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This article condemns the Persian Gulf war as militaristic and advises a ban on arms transfers to the Middle East. The Gulf War retaught the lesson that preventing aggression is much better than going to war to reverse it. The war also demonstrated the failure of a regional power balance: Iraq was armed as a bulwark against Iran, only to turn against one of its backers when its debt was called. The war seems less likely to go into military history as a great feat of arms than as a series of brutal acts perpetrated against citizens of a Third World state with an outlaw leader. One must ask whether it was necessary to destroy the power plants, communications, transportation, and water and sanitary systems on which innocent Iraqi civilians depended, exposing them to death and disease. Libraries are well stocked with prescriptions for common security--ways to resolve disputes, bans on weapons of mass destruction, political confidence-building measures, purely defensive military forces, controls on arms transfers, democratization, economic development, and so forth.