The War in Iraq
I've suprised myself in that I haven't let myself go in ranting about the mess and confusion and mistake that is the Iraq war. When the war started a number of years ago, I was attending UBC, and my roommates and I contemplated hanging a picture of Bush over the TV and then throwing things at it when we watched the news and something about the war went on.
In fact, the war in Iraq was the subject of the very first real heated argument between M and me. I was most emphatically against it. He from his Protestant "work ethic", conservative background thought it was the right thing to do. I am happy to say that it didn't take him very long to change his mind.
I am not any less hard core than I was in those heady, academia-filled, cheap-beer-from-the-grad-students-lounge-fueled discussions, days... Maybe being apart from that society has mellowed me out a bit... and the fact that up here only a few people talk about current events... or maybe they just don't feel as strongly about them as I do...
I get this newsletter from a group called Sojourners who run this blog, with different scholars, pastors, etc. writing, very intelligently I might add, about various current events and politics. It is American, so they do focus on US events, but they are very aware of what is going on around the world.
Anyways, this last blog on Bush's announcement to send more troops to Iraq is worth passing on. I don't know the proper etiquette of internet sourcing so I'll copy and paste the whole article as well as the link.
Jim Wallis blog-A Criminal Escalation
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Jim Wallis: A Criminal Escalation of An Unjust War
When the American people make it clear in the election, and in every public opinion poll, that they want an end to the war in Iraq, he ignores them. When the central recommendation of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group is "new and enhanced diplomatic and political efforts…that will enable the United States to begin to move its combat forces out of Iraq responsibly," he ignores them. When Republican Senators across the spectrum – from Susan Collins (ME) and Olympia Snowe (ME) to Sam Brownback (KS) and Gordon Smith (OR), and respected foreign policy expert Chuck Hagel (NE) – oppose his plan, he ignores them. (" … a dangerously wrongheaded strategy that will drive America deeper into an unwinnable swamp," says Hagel.) When the top U.S. military commanders in Iraq question the strategy, he replaces them.
George W. Bush is determined to continue making war in Iraq. I agree with Bush on one point – we need a new strategy in Iraq. But last night, George Bush decided to escalate the war and increase the American occupation – which he still doesn't seem to realize is at the center of the problem. Bush stubbornly believes that military solutions are always the best answer and consistently chooses war over politics. But without a political solution in Iraq, no escalation of the war will succeed. Whether in Iraq, or even in the larger war on terrorism, Bush believes, as he said again last night, that we are in a great "ideological struggle" between us and them, good and evil – and that only military solutions against "them" will suffice. Both wisdom and humility (two religious virtues) suggest that political and diplomatic resolutions to conflict are ultimately required. But last night, Bush again chose the primacy of military solutions.
By sending 20,000 more U.S. troops in support of a Shiite-dominated government, into a conflict that has become a sectarian civil war, he has essentially rejected the idea of a unified Iraqi government. Today, the idea of there even being a government in Iraq is another myth of Bush rhetoric, and for the young servicemen and women who daily die, it is a cruel joke to learn we have no real partners in Iraq. There is no real commitment to "democracy" among Iraq's leaders, a goal that Bush again invoked last night; there is only endless sectarian violence – with the government forces themselves acting simply as part of the tribal warfare. The depraved scene of Saddam Hussein's hanging revealed more a revenge lynching than an act of national justice – and became a brutal metaphor for what Iraq has now become. American lives are now the prime targets of the insurgency, while they are also caught in the cross-fire of a civil war. To send more troops into battle in a senseless "surge," without any new plan for political resolution between Iraq's intransigent and hateful factions – is morally irresponsible. We've tried this before, and failed. A new surge will simply mean more young Americans in body bags and wheel chairs, more families left without dads, moms, sons, or daughters, and more slaughter of innocent Iraqi civilians. "I don't want to die over there; I don't think it's worth it," said one American serviceman who was interviewed this morning about the President's new plan. He and his new wife had a new baby just five days ago, but now he has been ordered back to Iraq. He named several of his friends who have new wives and babies on the way, who will now also be sent back.
By the classic criteria of a "just war," Iraq was not, and is not, one. Not even close. And at the time of the run-up to the war, a majority of church bodies and their leaders around the world said just that. Pope John Paul II was quite agitated about Iraq, and had he been a younger man, might have actually intervened to prevent the unjust war. Even most evangelical Christians around the globe were against the American war in Iraq, and continue to be – a fact that the U.S. media also missed. There were others, like the American Southern Baptists, who supported their president's war, but on an international scale they were clearly the exceptions.
There is absolutely no way that the American invasion of Iraq could be considered a "last resort" – one of the just war criteria. The inspections officers were working to find and contain any weapons of mass destruction Iraq might have had, and the Bush administration both misrepresented and manipulated the alleged threat from the weapons of mass destruction. The administration lied to start a war. Over time, the brutal Saddam Hussein could have been isolated, undermined, and overthrown (a very worthy goal) from pressures internal and external, and serious proposals were on the table to do just that when Bush went to war. Instead we bombed the children of Baghdad and then allowed the country to slide into bloody chaos. There was never adequate "authority" to wage this war (another criterion) – the United Nations, NATO, and the vast majority of the world's people and nations were against it. Only Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair thought this was a good idea, and their political legacies will be forever shaped by the worst foreign policy decision either country has made in decades. Iraq also failed the tests of "proportionality" and "discrimination" with all the societal damage it was likely to cause (and has): the horrible number of innocents that have been lost through the tactics of "shock and awe," the resulting insurgency against American occupation, and now the civil war that has turned into ethnic cleansing. There was never an "imminent threat" from Saddam, there was no connection between Iraq and 9/11 (as we were told), and Bush's war in Iraq was not a central front in the international campaign against terrorism, but rather has turned out to be a serious distraction from it (though the war itself has now transformed Iraq into a haven and school for terrorism).
The war in Iraq was unjust; to continue it now is criminal. There is no winning in Iraq. This was a war that should have never been fought – or won. It can't be won, and the truth is that there are no good solutions now – that's how unjust wars often turn out. The president says that "failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States." But we have already failed in Iraq and it has already become a disaster for Americans, Iraqis, the Middle East, and even for the larger campaign against terrorism. The mistaken war in Iraq can only be mercifully ended, in ways that cause the least damage to everyone involved: the Americans and the Iraqis, the volatile surrounding region, and a world longing for security. It will likely take new international leadership to help fix the mess of Iraq, because U.S. leadership has brought one calamity after another. Unjust wars cause massive human suffering. When will we ever learn?
posted by Di @ 11:40 a.m.
1 comments
1 Comments:
Hi Di.
Can't say as I agree with you on your Afghanistan blog comments. Not even close.
Here's two columns I recently wrote for our local weekly newspaper. These were published the week before and the week after Remembrance Day.
"Uncle" Al Siebring.
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Column #1:
Have you got your poppy yet? The little red plastic circles are starting to show up on coats and outerwear all over the Valley, as they do every year at this time. But as my thoughts turn to those who we are called to “remember” at this time of year, I often wonder how veterans of past wars would view our society today. What would they think of the way we look at military matters in this day and age? In the first place, I think they would rush in and correct every politician or public official who blathers on about Canada’s “tradition of peacekeeping.” Let’s face it, folks. Until Lester Pearson came along, we had very little in the way of a “tradition of peacekeeping.” Canada’s military heritage - up until about 45 years ago - was one of warfare. Our soldiers killed bad guys. It’s what was expected of them, and they did it. They took no gratuitous pleasure in it, but they did it. And they did it well. Even heroically.
But it’s not politically correct to say that anymore. Because it’s not “nice.” Then again, stopping Hitler, (and the Kaiser before him), wasn’t exactly “nice” work. On November 11th, we all acknowledge that the world is a better place because of the blood, sacrifice, and suffering of those who did what had to be done. And yet, we get squeamish when we mentally cast our soldiers into that kind of role today.
I think if someone like Valley war hero Charles Hooey could come back and view our society today, he’d be aghast at what a bunch of wimps we’ve become. Especially about military matters. You want an example? Well, how about Canadian casualties in Afghanistan? Every time another soldier dies over there, civilian support for the war (and Steven Harper’s poll numbers), slip another notch. But let’s put some of this into “Charles Hooey” perspective. As I write this, 42 Canadian soldiers have died over there. That’s in five years of troop deployment. But we do the memory of our veterans a grave disservice when we bitterly lament those 42 deaths while completely ignoring the broader context of history, which teaches us that more soldiers than that died in the first five minutes of the D-Day assault on Juno beach. Look it up. The Regina Rifles’ “D” Company had 100 men on a landing craft. Only half of them even made it to shore. And 340 of our boys died on that beach in a single day.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to in any way minimize the grief or loss of bereaved military families in the Afghan conflict. Their suffering is real and heartfelt. But is losing a son any worse for a mother today than it was 60 years ago? Maybe part of the difference in terms of the way society reacts has to do with media coverage. It used to be that casualties of war were buried overseas. There were no pipers and ceremonies on the airfields of Europe to send our boys home. They were buried in places like Dieppe, Groesbeek, Brandhoek, Cassino, and Calais. But today, we highlight each individual death, and I suspect the emotion this coverage engenders is probably one of the main reasons that Canadians are starting to withdraw their support from the war. Because it’s not pretty to see a mother crying for her lost son. It tugs at our heart strings. We want the hurting to stop for her and mothers like her. It was American Civil War General William T. Sherman who first encapsulated this dilemma. He’s the guy who first came up with that line that says “War is hell”. And grieving mothers in every epoch prove this, over and over again.
But I’m afraid that in the overall historical scheme of things, our society has the attention span of a gnat when it comes to this stuff. We seem to have forgotten that the total death toll in WWII was greater than the entire population of Canada today. And that Canada lost more men in many (most?) of the individual big battles in Europe (in both WWI and WWII), than we’ve lost in a total of 5 years in Afghanistan.
And let’s not kid ourselves. We are at war in Afghanistan. Should we be there at all? That’s a different question, which I hope to address in my next column. But let’s never forget that Canada has a proud military history. Events like Dieppe, the Italian campaign, the triumphant liberation of Holland, Juno Beach, and the Korean conflict are all things we can proudly bring to mind, tell our children about, and even celebrate on November 11th. But to listen to some of our federal politicians, this country should ignore all of that history and turn tail and run at the first sign that the people we’re shooting at might actually be shooting back. On Remembrance Day, or any other day, that attitude displays a colossal betrayal of those who have died in defence of our country and its’ freedoms, both in past wars and in the present-day Afghan campaign. It is certainly not the way any of them would want to be “remembered.” In fact, it’s nothing short of shameful.
Column #2
Remembrance Day this year got me thinking about what our veterans died for. And about whether today, we honestly believe anything is worth “the ultimate sacrifice”. The moving tributes to our brave men and women, especially those who have died in Afghanistan, brought to mind a clash of cultures that seems to be epitomized in that faraway conflict. And then I ran across an online quote in a Belgian newspaper, from an interview done with a Dutch philosopher named Oscar van den Boogaard. He was talking about the notion that his country may soon become a Muslim nation. "I am not a warrior, but who is?” he shrugged. “I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it."
(He wasn’t being alarmist about the notion of losing his freedoms. Earlier this year, Holland’s justice minister declared that he would let so-called “Shariah law” - the moral code of the Muslim faith - take over his country if enough people voted for it. And the hard demographic fact is that the so-called “native” Dutch population is rapidly shrinking, while the only cultural group in Holland that’s producing more babies than corpses is in the already-one-million strong Muslim population. Demographers have noted that if the present trends continue, Muslims may become the majority in Holland within our lifetimes. Ditto for a large part of the rest of Europe.)
But this philosopher brought me back to my Remembrance Day musings. A lot of people have been questioning the mission of our Canadian troops in Afghanistan. Why are we over there anyway? Is it because Stephen Harper has caved in to the Americans, and is lending them our soldiers as an extension of their foreign policy? Is it because of oil? Or is it something else?
In previous world wars, everyone instinctively knew we were fighting against ‘evil’. There was a clear communal understanding that we didn’t want to surrender the reins of power to someone like Hitler. But do we honestly consider anyone over in Afghanistan right now to be “evil”? Some people say everything could be fixed if we just did more to rebuild the country and bring humanitarian aid. But the countryside is so dangerous that a lot of N-G-O’s - like the Red Cross - are scared to even venture outside the confines of cities such as Kabul. So what are we to do?
In our multi-cultural society, we’ve been taught to think that all cultures and religions are essentially equal. That we shouldn’t impose our way of life on anyone else. And that philosophy might work, as long as everyone else agreed with us. But the problem is, there’s a radical element of Muslim society that doesn’t want any part of that kind of thinking. The Taliban and al-Qaeda want to impose their ways on us. And they’d be happy to die for that cause; the notion of Jihad - or “holy war” - is a part of what defines them. It’s tough to resist that kind of resolve when we - like that Dutch philosopher - have spent all our lives enjoying our freedoms, but none of our time defending them.
It’s time to call a spade a spade. If the militant wing of the Muslim faith is indeed bent on expansionism (and it has proven that it is), we can’t sit idly by. Unless we are content to have future generations of our daughters potentially stoned to death for wearing anything other than a clerically-approved Hijab, and unless we want those young women barred from getting an education, we’d better stand and fight. Unless we relish the idea of amputation as punishment for thievery, and want our churches (and bars) burned to the ground, we’d better man the breaches. In short, unless we want to live under Sharia law - the absolute antithesis of every one of the “freedoms” we’ve been so lazily enjoying - we would do well to recapture the notion that there are indeed things worth dying for. Because even if we withdraw our troops from Afghanistan today, the battle will continue. Over time, this enemy would simply take the fight to us. If you don’t believe that, you’ve already forgotten the lesson the Americans learned on a quiet September morning just five short years ago.
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