If the Department of Peace existed today, who would * nominate ....?

[paineinthearse]

This is the next step of a post that started in GEN. I've extracted what I consider to be the 9 best names for this new post. Speculate and have fun.

============================

Rep. Dennis Kucinich has a resolution pending in the House to create a Department of Peace. For more information, see http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=158&topic_id=3598

If that cabinet-level position existed today, who would * nominate? And why?

[Cocoa]

1. a military type for sure

mabye Gen. Boykin.

[Katidid]

8. I'm with you, Cocoa .... definitely Boykin!

or Tommy Franks.

[getmeouttahere]

2. Having a Dept of Peace would require....

a government filled with peace-loving people.

[moggie]

5. Not really

In Newspeak it would be called 'Minipax', and would run the continuous war. Government departments already undermine their ostensible purpose, so there's nothing far-fetched about a Department of Peace run by hawks.

[O.M.B.inOhio]

3. Idi Amin (sp?) isn't available, so an Evangelist: "No Jesus, No Peace"

interesting question.

[IndianaGreen]

4. War is Peace!

Our language has been changed into Orwellian Newspeak, so when we speak of peace we really mean war, when we speak of freedom we really mean slavery.

George Orwell:
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’

Appendix
THE PRINCIPLES OF NEWSPEAK

The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds’. It could not be used in its old sense of ‘politically free’ or ‘intellectually free’ since political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts, and were therefore of necessity nameless. Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.

http://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/en_app

[mike6640]

6. Funny you should post this

Dont want to hijack a thread, but I have the book on the table in front of me. I was just about to go have a cup of coffee and curl up for another chapter or two this morning.

M

[TankLV]

7. Of course it would be Pearl, Negroponte, North or some other criminal

who is diametrically opposed to the principle of the "peace".

[marbuc]

9. I consider the Department of State to be charged with facilitating

the peace. Therefore, he nominated 4 Star General (sending a message perhaps?), sellout Colin Powell, and Sleaza Rice.

[flpoljunkie]

10. Dubya recess appoited Daniel Pipes to board of US Institute for Peace.

The President has signed the recess appointment of Daniel Pipes of Pennsylvania to be a Member of the Board of Directors of the United States Institute of Peace. The President nominated Mr. Pipes on April 2, 2003.

Who is Daniel Pipes? According to The Nation magazine, "NEOCON MAN"

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20040510&s=press

Neocon Man

by EYAL PRESS



Daniel Pipes was a busy man in the days following September 11, 2001. The Philadelphia-based foreign policy analyst and commentator on terrorism and Islam first learned that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center when a local television producer called to invite him to the station for an interview. Over the next twelve months, Pipes would appear on 110 television and 450 radio shows. His op-eds graced the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. The New York Post signed him up as a columnist. The Philadelphia Inquirer described him as "smoking-hot."

It was not always thus. Pipes, 54, had labored in comparative obscurity during the 1990s, writing a series of books and articles that advanced a hard line on Arab countries from Syria to Saudi Arabia to Iran, and darkly warning that Muslim-Americans posed a threat to the United States. Back then, these were not popular topics on the talk-show circuit. Pipes indeed seemed destined to share the fate of his old friend Steven Emerson, another self-styled terrorism expert, who gained notoriety in the immediate aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing for suggesting that it bore a "Middle Eastern trait." Pipes himself echoed this, telling USA Today that the bombing showed that the West was "under attack" and that fundamentalists "are targeting us."

The words of a demagogue, or of a prophet ahead of his time? To a growing circle of conservative admirers, Pipes is the latter. The Forward recently named him one of the nation's fifty most influential American Jews. Last year President Bush overrode objections from Muslim-American groups in appointing Pipes to the US Institute of Peace, a federal agency whose mandate is to promote the "peaceful resolution of international conflicts," despite the fact that Pipes has long dismissed the very idea of peaceful resolution ("diplomacy rarely ends conflicts," he had written a year earlier).

But Pipes's biggest impact has not come from analyzing foreign affairs. It has come from pointing a finger at a purported fifth column lurking in a place conservatives have long suspected of harboring one: academia. Two years ago Pipes launched Campus Watch, an organization whose stated purpose is to expose the analytical failures and political bias of the field of Middle Eastern studies. The group's first act was to post McCarthy-style "dossiers" on the Internet singling out eight professors critical of American and Israeli policies. When more than a hundred scholars contacted Campus Watch to request that they be added to the list in a gesture of solidarity, Pipes obliged, labeling them "apologists for suicide bombings and militant Islam."

much more...

[JNelson6563]

11. Glad Kissinger was on the list

he was my first thought. ;-)

[Debs]

12. Ghengis Khan....

Perhaps a former head of one of the Salvadoran death squads