The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life.  by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, CA. 2009 The Three Laws of Performance is not the kind of book I usually review on this blog. Written for an audience committed to improving the performance of business organizations, it might be hard to see what this book has to do with creating a peaceful world. I have also written about transformational peacemaking and shifting the conversation about peace and violence in the world. The ideas outlined in this book, though oriented toward the business community, are eminently transferable to the larger challenge of creating change in the international geopolitical arena where war, terrorism and genocide take place.

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“We Are Not Your Enemy” President Obama offered friendship to the Islamic world in a televised interview on Al-Arabiya this week saying, “We are not your enemy.” This came on the heels of two other important actions by President Obama: using his middle name “Hussein” when he took the oath of office, and calling for a “new way forward” directly to the Muslim world in his inaugural speech.Is there any such thing as the Muslim world? Probably not. There are however, a billion or more people who practice the Islamic faith in the world, and the fact that the western world lumps them together and blames them for terrorism is a huge problem. Developing a New Relationship with the Islamic World Actions like the President’s interview,  even when accompanied by critical steps like the closing of Guantanamo and the renunciation of torture by the U.S., still will not win the hearts  of the Islamic world over to the U.S. These acts are but a drop in the bucket where it really counts: ending the scourge of terrorism. What needs to happen here is not a reconciliation with the Muslim world but a new kind of relationship that has never existed before—a partnership based upon respect.

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Lies of the Mind are Universal Lies of the mind are universal. When a group shares a thinking error it becomes part of the national narrative and is often unchallenged. People who engage in behaviors that support the lie believe they are good, upstanding citizens. Only when the thinking and its behaviors, is repeatedly questioned, does the house of cards collapse. Heyday of Bombing in WW II The idea that one could wipe out one’s enemies probably started in World War II with the heavy bombing of German cities and the use of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The unbelievable destructiveness of this bombing resulted in the unconditional surrender of both Germany and Japan.

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Laughing as They Killed“ “They laughed as they killed,” read some reports from the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. I have been unable to verify these accounts but I tend to believe them.  Why do humans behave like this? Two vital questions beg to be examined: 1. Why are so many young people so easily engaged swept up into terrorism such that they become mass killers? 2. What will it take to eradicate terrorism and create a safer world?

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 Killing Bin Laden Continues Disastrous Bush Policies President-elect Obama stated on his recent 60 Minutes appearance that he was committed to “capturing or killing Bin Laden”. I agree that Bin Laden, and his second in command Al Zawahiri, should be captured, but they should not be killed. Killing them would be a continuation of the disastrous policies of the War on Terror which so isolated us from the rest of the world. It is a dangerous policy and one which the Obama administration should carefully re-examine. Victims of Terrorism Not Just American I have been studying the terrorism issue since 1998 when the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by Al Qaeda. The victims of those bombings were overwhelmingly African citizens.  Although the target was the U.S., the reaction of the U.S.

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Understaffed, Under-funded Diplomatic Corps Nicholas Kristof’s column in ( 8/10/08) New York Times, “Make Diplomacy, Not War” was an interesting piece of journalism, both for what it said and for what it didn’t say.  Kristof makes the case that the American Foreign Service is woefully under-staffed and under-funded.  The US has more musicians in its military bands than it has diplomats. Something is seriously out of whack, he suggests, especially when it comes to fighting terrorism. Firepower Isn’t Effective Against Terrorists The US is still doing the same thing it’s  been doing since 9/11. It has continued a habitual pattern of using firepower against terrorists. We still haven’t learned that this approach is ineffective.

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  (Editor’s Note: Today’s interview is with John Fair, a former Air Force officer who once worked in the Pentagon planning for war and who left that career to become a minister and peacemaker.  John’s ministry is focused on the need for planning for a sustainable peace. )                                                               Life in the Air Force and Planning for War Q: John, I understand that you were a career officer in the Air Force. Help me to understand what led you to eventually leave the Air Force to become a minister and then a peacemaker. How did the conviction that you must work for peace, not war, evolve inside you? JF: I grew up in a church-going family.   I learned to fly at an early age. I became an Air Force fighter pilot and gradually began to see things on a larger scale.  I found it foolish chasing Russian bombers around the arctic icepack.

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 Calming The Fearful Mind: A Zen Response to Terrorism.  Thich Nhat Hanh. Parallax Press: Berkeley, CA, 2005. On An Idyllic Fall Day In September Seven years have passed since those haunting days in September 2001 when the airplanes hit the twin towers in NYC and Washington DC. As I sit here on this idyllic summer afternoon, it could even be today, and thousands could be going to their deaths.  In fact, in Afghanistan right now, they are. For terrorism is not over. To read the newspapers  it has barely gotten started.

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There is a universal longing for peace and yet we never seem to achieve it despite our longings and good intentions. We are pervaded with cynicism and a deep-seated belief that war will always be with us because, well, “that’s just how humans are.” The intention of this blog is to start a new and very different conversation: that peace is possible if we say we want it, and if we are committed to creating it so it thrives on the planet. We can design and live into the kind of world we want to inhabit. This blog is about inquiring deeply into all our conversations from the past, exploring what keeps us in a violence-filled world, the costs of living in such a world and what it would take for us to deliberately create a world which works for every one, not just for a select few. A second intention of this blog is to create a community of readers who see the possibility in the ideas presented here and who will take hold of this new idea about creating peace intentionally on the planet. Toward that end, I am strongly encouraging readers to comment on posts and to interact with me, guest bloggers and with each other.

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