We should expect our leaders to share our hopes for peace and the two-week ceasefire in the war in Iran is a start. But President Donald Trump saying he planned to bomb Iran, including power plants, “to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong” is not words for peace. We need the ceasefire to lead to a lasting peace treaty. 

The American people, especially our brave U.S. service members, deserve a peace plan to end the war with Iran and other conflicts around the globe. We should not rely on war as a means of solving international disputes, because it only creates more problems.

We should instead unleash a force which President Dwight Eisenhower said was more powerful than any military, “the good will of America — the great hopes of America — the aspirations of America for peace.” 

What has sadly been forgotten is the Iran war’s impact on children. UNICEF says that in Iran “Children have been killed, injured, and displaced, living in a state of fear and uncertainty.” We have a duty to build peace for all children. 

The best way to deal with potential nuclear threats like Iran is through diplomacy and verification systems. President Ronald Reagan and President Barack Obama were both right in pursuing a world free of nuclear weapons through diplomatic means. The agreements they pursued had inspections and verification systems, which we need to have with Iran. We must choose diplomacy over the tragic alternative of war.   

The Iran war has claimed the lives of civilians and U.S. service members. Civilians in Iran are facing a worsening humanitarian crisis.   

According to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) “in less than a month, more than 2,000 people have been killed, including women and children, and at least 21,000 injured. Many families have been forced to flee their homes, with an estimated 3 percent of Iran’s population of around 92 million now internally displaced.”

Hunger is also escalating because of the Iran war, including in Lebanon where the fighting has spread. Many hundreds of thousands have been displaced in Lebanon, for some a tragic repeat. Save the Children staff member Jana writes “Now, once again,  for the third time,  my family and I have been forced from our home, as Lebanon is hit by Israeli military strikes and conflict escalates across the region. ”

The UN World Food Program, Catholic Relief Services and Save the Children are providing meals and other aid to families fleeing the violence in Lebanon.

The already impoverished Middle East cannot afford another humanitarian crisis, especially with the many budget cuts to global food aid by the Trump administration. In addition to the emergencies in Iran and Lebanon we have to remember that Gaza, Syria and Yemen are suffering from severe hunger because of Middle East conflicts.  

“Across the region, families who were already struggling to rebuild their lives are once again being forced to flee, not knowing where they will sleep, where their next sip of clean water will come from, how they will feed themselves or their children” said Robyn Savage of the charity CARE.

The best hope for Peace may be the American people sending food aid to the Middle East, similar to the post WWII Friendship Train that fed Europe. One such train was named after Abraham Lincoln. It was President Abraham Lincoln who said, “With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

We need to move away from war and toward compassion and peace. That is our best hope for a lasting peace in the Middle East and beyond. 

William Lambers is the author of “The Road to Peace” and partnered with the UN World Food Program on the book Ending World Hunger.