From one who loves the already-mentioned "Mothers, Daughters, Wives," "Great Peace March," "Masters of War," "With God on our Side," and "The Band Played Waltzing Matilda"...

From one that really appreciates Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." because it shows how this country dumps the vets into the street after they've used them up...

From one who says that "Good Morning Vietnam" was by far the greatest anti-war film (I know, I wasn't asked that) because it was the only film I know that protested wars not only for what they do to "our" soldiers, but also from the perspective of the ones called "the enemy"...

And, from one who is surprised to not see Jackson Browne's "Lives in the Balance" ("I want to know who the men in the shadows are, I want to hear somebody asking them why They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are But they're never the ones to fight or to die. And there are lives in the balance, There are people under fire, There are children at the cannons, And there is blood on the wire.")...

... I just wanna add Holly Near and David Rovics.

What could surpass Holly Near's "It Could Have Been Me" or "No More Genocide in My Name!"? Check out anything by Holly Near (http://hollynear.com). Holly sings both of the first two songs I listed at the top of this piece; she wrote the second. Some can be found at hollynear.com/lyrics; others can be googled. She wrote "It Could Have Been Me," in the sixties and updates it often, so there's a Viet Nam verse and an Central America one, among others:

A woman in the jungle so many wars away,
Studies late into the night, defends the village in the day.
Although her skin is golden like mine will never be,
Her song is heard and I know the words
And I'll sing them until she's free.
It could have been me, but instead it was you,
So I'll keep doing the work you were doing as if i were two:
I'll be a student of life, a singer of songs,
A farmer of food and a righter of wrong.
It could have been me, but instead it was you
And it may be me dear sisters and brother
Before we are through
But if you can work for freedom
Freedom, freedom, freedom
I can too.

http://www.hollynear.com/lyrics/it.could.have.been.me.html

Then there is the work of David Rovics (http://www.davidrovics.com/), the guy that wrote of bombing a village in Afghanistan, "Not one terrorist died there, but maybe some were born." This Jewish folksinger has the courage to sing out for Palestinian rights as well as against anti-Semitism and Naziism. (He has toured Palestine with that, and is now touring Hiroshima and Nagasaki and other Japanese cities.) He gives away his mp3s at: http://www.soundclick.com/pro/view/01/default.cfm?BandID=111310, but I suggest you buy his stuff too. Check out:

You ask me how it is
That I dare to take a side
You say I loathe myself
For pointing out that you have lied
You say it's tribal warfare
But I disagree
For the dynamics of the situation
Are not difficult to see
On one side is the fighter jet
On the other side the stone
On one side is the slave
On the other is the throne
For the many there are checkpoints
While foreign soldiers rule the street
For one side there is victory
But the people don't accept defeat.
The word you need to know is occupation
The very definition of a land without a nation
And if peace is what you're after then let us not deceive
It will come on the day the tanks return to Tel Aviv.

Read and hear it at: http://www.soundclick.com/pro/view/01/default.cfm?BandID=111310&content=lyrics&SongID=753230

But, hey you all, if you're reading all this, we gotta make sure we get it - as both Holly and David know so well: 1) Our songs have gotta be not just anti-war, but pro-justice, pro-peace, and celebrations of life, and 2) it's not enough to sing these songs; we gotta work all our lives for peace.

Peace,
cflpeace