IN THEORY:Reflections on war in Iraq

To mark the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, many religious groups have organized protests across the country. Those involved with a mass protest in Washington on Friday called on President Bush and Congress to withdraw troops from Iraq. What are your thoughts about the war on this anniversary?

I’ve been opposed to this war from the beginning. I grieve for the families of those who have given their lives or been wounded. I support activities that support our troops, but I do not support this war. I believe as a result of this war, terrorism has increased, innocent people have been killed, and our country is needlessly divided.

This war is a classic example of a dominator leadership model that has alienated us from the world. It is beyond me how our current administration justifies its behavior. Daily, I pray that a new approach will be found that can accomplish a peaceful conclusion and bring our troops home. There are no easy answers or quick fixes. Both parties must work together to end it as soon as possible.

Our first responsibility is to make peace, not war!

PASTOR JIM TURRELL

Center for Spiritual Discovery

Costa Mesa

Many a would-be conqueror has set his sights on the Middle East, only to have his ambitions covered by the shifting sands. The Crusaders at the Horns of Hittim, Napoleon at the Battle of the Nile, the British at Kut and the Nazis at El Alamein met devastating defeat. Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, Sassanids and many others attempted conquest, but their confidence proved illusory and evaporated as a desert mirage. President Bush sallied forth in the tradition of those who aspired to remake the region in the image of a dominant power. As a presidential candidate, Bush inveighed against nation-building. How much more futile and fatal to embark on a campaign of nation-creating!

For that is the goal of this war. Tribes, factions and clans that battled for centuries in intra-Muslim blood feuds have never coalesced into a nation. To suppose that American firepower can prevail over entrenched enmity and to imagine that democracy will flourish in a culture more amenable to authoritarianism is to stumble in a hashish haze.

We are not the first to misunderstand another culture or underestimate resistance to foisting our “superior” way of life on the natives. Intense religious conflicts do not acquiesce to rationality, and they scuttle hopes that the combatants will be governed by enlightened self-interest. Roses strewn along the path of the liberators soon molder as sworn enemies default to millennial patterns.

Our presence will have exerted precious little that is positive, and we will have left in our wake the senseless destruction of lives and needless loss of property, the exile of millions and the radicalization of multitudes. Meanwhile, Iran will have become predominant and will soon emerge as the greatest threat to humankind the world has ever known. President Bush’s lamentable legacy in Iraq will be overshadowed by the horrific fact that it was on his watch that Iran actually attained what he told us Iraq had acquired: weapons of mass destruction.

We are locked in a life-and-death struggle with the evil practitioners of an evil ideology. As we fought Nazism and communism, so today we battle radicalized Islamism. But we were misled into identifying Iraq as the front in that war. Mark Twain’s observation is validated: “The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation being attacked, and every man will be glad of these conscience-soothing falsities.” This misadventure is another in a catalog of human audacity and presumption that verges on folly.

I recall those who declared the Vietnam War to be “winnable,” and remember the doomsday scenarios, predicated on the Domino Effect, that Southeast Asia would cascade into a sea of communism if Vietnam were lost. The Middle East, too, is most often impervious to even the most reasoned calculations and considered prophecies. Many before us have invaded this region, only to have their schemes confounded and armies repulsed.

It is as if the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

RABBI MARK S. MILLER

Temple Bat Yahm

Newport Beach

War is always a dreaded thing. There is never a good war. Innocents on both sides suffer. I was in the air on the way to East Africa the day the bombs began to fall on Baghdad. If you remember, the press leading up to the war was loud and scary. The night before I left, we received a warning about a terrorist threat to the airport I was to fly into. Rocket-propelled grenades had been targeted at Western aircraft. I was to fly into and out of that airport four times. That night, I lay on my 1-year-old son’s bed and held him as he slept. I prayed and cried asking God if I was being stupid for going. I didn’t want to orphan my kids over my own stupidity. I knew he could take care of them, but that is a tough journey for any child to walk. I felt I had my answer and confidence in God’s provision regardless of the outcome. We were going to open medical clinics and sign government papers to begin a new vocational training school for orphans with AIDS. The clinics also serve refugees from wars in Congo, Sudan, Rwanda and northern Uganda. Since that trip, these ministries have blossomed. That trip ignited fires in the hearts of people who now are going back and serving there, even this summer. Hundreds of children are receiving ongoing care through these ministries. Hundreds of families benefit from the clinics annually. Lives are saved. Kids are fed, educated and given hope. We have even received letters of commendation from Uganda’s president.

All of that could have been lost because of the threat of war. War threatened by terrorists, and war threatened by our government. War is always devastating.

RIC OLSEN

Lead Pastor

The Beacon

Anaheim

What a great relief to see that public opinion has changed. This is essential to ending the war in Iraq.

To question the motivation for the invasion four years ago was considered unpatriotic and fringe thinking. Fortunately, we find rebels and prophets who defend spiritual, humanitarian and ethical values by challenging decisions to go to war right from the very beginning. Too many religious organizations defer to government power and oppose war only when the tide of public opinion has already turned, and it has become safe and expedient to do so. It is the primary role of the world’s religious traditions to uphold the dignity and care of every human being, not just those born in the United States. The current protests by mainstream religious groups will play an important role in ending the war.

American taxpayers spend almost half of every tax dollar on defense. U.S. military spending amounts to more than all of the other nations of the world combined (according to the National Catholic Reporter, March 9, 2007). Death and destruction are not the only costs of war. Dwight D. Eisenhower, a general as well as president, in 1953 pointed out that, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” We should direct the money being spent on this war to food, shelter, education, medical care, ecology and other necessities.

From a Zen Buddhist perspective, careful attention to all of our daily activities has a beneficial ripple effect. This mindful living will naturally draw us to public involvement, whether through discussions, civic activities, volunteer services, voting, protesting, marching, letter writing and so on. Rev. Carol Aguilar, from our Zen Center, attended the protest in Washington, D.C., last month. She marched with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and practiced seated meditation and walking meditation at the Capitol.

Becoming more aware of our own ignorance, greed and anger is the best starting point for ending the war — in ourselves, our families, neighborhoods, freeways, workplace, nation, Iraq and world.

REV. DR. DEBORAH BARRETT

Zen Center of Orange County

Costa Mesa

The war was a knee-jerk reaction to the 9/11 Islamic terrorist attack. The United States invaded a country that was supposed to be a direct nuclear threat to America, and the Iraqi terrorists were supposedly collaborators with Osama bin Laden. Called the war in Iraq, it is actually a war against Islamic terrorism, which cannot be won. The United States is funding a war that is not only money ill-spent but making our country economically weaker and taking money that could be spent elsewhere abroad and domestically. Our image in the world grows worse, and for many we seem to be the aggressor in the war.

If anybody has benefited from these last four years, it appears to be Israel. Jihad directed against Israel now finds a bigger foe in the West and in America. In addition, in the last four years, America’s other enemies have gotten stronger, and we do not have the forces to fight everybody. This pattern has appeared in world history before. Rome, Greece and the British empire could not withstand the pressures of the economic, political and military aid costs to fund the war. America simply needs other countries, world leaders and world organizations to join in fighting the war against Islamic terrorism. But this won’t happen.

What upsets me the most is that everybody sees the world from his own point of view and does what is good for him. As a religious leader, it is my job to implore people to pursue ethics and make moral judgments that affect his neighbor. While the West tries to save lives and make peace, the Islamic terrorists kill themselves to make war and not peace. Using the idea that fighting a war against Iraq protects us from Islamic terrorists in our country is false. For example, if the war in Iraq is protecting us, we don’t need security at airports. But the point is we do need security, because the Iraq war has nothing to do with 9/11 and Islamic terrorism in America.

RABBI MARC RUBENSTEINTemple Isaiah

Newport Beach

From even before the start of the Iraq war, practically all members of our local humanist group were against it. Some of our group went to marches and demonstrations against the war. It would have taken a lot more joining in to help prevent this unnecessary and disastrous war, but most people wanted to believe that it might accomplish something. And as one evangelical said, “Bush may be doing all the wrong things, but we support him because we feel that he is one of us.”

For anyone who had any knowledge about the history of Iraq — and that area — it was obvious that the terrorist organization responsible for the 9/11 atrocities hated Saddam Hussein and would never cooperate with him on anything. After all, they were serious believers in their holy cause and in the belief that the U.S. was an evil country that Allah wanted them to bring down. Saddam’s government was secular and despised more because of that than because of being evil and corrupt. The terrorists wanted a religious government. So for the U.S. to start a war against Iraq instead of having a more logical clandestine project to root out the terrorists (which were mainly in Afghanistan and had mainly come from Saudi Arabia) was nothing but bluster on the part of the Bush administration to pretend to be doing something to get revenge for 9/11 while actually pursuing the one original foreign policy project that they had intended to do from the start — and that was getting rid of Saddam. (While getting some control of the Iraq oil supply.) Unfortunately, most of the U.S. fell right in line with the Bushies, believed their lies and supported the war as a way of showing patriotism.

In any case, there surely was no need to start the war when we did, since the U.N. inspectors, under Hans Blix, had been allowed into Iraq to see that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and they had already checked out the places that the CIA had indicated were believed to be storage places for WMDs finding nothing! As unprepared as we were, without good body armor or decently armored vehicles to protect our troops, needlessly starting the war when we did was clearly a criminal offense against our fighting personnel. The idea that we must stay there until the civil war is over is ridiculous. There is nothing that will be any better if we stay than if we simply leave now. There is no reason to keep having our young people killed and wounded. And until we prove that we can properly care for our wounded personnel, they should no longer be placed in harm’s way.

JERRY PARKS

Member

Humanist Assn. of Orange County

On the Sunday after 9/11, I preached on Psalm 18, saying that in the soul of each individual and in the spirit of every nation there dwells both a savage and a savior. I prayed that the savage would be routed by the savior. But we became hardened as individuals, and our nation chose to enter the never-ending spiral of violence that for millennia has confronted and confounded people of the Psalms.

On this sad anniversary of deepening that spiral, and as we Christians once again approach the Passion of Jesus, I am mindful that God-in-Christ shares with us the experiences of terror and death. But when we speak to God the language of hatred and rejection, nails and spears, terrorist attacks and calculated bombings, and the bleeding bodies of children anywhere, God refuses to answer in that language.

We may always be dreaming up evil, but God is always working for good, coming up with wild and wonderful transformations, and surprising us with the ways love conquers hatred and reconciliation overpowers revenge. I pray that we will think God’s thoughts, speak God’s language, do God’s will.

I am weary of hard-heartedness and have written our elected representatives who have the power to cease our participation in the spiral of violence. I would wholeheartedly participate in “The Christian Peace Witness for Iraq” as part of what I perceive is doing my best to follow the Prince of Peace.

(THE VERY REV’D CANON) PETER D. HAYNES

Saint Michael & All Angels

Episcopal Church

Corona del Mar