(Originally published in Greater Democracy)

In a recent blog entry, Professor Gordon L. Bowen at Mary Baldwin College summarizes an editorial which he wrote for the local newspaper. Mary Baldwin College is in Staunton Virginia, and the ghost of Woodrow Wilson looms large there.

Professor Bowen writes, “As Americans prepare for elections here, important ballotings also are to take place soon in Afghanistan and Iraq. But are electoral processes likely to yield pro-U.S. leaders in these battle scarred lands? A Wilsonian belief in the natural affinity of free peoples guides us to an affirmative answer, but such faith alone will not guide us to a winning strategy in the War on Terrorism.” He refers to an article in the Washington Post about a Saudi poll which notes that Osama bin Laden is more popular than the U.S. there. This fits well with the comment from Fassihi’s letter that “that if Saddam Hussein were allowed to run for elections he would get the majority of the vote.”

The question this poses, then is beyond winning the war, how does one win the peace, how does one win the hearts and minds of the people of a country? In my discussions with my daughter, I have noted Robert McNamara’s speech, Security in the Contemporary World. For those of my daughter’s generation, I should note that Robert McNamara was Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam conflict. Yet in this famous speech, he talks about how many people, “think of our security problem as being exclusively a military problem”. He goes on say, “Security is not traditional military activity, though it may encompass it. Security is development.”

I wrote about this back in August, and I return to my comments from before suggesting that instead of Kucinich’s call for “U.N. In, U.S. Out”, we should be calling for “Peace Corp (Or AmeriCorps) In, Marine Corp out”, or perhaps even better “AmeriCorps in, Halliburton out”.

Yet beyond economic development, there is the need to develop a public sphere where open and intelligent discourse can take place. When I blogged the Democratic National Convention, I was interviewed by Alhurra, the U.S. sponsored Arabic television station. “I talked about the importance of dialog, of getting as many people involved as possible, and that by having a good dialog, the readers should be able to figure out the truth.”

More recently, I was at a summit which included people from Women in Iran Their website says, “The Women in Iran web site tries to open a window, however small, to the life of Iranian women -- this always hidden half of our society. This web site, with the slogan of "Women's Right Is Human Right", tries to tell the story of struggles, issues and successes of Iranian women, and in this way we would like to extend our hands to and welcome all those who believe in the social and intellectual equality of women and men.”

While I have yet to see the effects of this blog entry, I do believe that blog entries and economic development are tools that need to be used to bring about a peaceful end to the war on terror. I believe McNamara, Alhurra and Women in Iran, are important pointers in the right direction and that we need to move away from a strategy that is based almost completely on military might.