The immediate future holds grim possibilities for war, though this does not reverse the general trend towards global democratization, said journalist Gwynne Dyer, who spoke last Wednesday night at St. Michael’s Brennan Hall.

“This is a war of disarmament,” he told the filled hall. “A country with 10,000 nuclear weapons will attack a country with none.”

The talk was part of Peace Week, seven days of public lectures and events organized by the U of T Campus Chaplains Association. Dyer is a Newfoundland-born broadcaster, writer and lecturer whose column on international affairs appears in more than 200 newspapers. His 1983 television documentary “The Profession of Arms” was nominated for an Academy Award.

Dyer believes the impending war the United States and its coalition of the willing are gearing up to wage against Iraq threatens to be much bloodier on both sides than the Gulf war.

“If regime change is your objective, then you have to go into Baghdad, and Baghdad is a larger city than Toronto,” he noted. Dyer foresees street fighting and high casualties, as well as Iraqi attempts to draw in Israel, a move he believes is aimed to catalyze a larger Arab-Israeli conflict.

Dyer characterized the Bush administration as one that sees “a use of force as the solution to virtually every problem,” although “curiously, it’s not going after the people who carried out the September [2001] attacks … Saddam Hussein is a nasty man, but not an Islamist.” According to Dyer, the “Axis of Evil” consists of “three countries that don’t even talk to each other” and are simply the convenient “usual suspects.”

In Dyer’s opinion, the attack on Iraq plays right into the hands of the Sept. 11 terrorists.

“What did the terrorists want the Americans to do? They wanted an indiscriminate attack from the U.S.,” in order, he said, to galvanize the Arab population into overthrowing current pro-Western regimes. Groups such as Al-Qaeda have been unable to do so using terrorism and are therefore “luring the Americans” into a war.

Even though Dyer’s dire predictions amount to “a fairly ugly menu,” the current international climate has experienced a marked change from twenty years ago. The Cold War standoff between the United States and the USSR meant a regional war could easily have expanded into nuclear war, which is now not the case. In this broader context, Dyer, who holds a PhD in military history, believes the pressing Iraqi conflict does not threaten the spread of democracy that has been occurring since the late 1980s, despite what pundits and other academics think.

“The chattering classes of the West would all be in jail if historical ingratitude were a crime,” he said.

The emergence of general global peace in the past twenty years is attributable to this spread of democracy. As Dyer noted, two democracies have never gone to war with one another.

And as the legendary historian noted, the war with Iraq “is not the beginning of the end, but a detour” on the road of social progress.