No Holiday for Doves
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island,
Sunday November 10, 2002
***
I’m just a little curious, but how many of you actually saw me interviewed on Channel 22 this past week about our monthly Peace vigil? I’m never really certain what to make of occasions like that; I can’t quite get used to how much more balder and chubbier I appear on TV than I am in my mind’s eye, or how much more intelligent I sound when I watch myself afterwards than I generally feel at the time. There was one question in particular that kind of threw me for a loop, something about whether or not I thought September 11th had turned people who were basically “doves” into “hawks” -- and afterwards, I got to thinking about the symbolism of those two birds, and their place in history of American political discourse.
Their strongest association, of course, is with the Vietnam war: the Hawks were those who thought our country should have done more to win that war, and the Doves were those who opposed it. But historically, the term “War Hawks” actually dates back to the War of 1812, when it referred to a group of primarily Southern politicians who advocated going to war against Great Britain, ostensibly over the issue of the illegal impressment of American sailors on the high seas, but in reality as an excuse for invading Canada and annexing it to the United States. And in our historical myopia we generally tend to overlook the fact that the War of 1812 was nearly a disaster for our fledgling nation: we didn’t conquer Canada; our new capital city, Washington D.C., was put to the torch by British troops; and with the exception of a few minor naval engagements, the only truly decisive American military victory of the conflict was at the Battle of New Orleans, which took place some two weeks after the signing of the Treaty of Ghent in Belgium by British and American diplomats had officially ended the war.
Of course, nowadays we also have the so-called “Chicken-Hawks” -- politicians who somehow managed to avoid service to their country during the War in Southeast Asia, but are now gung-ho to begin a new war with Iraq, ostensibly over the issue of Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, but in reality (some would say) in order to gain effective American control over Iraqi oil reserves.
The origins of the Dove as a symbol of peace, on the other hand, can be found in the Hebrew Bible. In the 8th chapter of the Book of Genesis you can read about how, after the flood, Noah sent out first a raven and then a dove from the Ark, in order “to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the earth.” And when the dove returned with a fresh olive branch in its beak, Noah knew that the worst was over; and then later on in the next chapter, God makes a covenant with Noah and with every living creature, that he will never again destroy the earth in a flood, and as a sign of this covenant he hangs his weapon, the rainbow, in the clouds as a reminder of his promise.
And so the dove, and the rainbow ,and the olive branch are all venerable symbols of peace, based on this mythic tale from the Bible. And I think it’s important to point out that the thing which makes the dove so special is that she went out alone into the unknown, in order to seek some sign of hope in the aftermath of the deluge. It takes a special kind of courage to be a dove. For all we know, the hawks were still hunkered down back at the Ark, trying to keep their tail feathers from getting soaked.
In the basement of the Student Union Building on the University of Oregon campus, there is a large meeting room called the Ben Linder room, which (as you might easily guess) is named for Benjamin Linder, an Oregon-born (but University of Washington-educated) mechanical engineer, who was killed in 1987 (at the age of 27) in a Contra ambush while working on a hydroelectric project in rural Nicaragua. Back in those days, electrical generating plants, like schools and medical clinics, were targets of high military priority for the Reagan administration’s C.I.A. trained-and-funded “Freedom Fighters,” who apparently believed that a truly free people should never be too smart, too healthy, or able to see in the dark.
According to witnesses and the evidence of the subsequent autopsy, Linder had been inspecting a device which measured the rate of the flow of water in a stream when he and two villagers who had accompanied him were attacked with hand grenades. Following this initial assault, the Contras continued their attack with small arms fire; the actual cause of Linder's death was later determined to be a gunshot wound to the head, fired from so close of range it left powder burns on his body.
I don't know about you, but I still get angry (not to mention a little nervous) when I think about American citizens being murdered, execution-style, in Third World countries by terrorists using weapons provided by the United States government, simply because they happen to believe in providing such things as electric lights and running water. It's bad policy to train and pay foreign mercenaries to assassinate your own citizens, even if it does take place in foreign countries outside of obscure little villages no one has ever heard of before. That sort of thing can easily get out of hand. And once it does, there's really no telling where it will all end.
In March, 1991, at the conclusion of the Gulf War, an editorial writer for the New York Times observed that the defeat of Saddam Hussein “provided special vindication for the U.S. Army, which brilliantly exploited its firepower and mobility and in the process erased memories of its grievous difficulties in Vietnam.” The death of the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” has often been touted as one of the great benefits of our supposed “victory” over Iraq, yet I sometimes wonder how well we really understand the historical lessons of either of those wars. Studs Terkel put quotation marks around the title of his oral history of the Second World War, the "Good War," because he felt that "the adjective 'good' mated to the noun 'war' is so incongruous."
Yet compared to the wars which have followed-- Korea, Vietnam, and even the Gulf War -- “WWII” certainly had some advantages. During the Second World War our government had clear and articulate war aims, as well as tangible objectives which it hoped to accomplish in order to achieve those aims. There was a clear and present danger from hostile and belligerent enemies, the citizenry was behind their government, and the entire country was mobilized for the war effort. There were many who blamed our subsequent defeat in Vietnam on the absence of these very qualities, yet this is only part of the story. Even as our nation rallied to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the seeds were being sown for our own defeat in Indochina a generation later. Senator William Fullbright called it "the arrogance of power," through which our own sense of self-importance blinds us to realities outside our own agenda.
Our nation's on-going inability to recognize that nationalism and cultural identity are far more compelling ideologies than free market global capitalism among third world peoples, and our insistence upon aligning ourselves with the outdated vestiges of Western colonialism in order to defend the “freedom” of multi-national corporations to do business however and wherever they wish, were the real errors which led us into defeat in Southeast Asia, and which threaten now to do the same whenever we forget the true “lessons” of Vietnam.
In his book *On Strategy: a critical analysis of the Vietnam war* Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr. recounts a conversation with a North Vietnamese counterpart in Hanoi on the eve of the fall of Saigon, in April 1975. "You know," Summers remarked, "you never defeated us on the battlefield." The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment. "That may be so," he replied, "but it is also irrelevant."
Militarily, the United States was also capable of doing just about anything it wanted to in Vietnam. We had superior firepower, superior mobility, and in combat inevitably inflicted far more serious casualties upon the enemy than we ever suffered ourselves. But all this was irrelevant. Our war aims were vague and ill-defined, our objectives failed to come to grips with the true nature of the conflict, our political leaders were out of touch with the will of the people, who in turn became increasingly unwilling to pay the price of preserving the National Honor with the lives of their teenaged sons.
Nevertheless, from time to time I still hear frustrated “hawks” talk about how we should have plowed the whole country flat and paved it over, or had our soldiers link arms and march from the Mekong Delta to the DMZ, or some other such nonsense; never seeming to realize that genocide is no longer considered a legitimate war aim, or that it is difficult to bomb a country back to the stone age when the mass of the economy has never really moved much beyond it anyway. The Vietnam war, if indeed the outcome was ever at issue in the first place, was lost by the French at Dein Bein Phu in 1954; it simply took the United States another 20 years, and a hundred and eleven billion dollars, and the lives of 58,000 American soldiers, before we finally figured this out.
America lost in Vietnam because we attempted to impose a military solution upon what was essentially a moral and ideological contest, and because we were incapable of seeing beyond our own prejudices and ignorance in order to correctly analyze the true nature of the conflict. It wasn’t simply a matter of being unwilling to pay the price and stay the distance; rather, having squandered American lives and treasure upon a foolish and meaningless war without end, we no longer had the resources or the imagination to try anything different.
Perhaps the most disturbing opinion I hear voiced about the war in Vietnam is that our military was somehow "betrayed" by our civilian government, and that if only we had left the war in the hands of the generals, we would have come home victorious instead of in defeat. Ironically, this view is almost never voiced by professional military people themselves, who know full well why they fight and whom they ultimately serve. The American army is without question the best trained, best equipped, most powerful fighting force in the history of the world; yet it is also a "people's army" -- it fights most effectively when it is protecting our civilian population and our democratic system of government, and not in opposition to those principles.
If our military was in any way betrayed by our civilian leaders in Vietnam, it was in the decision of those leaders to send it to do a job that it should never have been asked to do in the first place, and not because they failed to give them the means to do it at any cost. American strategy in Vietnam, if you can call it that, was based upon the two pillars of “Containment of Communism” and “Flexible Response.” The much-touted "Domino Theory" was an example of the first of these, while “Pacificaton” and "counter-insurgency" were the watchwords of the second -- the notion that somehow soldiers could be converted into social workers in order to win over the hearts and minds of those whose homeland they occupied as an invading foreign power. The Domino theory overestimated the threat which a nominally-communist government in Southeast Asia posed to the safety of the United States, while counter-insurgency proved itself a failed strategy as well, since it attempted to impose a military solution on what was ultimately a political and diplomatic problem.
In the aftermath of Gulf War, American policy-makers articulated something known as the “Powell Doctrine,” which basically states that American military power should only be used when there is an important, clearly-defined objective to be achieved, when it is possible to obtain decisive results through military means, and when the American people clearly understand and support the reasons for military action. A clear mission, popular support, and a decisive outcome -- this is the Powell doctrine in a nutshell, although if you actually read the article in Foreign Affairs you will discover that the complete doctrine is much more subtle and nuanced than this, and contains an additional consideration, which Powell posed in the form of a question: “How might the situation that we seek to alter, once it is altered by force, develop further, and what might be the consequences?”
“We owe it to the men and women who go in harms way that...in every instance we have carefully matched the use of military force to our political objectives,” Powell wrote, “and that their lives are not squandered for unclear purposes. Military men and women recognize more than most people that not every situation will be crystal clear. We can and do operate in murky, unpredictable circumstances. But we also recognize that military force is not always the right answer. If force is used imprecisely or out of frustration rather than clear analysis, the situation can be made worse.” The essential insight of the Powell doctrine is that the only truly effective use of military force is to defeat an opposing military force -- to win a war. The far more difficult challenge of “winning the peace” is another matter, a matter for which the military is at best poorly suited.
And this is why I think it’s important that we also remember and honor people like Ben Linder on Veterans Day. Ben Linder was not a soldier; he was a humanitarian, an amateur clown and juggler who often rode his unicycle in order to entertain the children in the village where he worked, to set them at ease when they were getting their vaccinations and such. But he did voluntarily put himself in harm’s way in order to further the cause of freedom. He was willing to serve in a foreign land, on a mission of peace and reconciliation, and he ultimately gave his own life in defense of what he believed in most. Shortly after arriving in Nicaragua, Ben wrote this meditation in his diary: “When justice burns within us like a flaming fire, when love evokes willing sacrifice from us, when, to the last full measure of selfless devotion, we demonstrate our belief in the ultimate triumph of truth and righteousness, then your goodness enters into our lives; then you live within our hearts, and we through righteousness behold your presence. The bush is burning, but the Voice has not yet spoken aloud; we can only feel, guess, hope; we cannot yet hear. But it may be that we must act in order to hear....Great is the eternal power at the heart of life; mighty the love that is stronger than death....”
It seems to me that Ben Linder’s words might well serve as a prayer for all of us at this time of year. There is no holiday for Doves. But as we remember the lives of those who have served our nation in time of war, let us also remember those who have served as “peacemakers” of a different sort -- who have ventured forth alone, at great danger to themselves, in the aftermath of destruction, in a courageous attempt to seek some place of refuge in the eye of the storm, to find once more that solid ground in which the Olive Branch might once again be firmly rooted.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island,
Sunday November 10, 2002
***
I’m just a little curious, but how many of you actually saw me interviewed on Channel 22 this past week about our monthly Peace vigil? I’m never really certain what to make of occasions like that; I can’t quite get used to how much more balder and chubbier I appear on TV than I am in my mind’s eye, or how much more intelligent I sound when I watch myself afterwards than I generally feel at the time. There was one question in particular that kind of threw me for a loop, something about whether or not I thought September 11th had turned people who were basically “doves” into “hawks” -- and afterwards, I got to thinking about the symbolism of those two birds, and their place in history of American political discourse.
Their strongest association, of course, is with the Vietnam war: the Hawks were those who thought our country should have done more to win that war, and the Doves were those who opposed it. But historically, the term “War Hawks” actually dates back to the War of 1812, when it referred to a group of primarily Southern politicians who advocated going to war against Great Britain, ostensibly over the issue of the illegal impressment of American sailors on the high seas, but in reality as an excuse for invading Canada and annexing it to the United States. And in our historical myopia we generally tend to overlook the fact that the War of 1812 was nearly a disaster for our fledgling nation: we didn’t conquer Canada; our new capital city, Washington D.C., was put to the torch by British troops; and with the exception of a few minor naval engagements, the only truly decisive American military victory of the conflict was at the Battle of New Orleans, which took place some two weeks after the signing of the Treaty of Ghent in Belgium by British and American diplomats had officially ended the war.
Of course, nowadays we also have the so-called “Chicken-Hawks” -- politicians who somehow managed to avoid service to their country during the War in Southeast Asia, but are now gung-ho to begin a new war with Iraq, ostensibly over the issue of Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, but in reality (some would say) in order to gain effective American control over Iraqi oil reserves.
The origins of the Dove as a symbol of peace, on the other hand, can be found in the Hebrew Bible. In the 8th chapter of the Book of Genesis you can read about how, after the flood, Noah sent out first a raven and then a dove from the Ark, in order “to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the earth.” And when the dove returned with a fresh olive branch in its beak, Noah knew that the worst was over; and then later on in the next chapter, God makes a covenant with Noah and with every living creature, that he will never again destroy the earth in a flood, and as a sign of this covenant he hangs his weapon, the rainbow, in the clouds as a reminder of his promise.
And so the dove, and the rainbow ,and the olive branch are all venerable symbols of peace, based on this mythic tale from the Bible. And I think it’s important to point out that the thing which makes the dove so special is that she went out alone into the unknown, in order to seek some sign of hope in the aftermath of the deluge. It takes a special kind of courage to be a dove. For all we know, the hawks were still hunkered down back at the Ark, trying to keep their tail feathers from getting soaked.
In the basement of the Student Union Building on the University of Oregon campus, there is a large meeting room called the Ben Linder room, which (as you might easily guess) is named for Benjamin Linder, an Oregon-born (but University of Washington-educated) mechanical engineer, who was killed in 1987 (at the age of 27) in a Contra ambush while working on a hydroelectric project in rural Nicaragua. Back in those days, electrical generating plants, like schools and medical clinics, were targets of high military priority for the Reagan administration’s C.I.A. trained-and-funded “Freedom Fighters,” who apparently believed that a truly free people should never be too smart, too healthy, or able to see in the dark.
According to witnesses and the evidence of the subsequent autopsy, Linder had been inspecting a device which measured the rate of the flow of water in a stream when he and two villagers who had accompanied him were attacked with hand grenades. Following this initial assault, the Contras continued their attack with small arms fire; the actual cause of Linder's death was later determined to be a gunshot wound to the head, fired from so close of range it left powder burns on his body.
I don't know about you, but I still get angry (not to mention a little nervous) when I think about American citizens being murdered, execution-style, in Third World countries by terrorists using weapons provided by the United States government, simply because they happen to believe in providing such things as electric lights and running water. It's bad policy to train and pay foreign mercenaries to assassinate your own citizens, even if it does take place in foreign countries outside of obscure little villages no one has ever heard of before. That sort of thing can easily get out of hand. And once it does, there's really no telling where it will all end.
In March, 1991, at the conclusion of the Gulf War, an editorial writer for the New York Times observed that the defeat of Saddam Hussein “provided special vindication for the U.S. Army, which brilliantly exploited its firepower and mobility and in the process erased memories of its grievous difficulties in Vietnam.” The death of the so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” has often been touted as one of the great benefits of our supposed “victory” over Iraq, yet I sometimes wonder how well we really understand the historical lessons of either of those wars. Studs Terkel put quotation marks around the title of his oral history of the Second World War, the "Good War," because he felt that "the adjective 'good' mated to the noun 'war' is so incongruous."
Yet compared to the wars which have followed-- Korea, Vietnam, and even the Gulf War -- “WWII” certainly had some advantages. During the Second World War our government had clear and articulate war aims, as well as tangible objectives which it hoped to accomplish in order to achieve those aims. There was a clear and present danger from hostile and belligerent enemies, the citizenry was behind their government, and the entire country was mobilized for the war effort. There were many who blamed our subsequent defeat in Vietnam on the absence of these very qualities, yet this is only part of the story. Even as our nation rallied to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, the seeds were being sown for our own defeat in Indochina a generation later. Senator William Fullbright called it "the arrogance of power," through which our own sense of self-importance blinds us to realities outside our own agenda.
Our nation's on-going inability to recognize that nationalism and cultural identity are far more compelling ideologies than free market global capitalism among third world peoples, and our insistence upon aligning ourselves with the outdated vestiges of Western colonialism in order to defend the “freedom” of multi-national corporations to do business however and wherever they wish, were the real errors which led us into defeat in Southeast Asia, and which threaten now to do the same whenever we forget the true “lessons” of Vietnam.
In his book *On Strategy: a critical analysis of the Vietnam war* Colonel Harry G. Summers Jr. recounts a conversation with a North Vietnamese counterpart in Hanoi on the eve of the fall of Saigon, in April 1975. "You know," Summers remarked, "you never defeated us on the battlefield." The North Vietnamese colonel pondered this remark a moment. "That may be so," he replied, "but it is also irrelevant."
Militarily, the United States was also capable of doing just about anything it wanted to in Vietnam. We had superior firepower, superior mobility, and in combat inevitably inflicted far more serious casualties upon the enemy than we ever suffered ourselves. But all this was irrelevant. Our war aims were vague and ill-defined, our objectives failed to come to grips with the true nature of the conflict, our political leaders were out of touch with the will of the people, who in turn became increasingly unwilling to pay the price of preserving the National Honor with the lives of their teenaged sons.
Nevertheless, from time to time I still hear frustrated “hawks” talk about how we should have plowed the whole country flat and paved it over, or had our soldiers link arms and march from the Mekong Delta to the DMZ, or some other such nonsense; never seeming to realize that genocide is no longer considered a legitimate war aim, or that it is difficult to bomb a country back to the stone age when the mass of the economy has never really moved much beyond it anyway. The Vietnam war, if indeed the outcome was ever at issue in the first place, was lost by the French at Dein Bein Phu in 1954; it simply took the United States another 20 years, and a hundred and eleven billion dollars, and the lives of 58,000 American soldiers, before we finally figured this out.
America lost in Vietnam because we attempted to impose a military solution upon what was essentially a moral and ideological contest, and because we were incapable of seeing beyond our own prejudices and ignorance in order to correctly analyze the true nature of the conflict. It wasn’t simply a matter of being unwilling to pay the price and stay the distance; rather, having squandered American lives and treasure upon a foolish and meaningless war without end, we no longer had the resources or the imagination to try anything different.
Perhaps the most disturbing opinion I hear voiced about the war in Vietnam is that our military was somehow "betrayed" by our civilian government, and that if only we had left the war in the hands of the generals, we would have come home victorious instead of in defeat. Ironically, this view is almost never voiced by professional military people themselves, who know full well why they fight and whom they ultimately serve. The American army is without question the best trained, best equipped, most powerful fighting force in the history of the world; yet it is also a "people's army" -- it fights most effectively when it is protecting our civilian population and our democratic system of government, and not in opposition to those principles.
If our military was in any way betrayed by our civilian leaders in Vietnam, it was in the decision of those leaders to send it to do a job that it should never have been asked to do in the first place, and not because they failed to give them the means to do it at any cost. American strategy in Vietnam, if you can call it that, was based upon the two pillars of “Containment of Communism” and “Flexible Response.” The much-touted "Domino Theory" was an example of the first of these, while “Pacificaton” and "counter-insurgency" were the watchwords of the second -- the notion that somehow soldiers could be converted into social workers in order to win over the hearts and minds of those whose homeland they occupied as an invading foreign power. The Domino theory overestimated the threat which a nominally-communist government in Southeast Asia posed to the safety of the United States, while counter-insurgency proved itself a failed strategy as well, since it attempted to impose a military solution on what was ultimately a political and diplomatic problem.
In the aftermath of Gulf War, American policy-makers articulated something known as the “Powell Doctrine,” which basically states that American military power should only be used when there is an important, clearly-defined objective to be achieved, when it is possible to obtain decisive results through military means, and when the American people clearly understand and support the reasons for military action. A clear mission, popular support, and a decisive outcome -- this is the Powell doctrine in a nutshell, although if you actually read the article in Foreign Affairs you will discover that the complete doctrine is much more subtle and nuanced than this, and contains an additional consideration, which Powell posed in the form of a question: “How might the situation that we seek to alter, once it is altered by force, develop further, and what might be the consequences?”
“We owe it to the men and women who go in harms way that...in every instance we have carefully matched the use of military force to our political objectives,” Powell wrote, “and that their lives are not squandered for unclear purposes. Military men and women recognize more than most people that not every situation will be crystal clear. We can and do operate in murky, unpredictable circumstances. But we also recognize that military force is not always the right answer. If force is used imprecisely or out of frustration rather than clear analysis, the situation can be made worse.” The essential insight of the Powell doctrine is that the only truly effective use of military force is to defeat an opposing military force -- to win a war. The far more difficult challenge of “winning the peace” is another matter, a matter for which the military is at best poorly suited.
And this is why I think it’s important that we also remember and honor people like Ben Linder on Veterans Day. Ben Linder was not a soldier; he was a humanitarian, an amateur clown and juggler who often rode his unicycle in order to entertain the children in the village where he worked, to set them at ease when they were getting their vaccinations and such. But he did voluntarily put himself in harm’s way in order to further the cause of freedom. He was willing to serve in a foreign land, on a mission of peace and reconciliation, and he ultimately gave his own life in defense of what he believed in most. Shortly after arriving in Nicaragua, Ben wrote this meditation in his diary: “When justice burns within us like a flaming fire, when love evokes willing sacrifice from us, when, to the last full measure of selfless devotion, we demonstrate our belief in the ultimate triumph of truth and righteousness, then your goodness enters into our lives; then you live within our hearts, and we through righteousness behold your presence. The bush is burning, but the Voice has not yet spoken aloud; we can only feel, guess, hope; we cannot yet hear. But it may be that we must act in order to hear....Great is the eternal power at the heart of life; mighty the love that is stronger than death....”
It seems to me that Ben Linder’s words might well serve as a prayer for all of us at this time of year. There is no holiday for Doves. But as we remember the lives of those who have served our nation in time of war, let us also remember those who have served as “peacemakers” of a different sort -- who have ventured forth alone, at great danger to themselves, in the aftermath of destruction, in a courageous attempt to seek some place of refuge in the eye of the storm, to find once more that solid ground in which the Olive Branch might once again be firmly rooted.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 2:40 PM
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