Carter's comments, especially the idea of transforming the Peace Corps through technology, converge interestingly with Owens' interpretation of the Revolution in Military Affairs: the former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs advises intensive conversion of the military into an information technology apparatus integrated into the world's most advanced telecommunications society, which he has urged the US rapidly to become. Without these changes, Owens has argued, the US cannot sustain competitive edge in national security, intelligence or economic performance in the next twenty years. He supports the re-envisioning of the Peace Corps in five linked areas: (1) reinventing America's international profile via a new use of soft power; (2) moving from a war-defined, non-technological, reactive theory of peace to a proactive theory of peace as a normal component of technologically advanced democracy; (3) reappraising the Corps as a national strategic asset whose value remains largely untapped; (4) the Corps as a model for the technological reinvention of government agencies for the 21st century; and (5) redefining civil society as information technology society.

REINVENTING THE US'S INTERNATIONAL PROFILE.

In re-evaluating the role of the Peace Corps along the lines explored in my discussion with President Carter, two facts must be confronted: (a) America's global image is in crisis; and (b) receding US prestige involves cultural as much as military factors. A 2004 report of the Pew Global Attitudes Project (chair: former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright) found anti-Americanism "deeper and broader" than in any modern period, with negative perceptions widespread in European and Muslim nations. Publics in surveyed countries expressed considerable skepticism of US motives. Majorities in France, Germany, Pakistan, Jordan, Morocco and Turkey believed the war on terror reflected US desires to control Mideast oil and the world.

Two recent books bring these attitudes into focus. In Beyond the Age of Innocence: Rebuilding Trust Between America and the World, Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's former ambassador to the United Nations, sees ebbing US prestige as not merely due to Bush Administration policies but as a "tectonic shift" in world opinion. Even when US commerce and culture are embraced, Mahbubani notes, their perceived one-sidedness causes suspicion and resentment. America's soft power is seen as extended hard power, an "increasingly frayed velvet glove that covers a mailed fist." The US needs to invite participation in its culture instead of heavy-handedly imposing it.

In Weapons of Mass Distraction: Soft Power and American Empire, Canadian journalist Matthew Fraser describes how movies, television, pop music and the fast food industry make US culture ubiquitous. But while these industries are economically potent, they fail to transmit the most culturally valuable contents of US society. More overtly, they reveal America's talent for shooting itself in the foot vis a vis global public relations. Hollywood blockbusters and fast food franchising machineries are genuine accomplishments, but it is unrealistic to expect them to represent high philosophical values. Foreigners seeking national values in these artifacts can be forgiven for perceiving the US as materialistic and shallow. With astonishing irony, the society preeminent in modern advertising has abysmally failed to market its greatest cultural goods.

The US's core national values differ markedly from those which its detractors identify with it. Its positive values include reverence for human rights, liberty, opportunity conferred without prejudice, moral responsibility, the free play and optimal development of intelligence, individual dignity, the desire to learn from all traditions and incorporate their wisdom into the complex multicultural fabric that is America. The values, in short, of the Peace Corps since its inception in 1961. Yet in Niger, which is unlikely to be unique in this regard, many Europeans see the Corps as an intelligence organization. French and German volunteers do not associate with Peace Corps volunteers, even in the same small, remote town, according to the Peace Corps Country Director for Niger, Jim Bullington. At a 2004 reception the anti-Americanism of DED (a German volunteer organization) personnel was palpable, says Bullington, who has served as a former US ambassador, a career US State Department diplomat for 27 years, Director of the Center for Global Business at Old Dominion University and Senior Fellow at the US Armed Forces Staff College. "In decades of diplomatic work with Europeans in Asia and Africa, I had never felt such hostility," he recalls. Clearly, US soft power, though immense, projects an inadequate message; this message handicaps even the Peace Corps, arguably the purest institutional expression of American idealism. To project its values more effectively may be impossible without reconceptualizing and strengthening the Corps.

PEACE AS WAR-DEFINED AND NON-TECHNOLOGICAL ...OR AS A NORMAL COMPONENT OF TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED DEMOCRACY?

According to novelist-essayist Gore Vidal, he suggested the idea of the Peace Corps to John F. Kennedy during the latter's presidential candidacy. Whether or not any such communication triggered the Corps' origin, Vidal's account usefully indicates two sensibilities on which the agency was founded. This history, and the paradigms that underlie it, must be taken into account in any attempt to appraise or re-imagine the Corps. Kennedy embodied American imperial presence, Caesar as global benefactor. Vidal represented an ambivalent intelligentsia captivated by the political establishment's mystique, yet suspicious of it, and deeply respectful of the idea that writers should serve a counterculture. The Peace Corps thus reflected a 1960s climate of conflict: geopolitically, the Cold War, and culturally, the anguished national divisions ranging from civil rights and race to Vietnam and sexual customs, awkwardly intruding social idealism into a government enmeshed in Vietnam. Congressman James A. Leach (R-Iowa) has observed: "President Nixon was clearly embarrassed by inheritance of this Kennedy/Shriver treasure and frankly apprehensive that America's best youth would come home committed to a non-realpolitik internationalism that might not suit his party's banner. But

he didn't have the political capital to bury the institution, so he chose to hide it, by reducing its size and institutionally downgrading its status and putting it under a newly created umbrella agency called ACTION." (It was President Carter who declared the Corps a fully autonomous agency in a 1979 executive order.)

This conflictual origin underlying the Peace Corps' peculiarity within government is not unique. It continues a tradition of pacifist enterprises defined by war. For centuries peace initiatives expressed deliberative aftermaths of war, climates of fear or moral concern preceding possible war, or dissent during war. Peace has been seen as the absence of violence or as the mitigation of legitimate or illegitimate force. So pervasive is this paradigm that we call police officers, who labor amid actual and / or potential violence, peace officers. Peace initiatives are encumbered with the political baggage and vocabulary of violence. This often conspicuously impedes stated objectives, as with the League of Nations. A feature of this custom of talking peace in the language of war has been the conceptualization of peace pursuits as non-technological. Military pursuits, it is assumed, demand budgets for sophisticated technologies; peace pursuits, if supported by well-equipped militaries, require only the non-technological arts of power brokers --the world of Machiavelli's 16-century treatise The Prince.