To stress one's own love of peace is always the close concern of those who have instigated war. But he who wants peace should speak of war. He should speak of the past one ... and, above all, he should speak of the coming one.

A remarkable consensus appears to have emerged on the Left: that in the context of the war on terror the distinction between war and peace has been destabilized. Alain Badiou suggests that the category of 'war' has become so obscured that ancient capitals can be bombed without serving notice to anyone of the fact that war has been declared. 'As such, the continuity of war is slowly established, whereas in the past declaring war would, to the contrary, have expressed the present of a discontinuity. Already, this continuity has rendered war and peace indistinguishable.' 'In the end', notes Badiou, 'these American wars ... are not really distinguishable from the continuity of "peace".' Antonio Negri and Eric Alliez likewise comment that 'peace appears to be merely the continuation of war by other means', adding that because peace, 'otherwise known as global war ... is a permanent state of exception', war now 'presents itself as peace-keeping' and has thereby reversed their classical relationship. Their reference to a concept made popular following Agamben's State of Exception is far from unusual in this new consensus. 'We no longer have wars in the old sense of a regulated conflict between sovereign states', notes Zizek. Instead, what remains are either ‘struggles between groups of Homo sacer ... which violate the rules of universal human rights, do not count as wars proper, and call for "humanitarian pacifist" intervention by Western powers', or 'direct attacks on the USA or other representatives of the new global order, in which case, again, we do not have wars proper, merely "unlawful combatants" criminally resisting the forces of universal order. Hence 'the old Orwellian motto "War is Peace" finally becomes reality.'