War

We are immersed in war in Afghanistan and Iraq and we are an essential party to Israel’s recent, virtual destruction of Gaza. We desperately need alternative, prophetic voices that see reality, not hide bound to violence as the primary vehicle for the resolution of conflict. There are some wise persons counseling us to leave Afghanistan as well as Iraq.

Stanley Hauerwas a Duke University theologian, a pacifist, says now is the time “to tell the American people some really hard truths, namely that we’ve got to start, as Americans learning to live in a world that we don’t control.” Hauerwas, after 9/11, among many, offered an alternative to all-out war on Afghanistan, perhaps an international police force. Al-Qaida represented about 300 people, and their planning for 9/11 was carried out in Germany and Spain and through U.S.-based Saudis. But we commenced all out war in a matter of weeks on a sovereign nation, while the American people were still absorbing the trauma of 9/11. 

Andrew Bacevich, who served as an officer in the U.S. Army from 1969 to 1992, now at Boston University, writes about Iraq in the August 15 issue of Commonweal and the “indisputable fact that this war was an utterly needless war―no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction found, no ties between Saddam Hussein and the jihadists established, no democratic transformation of the Islamic world set in motion, no road to peace in Jerusalem discovered in downtown Baghdad―to describe Iraq as a success, and as a model for application elsewhere is nothing short of obscene.”

The U.S. Catholic bishops after 9/11 proclaimed the U.S. had the moral right to defend itself, which the Bush administration took as a carte blanche to create utter mayhem in two countries, with hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees, untold traumatically wounded soldiers and civilians. Iraq became a massive recruiting ground for terrorists.

Jeremy Scahill, an expert on Afghanistan, who appeared on the Bill Moyers show, speaks to the reality of our mercenary army, in addition to our soldiers. “Right now (June 09) there are 250 thousand contractors fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan―about 50 percent of the total U.S. fighting force.” We’ve spent $190 billion dollars on the war in Afghanistan. “Most Americans are not aware that their dollars being spent in Afghanistan are, in fact, going to for-profit corporations . . . simultaneously working for profit and the U.S. government.” War is the business of companies like Blackwater, and it’s very lucrative. Scahill sees mercenary contractors as undermining the very democratic process of citizens defending their country. Lastly, “I think what we are doing in Afghanistan increases the likelihood that there is going to be another attack . . . because we are killing innocent civilians regularly.”

Bacevich speaks of the failure of imagination that characterizes the Washington establishment in addressing these critical issues. What if the $190 billion had been creatively used in Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries on earth. One thinks of Greg Mortenson and his book Three Cups of Tea, describing building schools in northern Pakistan which provide community-based education. There is deep gratitude from the people for his labor. After WWII, the Marshall Plan rebuilt war-ravaged Europe and created a new peaceful Germany, unlike the merciless punishment after WWI that was the breeding ground for Adolph Hitler. The trillion dollar bill for Iraq could have recreated the Middle East. After 9/11, virtually the whole world was with us; we had an opportunity to enthrall the community of nations with our creative bridge building, ala Nelson Mandella. Our fate was determined by men obsessed with war.

After years of listening to very learned experts on Israel/Palestine, I’m convinced peace with the Islamic world begins in Jerusalem. The scandal of the world’s longest occupation of a people, 42 years of oppression, cries out for resolution which can only happen with the insistence of the U.S. Over 3 billion dollars flows annually to Israel, 70% of which is used to purchase U.S. weapons. The people of Gaza were recently recipients of white phosphorous, which burns skin horrendously on contact, made in Louisiana, and cluster bombs, made in the Philadelphia area.

Donald J. Moore, a Jesuit, director of Interfaith Relations at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem, wrote a moving article in America (Oct. 12), “When Silence Is Betrayal” which indicates strong evidence that war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed by both Israel and Hamas in the 3-week war of December ‘08. Moore mentions the Jewish activist Sarah Roy, senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, who cites Gaza as an example of a society “deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution,” its people reduced to “aid dependent paupers.”

The almost total destruction of Gaza’s economy has caused the poverty rate to soar. In Moore’s words, it was “basically a war against a civilian population.” A very disturbing fact: “Only one-quarter of the food needed to meet Gazans’ basic nutritional needs is permitted to pass through the siege implemented by Israel.” Gazans feel “that they do not count in the eyes of the world.”

It is a profound lesson to trace the parallel thought and actions of President Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr., from 1964 until King’s death in 1968. Johnson was on a track of escalating the U.S. involvement from a modest group of advisors to a half million troops, relentlessly hounded by his Generals, Westmoreland and others, and Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense, who had an insatiable desire for more American military, army, navy, air force. Johnson’s presidency was doomed and his political career so shattered that he refused to run for reelection in 1968. In his retirement in Texas he seemed a broken man, victimized by the inability, in his mind, of the American people to accept anything but honorable victory. King in 1967 got it exactly right. King’s plea, Come Home America, urged his countrymen to take on “the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism” 

Bacevich says it well, “Yet in his insistence that we first heal ourselves, King remains today the prophet we ignore at our own peril. That Barack Obama should fail to realize this qualifies as not only ironic but inexplicable.” 

See:

► The War We Can’t Win, Andrew J. Bacevich, August 15, 2009, www.commonwealmagazine.org

► Stones into Schools - Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Greg Mortenson, http://gregmortenson.blogspot.com

. . . everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. 

Joe Bradley

return to 12/09 CPF Newsletter