More war will not change this stark reality. The city of Baghdad remains a deadly battlefield. Huge U.S. military bases and concrete blast walls have turned roads into twisting and archaic tunnels. An evening curfew remains in effect, and people are terrified of car bombings, kidnappings and assassinations. It is a pattern played out in cities and towns across Iraq.

Promises of security have evaporated with a military occupation unable to restore the most basic of services to pre-war levels, including the delivery of clean water, electricity and heating oil. The chaos threatens Iraq’s historic ethnic and religious mosaic and has forced Iraqis to seek safety in homogenous communities.

As fear of civil war grows, the voices calling for negotiation, compromise, and diplomacy must be heard.

The path to peace in Iraq rests on fulfilling the needs and hopes of the Iraqi people. Personal safety, access to education and jobs are what give stability to a community. Stability and peace will require generous long-term economic aid, compensation for damages caused by this war, and support for genuine Iraqi voices and institutions.

The first steps are removing U.S. troops and bases, and giving up American control of administrative, economic, political, and military structures. While many around the world may see the violence in Iraq as fundamental and inherent, rooted in history or simply incomprehensible, this is not the case. The current violence in Iraq is a direct result of the U.S. invasion and hostile military occupation.

The U.S. government has a military budget of almost half a trillion dollars. Yet Congress is poised to commit another $67.6 billion dollars to war in Iraq -- part of the largest emergency supplemental bill in history. Of the massive funds dedicated to Iraq, only a fraction, $1.6 billion, will be committed to reconstruction. The U.S. State Department has announced that the last new infrastructure project will be to build a prison.

The U.S. cannot win this war with more troops. However, the alternative is not the abandonment of the Iraqi people. Lasting peace calls for a focus on diplomacy, and funneling these billions of dollars into reconstructing Iraq.

The United States cannot afford to ignore the voices and sentiments of the many other countries that oppose the occupation. Bridges need to be rebuilt between the United States and the international community. The past three years show that unilateral militarism, with disregard for our allies, leads to isolation and failure.

There are Iraqi organizations working for nonviolent social change that have the ability to heal the divisions of war and move the country toward reconciliation. They need the opportunity to build a new society free of outside control and manipulation.

After three years, AFSC emphasizes these simple truths: military solutions do not work; the occupation is not self-correcting; and the result is a pattern of escalating violence.

This weekend, across the country marches, rallies, vigils, phone calls, letter writing campaigns and visits to congressional offices are being coordinated to call for an end to this war. We embrace those efforts.

Peter Lems is Iraq Program Coordinator with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), an international social justice organization grounded in the principles of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). AFSC was co-recipient of the 1947 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition for Quaker’s work to ease the suffering of war.

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