On the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Rep. Dennis Kucinich introduced a bill into Congress to create a Department of Peace (DOP), headed by a Secretary of Peace, who would sit on the President's cabinet and on the National Security Council.

It may have seemed out of context at the time, but recent events highlighting the ultimate inability of military power to get America's way in the world has opened the door reevaluating our approach. And if nothing else, when the politics of fear drives almost every political decision-left or right--it is heartening to see people enthused and committed to big ideas-especially ones as timely as this.

A grassroots movement to make the DOP a reality is underway, currently focusing on getting Congressmembers to sign on as co-sponsors. The bill, HR 1673 currently has 50 co-sponsors, but with 435 seats in the House, it is going to need a lot more.

According to the draft bill, the Department would "take a proactive, strategic approach in the development of policies that promote national and international conflict prevention, nonviolent intervention, mediation, peaceful resolution of conflict, and structured mediation of conflict," and "address matters both domestic and international in scope."

Under the bill, the Secretary of Peace and his six undersecretaries and their respective departments are given a whole range of duties and responsibilities, from eliminating weapons of mass destruction to working with communities on domestic violence, gangs and criminal justice issues. The Secretary would "advise the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State on all matters relating to national security, including the protection of human rights and the prevention of, amelioration of, and de-escalation of unarmed and armed international conflict," and "make policy recommendations to the Attorney General regarding civil rights and labor law."

The bill also plans for a strong education role for the DOP, from working with the Education Department in developing practical peace studies programs for public schools to the establishment of a Peace Academy, "be modeled after the military service academies" providing a "4-year course of instruction in peace education, after which graduates will be required to serve 5 years in public service in programs dedicated to domestic or international nonviolent conflict resolution."

No less a patriotic warrior than George Washington recognized the value of a Peace Department. In a "Circular to the States" of June 8, 1783, he called "adoption of a proper Peace Establishment" one of the four things "essential to the well being, I may even venture to say, to the existence of the United States as an Independent Power."

The first bill to establish a Peace Department was introduced in 1792 by Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and Benjamin Banneker who surveyed the streets of Washington DC. There have been over 140 similar bills in the intervening years and there is still no Department of Peace.

The closest we have gotten are the International Arms Control Agency, meant to stem weapons proliferation, established in 1961; and the US Institute for Peace, established in 1984 and devoted to studying conflict and nonviolence.

Experience with these two organizations has made some peace activists leery of supporting the push for a DOP. Commenting on Kucinich's original proposal in 2000, Joe Volk of the Quaker-affiliated Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), while praising the proposal as having staked out a goal that could be a kind of "North Star to guide advocacy for peace by citizens of America in the 21st century," bluntly called the effort "a waste of time."

He wrote that "based on FCNL's experience with the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and the US Institute of Peace (USIP), we are very wary of the idea of legislating a Department of Peace." He says that the FCNL was active "to help create the ACDA in 1961, but we saw it taken over by people who became intimidated by right wing attacks."

"The latest regrettable chapter was when President Clinton traded the end of ACDA to Senator Helms in exchange for Senate ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention. After all our work to create and sustain ACDA, it was in the end simply thrown away as a bargaining chip by someone who knew little of ACDA nor what it took to establish it. This debacle demonstrates the limitations of embodying an idea in a government agency when the political atmosphere is not supportive of its goals."

Volk says he is concerned "that scarce resources for citizen action would be channeled away from attempts to influence the direction of US foreign and security policy into a futile effort to create a Department of Peace that would only be assimilated into the predominate culture of war and violence." He also points out that what small successes such legislative avenues have yielded were undertaken in a more favorable political climate.

These are all significant critiques, but neither ACDA nor the Institute of Peace were complete wastes of effort. The question is whether a DOP could favorably influence our "culture of war and violence." A lot of people think it can.

With armed American imperialism having come up short in ways that will only become more evident as time goes on, nonviolent conflict resolution and expert conflict deescalation skills make sense, even from a purely national defense standpoint. That's why George Washington thought it was such a vital idea when the young United States was anything but a superpower.

Competent training in the "administration of post conflict reconstruction and demobilization in war-torn societies" would be an immediate improvement over what we have now. And the Peace Secretary's annual report "on the sale of arms from the United States to other nations, with analysis of the impact of such sales on the defense of the United States and how such sales affect peace," would add new information to the debate. There a many, many other provisions like these in the bill that deserve consideration on their own merits, even if creating an actual DOP proves impossible.

Of course, to be of any use, America and Americans would have to be committed to peace. But since, as George Washington said, that is ultimately the only way the America is going to survive, there seems to be little to lose betting that we can--as the bill says--hold peace as an organizing principle of American society.

--Troy Skeels. The Grassroots effort to lobby congresspeople to sign onto the bill is being led by the "North American Peace Alliance," and they have a whole host of fact sheets, organizing information and a copy of the bill on their website at www.dopcampaign.org. There is also a handy list to find out if your congressperson has signed onto the bill and guidance for getting activated in your own community.