, without public opinion encouragement, are seemingly willing to talk about military reform. We need to encourage the debate beyond this, to remind the candidates of both parties, at all levels, about the peace dividend we are owed. More importantly, please communicate this message to your neighbors and friends. Begin the dialog that will take this movement from the kitchen table and backyard fence to the pulpit, to the ballot box and to the congress. Do not fear to speak for peace.

Even as the great modern civil rights movement was beginning, the most powerful man on earth spoke the words I close with today. Because of who he was, many consider him perhaps the greatest warrior of this century, his words fell on deaf ears. Friends and foes listened with equal suspicion. He was not known for eloquence, but I can find or pen no more eloquent closing than the words of Dwight Eisenhower,

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8000 people. This, I repeat, is the best of way life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. "