World Peace

Instead of a normal birthday gift, ask people to give some money in your name to Mercy Corps for Iraqis. My mom did.

I spent $US 3,000 of my own money on an ad for America's biggest anti-war presidential candidate, Ron Paul.

I cajoled my neighbors to vote for him, and ridiculed those who didn't.

He won in my county in 2008.

I admire Switzerland's neutral foreign policy. I expect it helps them live in peace, stay free and prosper. Unfortunately, it evidently began only after a rare military defeat.

I can imagine two more reasons for Swiss neutrality.

1. It's an alpine fortress, so they're less likely to be attacked. My understanding is that tunnels are booby trapped with explosives, tank traps are built into highways, modern homes have no-nonsense bomb shelters, all men must serve in the reserves and there are thousands of underground military installations. It's like a big porcupine.
2. The government's executive branch is seven people, instead of one. This deters a power hungry president from starting a war.

On April 16, 1953, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower said: Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

On October 3, 2007, U.S. General Wesley Clark said:

I went through the Pentagon ten days after 9/11 and an officer from the Joint Staff called me into his office and said

I would want you to know, sir, we are going to attack Iraq.

Why?

We don’t know.

Will they tie Saddam to 9/11?

No

I came back to the Pentagon about six weeks later, I saw the same officer, I said why haven’t we attacked Iraq?

oh sir, it’s worse than that. I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense’s
office, it says we are going to attack and destroy the governments in in seven countries in
five years. We are going to start with Iraq and then we are going to move to Syria, Lebanon,
Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran

In the 1930s, two time Congressional Medal of Honor recipient and Major General Smedley Butler said:

WAR is a racket. It always has been.