At the outset of 2003 it was estimated that thirty military conflicts were being fought around the world. It's a good day for all these wars to come to an end. But will they? And if they do, what will replace them?
To end war, you have to think of ending not just one conflict, and not just thirty. What we have to end is the idea of war, which has turned into the habit of war, and then into the numbing constancy of war. . .
Like any habit, war has worn a groove in our minds, so that when we become very afraid or very angry, the response of war comes naturally. . . . In Mira Nair's film adaptation of Vanity Fair, a woman comments smugly at a party, "War is good for men. It's like turning over the soil." We reach for war the way a chain-smoker reaches for a cigarette, muttering all the while that we have to quit. In the past four decades America's war habit has led us into Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam, and Cambodia, not to mention more covert military operations into places like Laos, Nicaragua, and Columbia. . .
The way of peace has to become a new habit. To do that, it must offer a substitute for every single thing that war now provides. You may feel immune to the appeal of war, but everyone has benefited from war's gifts in some measure. . . .
War's gifts may prove bitter and empty in the end, but that hasn't eroded the groove of war in our minds. Today, after a century in which more than 100 million people died from war, we survivors still turn to war because we think it does some good. The satisfaction of waging war cannot be replaced by philosophy or religion. The Buddha and the Prince of Peace could not have spoken out more strongly against violence, yet their beliefs have been distorted into a cause for bloodshed at the hands of their followers.
— Deepak Chopra, Peace Is the Way