From Motherpeace by Vicki Noble, 1982:

Patriarchy has brought us no peace.  Instead, its leaders try to reassure us by arguing, as Winston Churchill did, that "safety will be the sturdy child of terror and survival the twin brother of annihilation."  What Churchill apparently meant, in his apologia for the nuclear age, was that we could assure survival not by actually annihilating people but by threatening to do so, perpetually, and hoping that no accident or folly would lead to war.

Today, leaders warn us about terrorists, while themselves commanding the terrible power to wreck, within half an hour, whole continents.  And the idealogists of Patriarchy tell us that "man" has always been a killer, his first tools a club to break an arm, a stone to smash a skull.  In this view, all that changes is the sophistication of the weapons and the "causes" over which to fight. 

I listened to President Bush's speech the other night, and as always, I strain to hear and understand exactly why we are in Iraq and why we have done such terrible things to the Iraqi people.  He mentioned, rather in passing, that we are fighting a war of ideologies that will take a very long time.  Yes, we may just have to cram democracy down all their throats, while losing our democratic rights over here.  A war that will never, can never, be won.