GROUND ZERO, New York City, Dec. 27-- WORLD PEACE!   WORLD PEACE! 
        Listen!   Can you hear the cries…the tears of remorse? 
        Peace lovers, once driven by the hope that when communism fell the world would grow flowers instead of bombs and bullets, have all but given up on the idea that World Peace is within the grasp of Citizens of the 21st Century.  Terrorism has stood in Peace's sunlight, casting a deadly shadow on the idea that nations can agree to peace in spite of human nature's thirst for war, death and destruction.
        The disillusion came into sharp focus in 1989 when the Berlin Wall crumbled.   A symbol of East-West nuclear tension, the falling of the Wall implied for many peaceniks that the Gordian Knot of Conflict had been finally cut, untied, unraveled.  Once the world stopped aiming lethal nuclear weapons at one another, a new World Order would usher in replacing Suspicion with Affirmation, and Division with Unity.
        Unfortunately, that global Unity hope was quickly dashed when Terrorism found that the superpowers had no stomach for war--civil war.   They had been great at policing World War, but when it came to stomping out the fires of dissent and despotism, they weren't good local firemen.   They weren't equipped to snuff out regional conflicts.  
        History had defeated them in this arena.

        America lost its first "guerrilla war" in Vietnam at the expense of 50,000 lives and an estimated two million Vietnamese’s.    Russia, in 1979, launched a similar "guerrilla war" against Afghanistan.   After eight brutal years of fighting and the loss of 14,000 Russian soldiers, Russia pulled out, defeated.
        When the Berlin Wall came down instead of ushering in peace and tranquility, the superpowers’ former check and balance systems over tyrant nations evaporated.  No longer did the Terrorist of a small, struggling country have to answer to either America or Russia.   Both giants were licking their wounds.
        The time was ripe for the evolution of dictators and despots.  In 1979 Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq on the heels of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.
        America and Russia, trying to juggle allies in the Middle East, threw aide here and there, never sure when the guns and bullets they were offering for support might turn back on them.
        World Peace rushed out of the globe's jugular as regional conflicts grew more intense and confusing.  Russia's invasion of Afghanistan ended in dismal failure, a Vietnam-type defeat that rippled through the world  reminding everyone of  the inability of the "super giants" to fight and win small wars.
        Madmen like Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic or Rwanda's 1993 Hutu government unleashed a reign of killing and destruction that reminded the citizens of the world of the former military superpowers' impotency to "fix" other nations.  Both America and Russia stood helplessly by as thousands upon thousands of bodies floated down blood-clogged rivers.

        In past years America and Russia held smaller nations in check, wedged between the Hammer & Cycle on one side and the Stars & Stripes on the other.  Despotic leaders were muted by the shadows of each power, fearful of engaging either's wrath.
       When the two giants collapsed their fight with one another, the Terrorists rose out of the caves, seizing or wielding a new-found power in the knowledge that neither the U.S. nor the former Russian Empire had the resources or stomach to fight hundreds of small battles in an equal number of nations undergoing transformation.
       The world's policemen were gone.  The despots were in.  
        Today, America and Russia are scrambling to fight off the Ants of Terrorism.   They crawl out of holes here and there, attacking the superpowers with ambushes and assaults, sniping at them to show the world that any time a Terrorist desires, he or she can rise up out of nowhere and clutch the giants' testicles in a great vice.   
       Somalia was a bitter example of a failed attempt by the United States to heal the wounds of despotism.   Then came September 11, the World Trade Center attack, the Pentagon attack, the Bali attack.  In the midst of this was the constant attacks in Israel and increased failures at negotiating peace in the Middle East.  Russia had its own problems with Chechnya rebels Terrorizing its power and authority.
        The Gulf War didn't help proffer the prospects of peace.   It only proved the ability of the bulldogs to snarl and yap at the superpowers, and to illustrate the conflict of the United Nations in agreeing as to whom the world's Peace Policeman would be.
        President Bush's War On Terrorism was a declaration of war on a global basis, a unilateral vow to fight war against any individual or nation that harbored Terrorism.  To many, that meant global war, for the despots were everywhere, symbolized most egregiously by Saddam Hussein.

       In an opinion piece published today in the Christian Science Monitor, Larry Seaquist, a former U.S. Navy warship captain and Pentagon strategist turned peace-builder, suggests the failure in creating WORLD PEACE is the delusion it can be achieved by military forces--i.e.. waging war.
      The fatal flaw by national leaders is an historic belief that guarding one's borders is the key to its internal security.   The hunter-warrior principle of defense calls for guards to be stationed around the  perimeter of a nation, waiting for hoards to rush its walls and who are geared to repel them.  This includes preemptive attacks when there is a threat or presumed threat in the offing.
       However, the strategy was based on one nation against another, one force facing another force.  Little thought was given to the carcinogenic effect of Terrorism that sprouts up like a virus in the midst of the homeland, one Terrorist at a time, bombing here, poisoning there, plotting here.   The strategy did not consider being bitten to death by ducks, or sniped at by one guerrilla Terrorist after another driven by ideological differences rather than national agendas.
       This faceless, nameless, anonymous Terrorist enemy flies in the face of armies and modern warfare technology--all designed to pulverize and smash into submission fixed enemies.   WORLD PEACE, Seaquist claims, will not occur by strapping on  rifles and assaulting bankers in desert strongholds with tanks and Black Hawks.  Seaquist advocates World Peace will only come when individuals in each tormented community stands up and work for it from within the hearth, from within society's innermost core--the family, neighborhood, community unit.
       Unfortunately, Mr. Seaquist doesn't give the reader any finger holds, any real firmament on how to go about becoming a Citizen Sentinel of Vigilance.   However, I understand his point.   He's saying that unless each citizen is Vigilant and takes the responsibility for the protection of his or her community, there will never be any WORLD PEACE.  Peace begins at home.  It cannot be the result of war, for if it were, the world would be at peace today.  We have had far too many wars to suggest peace is war's outcropping.  
     Even with this knowledge, we attack the goal of peace with the tools of war.  We heap billions of dollars on ancient resources that have proven only to fester war and depreciate peace.   The revised Northern Command is an example of shifting resources from one kind of war to another in an attempt to promote peace.

        New York Times, reporters Philip Shenon and Eric Schmitt offer a report on  General Ralph E. Eberhart of the Air Force in today's Times.  Eberhart is the nation's top officer in charge of domestic security.   Gen. Eberhart is the head of Northern Command, a Terrorist Situation Task Force that once was charged with being the alert force to guard the U.S. against threatened Russian nuclear attacks..  His emergency command center is part of a 4.5 acre bunker complex buried 2,000 feet into Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado.  It was built in the '60s as our core planning center to stave of Armageddon.  Daily, Gen. Eberhart walks through a variety of Terrorist scenarios--proactive and reactionary plans on how to deal with bombings, smallpox, water supply poisonings, dirty nuclear bomb radiation leakage--limitless planning on how America will respond to the next Terrorist attack.
       FBI and CIA representatives stand at his side, providing input and coordination. Also close by is Col. Jarisse J. Sanborn, the senior legal advisor.  Sanborn's job is to insure federal laws that restrict the domestic role of the military, such as the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits U.S. troops from direct involvement in domestic law enforcement duties.  These laws include who can be arrested and detained within the law
        War is being stoked, deep in the bowels of our nation, just as it is in the bowels of Iraq and Afghanistan, and who knows where around the world.
        But the target of war is not the true enemy.   Our guns and bullets are aimed at the "heads of war," the "Terrorists" who organize and plot to bring horror and destruction to our unsuspecting.  The great fallacy is by killing Saddam or Osama, or blowing up a carload of Terrorists in Yemen with a Predator manned by the CIA, we will move closer to peace and security.
        Seaquist's point is that won't happen.  Peace will not evolve out of war--more war will.  
        That's why I believe, and the VigilanceVoice advocates, that we not hunt down Terrorists, but instead spend that energy on hunting down the Beast of Terror--the oak not the acorns of Terrorism.
        The Beast of Terror does not reside in caves in Iraq or Afghanistan, but within each of us.   We, human beings, harbor our Beast of Terror.  Most of us control it, contain it, restrain it, leash it.   But many don't.  It raises its many heads in nefarious ways, creating Fear, Intimidation and Complacency in those around us, in ourselves, in society.   It is not the privy of suicide bombers or fundamentalists alone.   Terrorism--the injection of Fear, Intimidation and Complacency--can be hurled at a child by an angry parent's comment, or by a husband to a wife, or by a sniper in Washington D.C.   Terrorism has two forms--one that attacks the emotional well-being, the other that attacks the physical.
        If we are to find peace, it must be as a result of taming our Beast of Terror, not feeding it.  

       The Pledge of Vigilance is an individual Tool of Vigilance to leverage one's awareness of the Beast of Terror's goal to diminish the safety and security of a person's mind, and those around him or her.   It forces subscribers to it to reach for Courage in the face of Fear, for Conviction when under assault by Intimidation, and to take Right Actions rather than fall into a state of Complacency where one abdicates his or her personal security to others.
        I would have been more impressed if the Northern Command headquarters was planning how to get each American to fight his or her Beast of Terror as a key strategy to eliminating our threats of national security.   If Gen. Eberhart was more concerned with putting the Sword of Vigilance and Shield of Vigilance into every citizen's hands, and to insure that everyone subscribed to the Pledge of Vigilance, we might move closer to the concept of peace and farther from the fear of war.    Terrorism, when it cannot Terrorize, is rendered impotent.   Courage, Conviction and Right Actions for the benefit of the children's children's children disarms Terrorism instantly, it takes away the fuel necessary to spark the fires of Fear, Intimidation and Complacency.
      I concur with Mr. Seaquist that the battle starts at home, and isn't one that will be won by killing Saddam Hussein or trying to impose another government in place of his current despotic one.   What will change Iraq is a commitment by its people to protect their children, and all children--the same one we need to effect within the United States.    The Pledge of Vigilance will help all nations evolve into a Society of Vigilance.   It will turn the attention of people away from the need to be "governed" to the more vital and ultimate goal of "self government."   It will make each parent and loved one a Soldier of Vigilance, more concerned for the safety of future generations than allowing despots to hold the future of their children in their hands.
      World Peace means world commitment to Vigilance.   It means we must constantly be wary first of our own Beast of Terror, secondly of that within all others.  When we can walk up and face each other's Beast of Terror, armed with the Tools of Vigilance, we drive it back to its hiding places, deep within us where it can do no harm unless we feed it with our Fear, our Intimidation and our Complacency.

       World Peace, ultimately, is the wrong cry.   What Mr. Seaquist and others striving for a world without brutal conflict should be asking for is World Vigilance.   Peace is static, the end of war and the beginning of yet another.   Vigilance is dynamic.   It exists outside peace and war, the end and result of human conflict, bound in a continuous cycle that has no alpha or omega.
         Vigilance is a muscle that is always flexed, always coiled, always poised to strike down Terrorism.   It guards people from falling Complacent to the idea that Peace will assuage War, that light will suffocate dark, that Paradise exists without effort.
         Perhaps someday we will have a Northern Vigilance Command, staffed by those on alert to the presence of Fear, Intimidation and Complacency in our society and the world.   And, perhaps someday advocates such as Mr. Seaquist will promote World Vigilance rather than World Peace.
         In the interim, we must look in the mirror for the solution.   We must find and manage our Beast of Terror, and then help others find and manage theirs.  When that happens, Terrorism will not need to be killed, it will starve to death.