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My late awakening to these realities has brought a healthy share of irony into my life. In another century, thirty-six years ago, I thoughtlessly rode the subway to Whitehall Street and became an unquestioning servant of the nation's foreign policy. Now, I am seen as unpatriotic, a card-carrying member of the blame-America-first crowd, even a Communist. (If my father were alive, I think he'd smile about that.)

All I really want is for America to start spending more of its wealth on eliminating the global gap between rich and poor. Kennan wrote about preserving America's position of disparity. I want to narrow it. That gap is one of the most dangerous forces in the world. While the World Trade Center attackers appear not to have been poor themselves, it is this grinding poverty that provides terrorists with a fertile breeding ground for hate, and hate is far more essential to terrorism than weapons.

America could make this a much safer world by cutting our $300 billion defense budget (which vastly exceeds the expenditures of any potential adversary) and by spending a lot of that money on eliminating world hunger. Some organizations have estimated that the prudent investment of about $60 billion a year could nearly eradicate hunger on the planet. For the Pentagon, $60 billion is chump change.

The greatest obstacle to that fundamental change is ignorance. For example, Americans vastly overestimate our country's generosity to other nations. In a survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, the average poll respondent estimated that America spends 20 percent of its budget on foreign aid. Actually, it's well below 1 percent. Using Gross Domestic Product as a benchmark, the United States is the stingiest developed nation. In contrast, it is far and away the largest seller in the global arms trade. And the money that other nations spend on buying American arms is money they can't spend on lifting their people from poverty.

The ignorance of the American people on foreign policy is the subject of an excellent book, Who Speaks for America? Why Democracy Matters in Foreign Policy, by Eric Alterman. One of his central points is this: Polls show that Americans would back goals very different from those adopted by the foreign-policy establishment. Among other things, the public would like a foreign policy "that eschewed far-flung adventures to concentrate on strengthening the American economy and society," Alterman writes. In other words, the American people believe in a far less interventionist stance than the American government does. But the average citizen does not know much about how to alter the course of foreign policy, and most foreign-policy professionals feel that the general public is too ignorant to be part of the debate.

So it all comes back to my starting point: ignorance. Now that I have recognized, regretted, and tried to remedy my own ignorance, I am struggling with another shortcoming: impatience. As someone who remained so ignorant for so long, I should be more tolerant of that attitude now. But I'm not. It just makes me very angry.

To brighten that gloomy prospect, I should admit that I have seen a few encouraging signs in the past two or three years. Perhaps the most heartening is the sharp increase in the number of young people involved in at least one aspect of the peace movement: the campaign to close the School of the Americas.

Every year in November, thousands of demonstrators gather outside the gates of Fort Benning to protest the school's existence. At first the crowds were small, but every year, they have grown, under the leadership of the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, the Maryknoll priest and Vietnam veteran who leads the movement. And every year, the percentage of young people in those crowds has also increased. I wrote about that hopeful development for the magazine U.S. Catholic last August.

In my own family, I have the example of my daughter Rachel, who led Pax Christi Metro New York for three years, exhibiting a profound understanding of world issues. At her age, I was still cloaked in ignorance.

Still, I'm naturally pessimistic, and I know from my lived experience how persistent ignorance can be. But these times are so perilous that we can no longer afford the option of failing to study what our nation is doing in our name. We can't settle for slogans, for mindless flag-waving, for barroom rooting for swift victory, without thoughtful analysis of what happened to make September 11 possible and how we must change our policies to minimize the possibility of future terrorism.

One hint for action: I think we should support a plan by Senators Joe Lieberman (D., Connecticut) and John McCain (R., Arizona) for a nonpartisan, independent commission to examine the September 11 events. With an independent commission, we have a far better chance of getting truthful answers than if we leave it to the administration or to the Congress.

The commission's work may also help focus the public's attention on foreign policy issues and dispel some of the ignorance. I certainly hope so. Something has to get us beyond the slogans and the flags. If we can't take that step, if the nation as a whole takes as long as I did to emerge from the fog of unknowing, we're in very big trouble.

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Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire
Chalmers Johnson | Owl Books | 2001
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Who Speaks for America: Why Democracy Matters in Foreign Policy
Eric Alterman | Cornell University Press | 1998
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PART ONE: Remembrances of another war to make the world safe for democracy. DECEMBER 17, 2001.