Someone famous once observed that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”

His point was that it defies reason to try and describe one medium through the language of another; each can only be understood unto itself. Which is why we hope that this Friday, islanders will be “walking” – as opposed to “marching” – for peace. We’d like to think that someone, somewhere realizes the inherent contradiction between advocating for amity and reconciliation on one hand, and boots thudding ominously in lockstep on the other.

To be sure, the day will be suffused with discord and dismay over the ongoing conflict in Iraq. Thinking ahead to the event – a local tie-in to the United Nations’ apolitical International Day of Peace – we had occasion to re-read a 2004 essay from the Nation magazine, “The Moral Case Against the Iraq War,” in which writer Paul Savoy observes: “Talking about the world, or at least Iraq, being ‘better off’ avoids confronting the civilian carnage caused by the war… We should be wary of talking about the overall good of society or of a particular country. There is no social entity called Iraq that benefitted from some self-sacrifice it suffered for its own greater good, like a patient who voluntarily endures some pain to be better off than before. There were only individual human beings living in Iraq before the war, with their individual lives. Sacrificing the lives of some of them for the benefit of others killed them and benefited the others. Nothing more. Each of those killed in the war was a separate person, and the unfinished life each of them lost was the only life he or she had, or would ever have. They clearly are not better off now that Saddam is gone from power.”

It’s a powerful and insightful argument. But lest anyone in the anti-war crowd get too smug in the rightness of their convictions, the Los Angeles Times reports this week on a team of archivists and videographers laying bare the atrocities of the former Saddam regime. Typical among the millions of documents being sifted and interviews compiled is the tale of an Iraqi woman who under the tyrant’s rule lost 23 relatives – including her husband, son and pregnant daughter – to prison or execution: “My life is very complicated, a never-ending saga of pain and sadness,” she told interviewers after Saddam’s fall. “I cannot bear much more pain. I went through a traumatic time with the death of my daughter and son. My son was executed. I was told that my daughter, who was four months pregnant, died of a hemorrhage in the arms of my sister-in-law. She died of fear in prison before they could interrogate her. That’s all I know of her.”

Would you rather be alive under despotic rule, or be dead under democracy? For the countless lives lost in Iraq – civilians, soldiers, persons of all political and sectarian stripes – that question is moot. And that is, in the end, the ultimate failure of both oppressor and liberator.

The wisdom of the International Day of Peace is that it aspires to transcend the politics of the day, asking all sides – liberal, conservative, American, Middle Eastern, anti-war, pro-Bush – to step back and consider peace as a higher ideal. No political party, no religion holds a monopoly on the cause; it is an end in itself, to be aspired to by all.

It may seem naive to rally for an ideal, when specific policies and actions have caused such a profound rift among the citizens of our nation. But we must ask: If carrying an “Impeach” banner or a “Bush Lied” sign means you’ll scare off peace-craving conservatives from Friday’s event, are you walking or marching? And if you back the president and “support the troops” but won’t join your neighbors in a rally for peace, just what cause are you fighting for?

For one day at least, let us all come together – even if only in spirit – and stop dancing about architecture.