There is a lot to be said for correcting Bush II’s failures in the conflicts his Administration faced.

Where he basically told the American public to not step up, but to shop more and worship the “heroes” that found the military more alluring than being underemployed in small towns or larger ones that lost all their industry to the Globalist Elites.

Where he ignored strategic communications, economic solutions to matters like poppy fields nourishing Taliban and Warlord coffers.

Yes we should use more than just “miracle weapons!!” and “our high tech heroes!!” in protecting and advancing our overseas interests. DOD Secretary Gates has stated such, very strongly. Better a bigger State Dept than two “high tech” Navy gunships costing 3 billion each – he says.

That said, Kucinich is an idiot if he thinks a Dept of Peace would work any better than the UN Peacekeepers have if it is set up along idiot utopian lines as the UN Operations have been. If one looks at their record, they seem to only defer and postpone conflicts that are not reconcilable by political means. Ceasefires with UN troops positioned between parties that never settled their dispute usually means that hostility is not diffused and replaced by goodwill, but only intensifies and explodes while “Peacekeepers” are there or when they flee in horror as the dogs of war begin chomping bones in Rwanda, East Timor, the Suez.

Alas, it is just Wikipedia, but the list of UN Peacekeeping operations from the Korea onwards generally only defers resolutions and at best, only fosters stalemate. In only a few cases has it “created peace” – usually by a change in political rule in one of the belligerants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_Nations_peacekeeping_missions

Sometimes it is good to apply new knowledge, new negotiation theory, recognition of other tools to resolve disputes – economic incentives, control of high breeding rate populations seeking to invade or migrate to other occupied lands…objective statesmen able to convey to both sides the possiblities of not just defeat or victory, but full war being ruinious to all parties.

But in the end, sometimes there are disputes that can only be resolved with bloodshed. And in many cases, war is ultimately a social good to resolve issues that cannot be resolved otherwise.
As in other conflicts, like marital, sometimes peace at all costs between parties is not advisable for either side in the long term. Better a brief and bloody battle, a divorce and resolution. And then focus on a lasting peace rather than a series of mini-battles that are blocked from finality by the intervention of cops or blue helmets acting as temporary “Peacekeepers” – until a family is dead, or a Rwanda happens.

If we are to have a Gov’t group that focuses on International Peace, and succeed where UN Peacekeeping generally failed – to must be located within State and have core objectives:

1. Work by State to address technological threats that may destabilize should continue – that being matters like the excellent State Program created under Nunn and Lugar now gathering up loose nuclear material, liaison with military and Commerce on matters of proliferation, liaison with international groups sharing common objectives.

2. Policies of economic development and birth control tied to internal stabilization and eliminating jobless, impoverished “excess people”. And strategic communications that “couterprograms” against those wishing to raise hatreds to conflict level.

3. Recognition that merely stopping armed conflict by external intervention is not the same as creating a lasting peace. For that, a war may indeed have to be “let happen”. Short of war, Final Borders and settlement of grievances by troops and courts may have to be imposed. Or due consideration may have to be given to arming both sides equally to give the peace of parity – against futile war if both sides can wreck the other side and only get a Pyrrhic Victory. Or Partition.

4. Such a State subdepartment should have full access to military experts and academics involved in negotiation and conflict theory. Which would collaborate with other nations…making a study of factors that underlay what creates durable peace, and what causes war neither side wants..