An Unhappy Conundrum
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday March 30, 2003
***
Amidst the barrage of disturbing news from around the world these past few weeks, there were two small items in particular that caught my attention. The first was the observation that, given the 75 billion dollar budget override to fund the invasion of Iraq, annual U.S. military spending is now on the threshold of exceeding that of all the other nations of the world combined. The second item was an editorial cartoon of a father and son sitting together on a couch in front of the television watching the war on CNN. The little boy says to his dad: “I hope no one ever tries to liberate us.”
This is not an easy time to be an American citizen. In recent years, Americans have often felt proud of living in the richest, most powerful nation in the history of the world. But these days it seems as though our economy is faltering and no one appears to know how to get it back on its feet, our traditional way of life is under attack, and even our friends are critical of our policies. Our nation itself seems deeply divided. Many of us are anxious about the on-going threat of terrorist attack, as exemplified by the horrifying violence of nine-eleven, while others are even more concerned by the terrifying erosion of our constitutional civil liberties, under the guise of making our “homeland” more “secure.” And then, of course, there is the war itself, which (like it or not) has now placed many of our sons and daughters under hostile fire in a far off foreign land.
Issues of war and peace are never as easy or clear-cut as one might like. Yet once hostilities have commenced, and our soldiers are “in harm’s way,” complexity and nuance seem to slip away; the pressure is always to make things seem simpler than they really are, to set aside public criticism and “support our troops,” regardless of our private doubts or reservations. Waging war requires a belief that our side is right and good, and our cause is just, our enemies are evil, and all our problems will be solved when those who oppose us are dead or defeated.
Peace, on the other hand, is significantly more complicated. Peace requires not only that we recognize that our so-called enemies are a lot more like us than we might care to admit -- that they also have hopes and dreams and aspirations, and that they love their country and their children just as much as we do -- it also requires that we recognize and confront the potential for evil within our own hearts, an evil which is capable of transforming even the most kind-hearted and compassionate human being into a heartless, cold-blooded killer.
One of the great ironies of warfare is that the patriotic idealism which inspires people to go to war in the first place is typically an early victim of the violence of the experience. As Chris Hedges writes in his book *War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning*, “The myth of war very rarely endures for those who experience combat. War is messy, confusing, sullied by raw brutality and an elephantine fear that grabs us like a massive bouncer who comes up from behind. Soldiers in the moments before real battles weep, vomit, and write last letters home, although these are done more as a precaution than from belief. All are nearly paralyzed with fright. There is a morbid silence that grips a battlefield in the final moments before the shooting starts, one that sets the back of my own head pounding in pain, wipes away all appetite, and makes my fingers tremble as I ready myself to go forward against logic. You do not think of home or family, for to do so is to be overcome by a wave of nostalgia and emotion that can impair your ability to survive. One thinks, so far as it is possible, of cleaning weapons, of readying for the business of killing. No one ever charges into battle for God and country.... ’Just remember,’ a Marine Corp lieutenant colonel told me as he strapped his pistol belt under his arm before we crossed into Kuwait, ‘that none of these boys is fighting for home, for the flag, for all that crap the politicians feed the public. They are fighting for each other, just for each other’.”
I’m tempted to try to say more about the experience of war, but I’m afraid that anything I might try to say would only sound like a cliché. I’ve never been in combat. Everything I know about the subject is based on what I’ve read about the experiences of others, all of whom seem to agree that their words are but a pale shadow of the experience itself. War is dehumanizing. The basic emotion is that of fear -- fear of being killed, fear of letting your buddies down, of failing to do your duty. Survival is your chief priority, the only real ethic is kill or be killed. Heroism is an abstraction; on the modern battlefield, violence is arbitrary, random, and impersonal, and it doesn’t matter how good you are, how smart or talented or special, in combat you are basically just a piece of meat, a casualty waiting to happen. Moral ambiguity is all around you, and yet there is little room for doubt or subtlety or reflection. “A soldier who is able to see the humanity of the enemy is a troubled and ineffective killer,” Hedges writes elsewhere in his book. “To achieve corporate action, self-awareness and especially self-criticism must be obliterated. We must be transformed into agents of a divinely inspired will, as defined by the state, just as those we fight must be transformed into the personification of unmitigated evil. There is little room for individuality in war.”
I am not a soldier. I am a clergyman, a professional religious leader, and my expertise is in other areas. “Blessed are the Peacemakers,” the Gospel tells us, “for they shall be called God’s Children.” My Unitarian Universalist faith affirms both “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” as well as “the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part” -- two principles, or perhaps I should say sentiments, which have little place on the battlefield. Yet even as a clergyman, I recognize that there are times when war is unavoidable, and perhaps even necessary. Smarter theologians than I have even articulated a so-called “Just War” doctrine, which outlines the conditions under which a war might be considered justified from a religious perspective. War should only be waged as a last resort, after all other nonviolent options have been exhausted. The weapons used must effectively discriminate between combatants and noncombatants, and the violence must be “proportional” to the injury that has been suffered. The attackers must have legitimate authority, sanctioned by the society they profess to represent. And the peace established in the aftermath of war must be a clear improvement over what already exists. Reasonable people may disagree about whether or not these conditions have been met with respect to the war we currently find ourselves engaged in against Iraq. But personally, I have my doubts, especially when it comes to the first condition, and the last.
I sincerely believe that there were still other, nonviolent options we might have pursued short of a unilateral, pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. And I profoundly doubt that the aftermath of this war will leave our nation any more safe and secure from the threat of terrorist attack than we were before it started. In fact, it seems to me just the opposite -- that by repudiating the need to seek any sort of international consensus concerning our actions in Iraq, we have essentially thumbed our nose at the rest of the world, and isolated ourselves from the international community, effectively forfeiting both the legitimacy of international law and the so-called “moral high ground” that under different circumstances might well have proved our most dependable defense against “terrorism of global reach.” Instead, it seems to me that we have merely increased the amount of anger and resentment directed towards our nation, and are in danger of creating an entirely new generation of potential terrorists who perceive Americans, not as liberators and defenders of freedom, but rather as murderous aggressors who care about little else other than our own continued power and prosperity.
In my more cynical moments, I even question the sincerity of the President’s motives for initiating this war. I feel as though the President decided first to go to war, and only then started casting about for reasons he thought the public might swallow. The President claims that we have invaded Iraq in order to liberate the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator who possesses weapons of mass destruction that might someday threaten the United States. But that rationale rings hollow; I don’t believe him; it seems to me far more likely that the President has taken our nation to war in order to obtain effective control over Iraq’s substantial oil reserves, and to settle old scores in what for him is an extremely personal family vendetta, as well as to consolidate his own political power, by silencing potential criticism and dissent through the patriotic appeal to support our troops in the field.
If the President truly desires broad, bipartisan support for his policy against Iraq, he might easily take partisan politics out of the equation entirely simply by announcing that he will not seek a second term. But what do you suppose the odds are of that happening? About the same, I would suspect, as those that the siege of Baghdad will be a quick and virtually bloodless campaign in which our overwhelming high-tech military firepower will “Shock and Awe” our enemies into submission, thus transforming Iraq overnight into a peaceful, democratic society. It’s the naive, cowboy-inspired fantasy of those who have never experienced the reality of combat themselves -- shoot the bad guy in the hand, and they will “reach for the sky,” then walk away quiescently at gunpoint to the local hoosegow, leaving the Lone Ranger and Tonto free a few moments later to ride off dramatically into the sunset, while the grateful townspeople ask one another “who was that Masked Man?” You might see that program somewhere on basic cable. But you aren’t going to see it on CNN.
Ten days after the September 11th attacks against the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the President appeared on television before a joint session of Congress, and cautioned the nation, and the world, against the “pretenses to piety” exhibited by “the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century,” who “by sacrificing human life to serve their radical vision, by abandoning every value except the will to power,” were following in the footsteps of “fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism.” “And they will follow that path,” the President warned, “all the way to where it ends in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.”
I worry now about the path the President has chosen to lead our nation down. It’s a path I’m sure may have once been paved with good intentions, but here we are, a mere ten days on the road, and I’m already starting to wonder when and where it will all end, and whether or not I really want to be there when it does. Because I fear that we are headed, not toward some sort of triumphant victory, but rather toward disaster, a bloody tragedy that will sacrifice the lives of thousands more Americans and Iraqis alike, and for no good purpose other than to make the world less safe for all of us, and for the children who will someday follow in our footsteps....
The word “repentence,” which we use in English to translate the Greek word metanoia, essentially means “to change or to transform one’s mind.” A generation ago our nation learned in the jungles of Southeast Asia a lesson learned by the Germans in the streets of Stalingrad (and Berlin), and by the French in Algeria and an isolated valley called Dien Bien Phu -- that the worst betrayal soldiers face is the realization that the leaders of the nation they have pledged to defend with their lives have lied to them, that the dangers they have been asked to face, the sacrifices they have been asked to make, are not in support of some noble, higher purpose, but that instead they have been ordered to kill, and to risk being killed, in order to defend an illusion, a fantasy, a nightmare, the arrogant pride of those who would willingly squander the lives of others in order to “save face” themselves. It’s a lesson it seems that we must learn again with each new war, no doubt because it is only when this lesson has been forgotten that it becomes possible for us to contemplate waging war at all.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday March 30, 2003
***
Amidst the barrage of disturbing news from around the world these past few weeks, there were two small items in particular that caught my attention. The first was the observation that, given the 75 billion dollar budget override to fund the invasion of Iraq, annual U.S. military spending is now on the threshold of exceeding that of all the other nations of the world combined. The second item was an editorial cartoon of a father and son sitting together on a couch in front of the television watching the war on CNN. The little boy says to his dad: “I hope no one ever tries to liberate us.”
This is not an easy time to be an American citizen. In recent years, Americans have often felt proud of living in the richest, most powerful nation in the history of the world. But these days it seems as though our economy is faltering and no one appears to know how to get it back on its feet, our traditional way of life is under attack, and even our friends are critical of our policies. Our nation itself seems deeply divided. Many of us are anxious about the on-going threat of terrorist attack, as exemplified by the horrifying violence of nine-eleven, while others are even more concerned by the terrifying erosion of our constitutional civil liberties, under the guise of making our “homeland” more “secure.” And then, of course, there is the war itself, which (like it or not) has now placed many of our sons and daughters under hostile fire in a far off foreign land.
Issues of war and peace are never as easy or clear-cut as one might like. Yet once hostilities have commenced, and our soldiers are “in harm’s way,” complexity and nuance seem to slip away; the pressure is always to make things seem simpler than they really are, to set aside public criticism and “support our troops,” regardless of our private doubts or reservations. Waging war requires a belief that our side is right and good, and our cause is just, our enemies are evil, and all our problems will be solved when those who oppose us are dead or defeated.
Peace, on the other hand, is significantly more complicated. Peace requires not only that we recognize that our so-called enemies are a lot more like us than we might care to admit -- that they also have hopes and dreams and aspirations, and that they love their country and their children just as much as we do -- it also requires that we recognize and confront the potential for evil within our own hearts, an evil which is capable of transforming even the most kind-hearted and compassionate human being into a heartless, cold-blooded killer.
One of the great ironies of warfare is that the patriotic idealism which inspires people to go to war in the first place is typically an early victim of the violence of the experience. As Chris Hedges writes in his book *War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning*, “The myth of war very rarely endures for those who experience combat. War is messy, confusing, sullied by raw brutality and an elephantine fear that grabs us like a massive bouncer who comes up from behind. Soldiers in the moments before real battles weep, vomit, and write last letters home, although these are done more as a precaution than from belief. All are nearly paralyzed with fright. There is a morbid silence that grips a battlefield in the final moments before the shooting starts, one that sets the back of my own head pounding in pain, wipes away all appetite, and makes my fingers tremble as I ready myself to go forward against logic. You do not think of home or family, for to do so is to be overcome by a wave of nostalgia and emotion that can impair your ability to survive. One thinks, so far as it is possible, of cleaning weapons, of readying for the business of killing. No one ever charges into battle for God and country.... ’Just remember,’ a Marine Corp lieutenant colonel told me as he strapped his pistol belt under his arm before we crossed into Kuwait, ‘that none of these boys is fighting for home, for the flag, for all that crap the politicians feed the public. They are fighting for each other, just for each other’.”
I’m tempted to try to say more about the experience of war, but I’m afraid that anything I might try to say would only sound like a cliché. I’ve never been in combat. Everything I know about the subject is based on what I’ve read about the experiences of others, all of whom seem to agree that their words are but a pale shadow of the experience itself. War is dehumanizing. The basic emotion is that of fear -- fear of being killed, fear of letting your buddies down, of failing to do your duty. Survival is your chief priority, the only real ethic is kill or be killed. Heroism is an abstraction; on the modern battlefield, violence is arbitrary, random, and impersonal, and it doesn’t matter how good you are, how smart or talented or special, in combat you are basically just a piece of meat, a casualty waiting to happen. Moral ambiguity is all around you, and yet there is little room for doubt or subtlety or reflection. “A soldier who is able to see the humanity of the enemy is a troubled and ineffective killer,” Hedges writes elsewhere in his book. “To achieve corporate action, self-awareness and especially self-criticism must be obliterated. We must be transformed into agents of a divinely inspired will, as defined by the state, just as those we fight must be transformed into the personification of unmitigated evil. There is little room for individuality in war.”
I am not a soldier. I am a clergyman, a professional religious leader, and my expertise is in other areas. “Blessed are the Peacemakers,” the Gospel tells us, “for they shall be called God’s Children.” My Unitarian Universalist faith affirms both “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” as well as “the interdependent web of all existence, of which we are a part” -- two principles, or perhaps I should say sentiments, which have little place on the battlefield. Yet even as a clergyman, I recognize that there are times when war is unavoidable, and perhaps even necessary. Smarter theologians than I have even articulated a so-called “Just War” doctrine, which outlines the conditions under which a war might be considered justified from a religious perspective. War should only be waged as a last resort, after all other nonviolent options have been exhausted. The weapons used must effectively discriminate between combatants and noncombatants, and the violence must be “proportional” to the injury that has been suffered. The attackers must have legitimate authority, sanctioned by the society they profess to represent. And the peace established in the aftermath of war must be a clear improvement over what already exists. Reasonable people may disagree about whether or not these conditions have been met with respect to the war we currently find ourselves engaged in against Iraq. But personally, I have my doubts, especially when it comes to the first condition, and the last.
I sincerely believe that there were still other, nonviolent options we might have pursued short of a unilateral, pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. And I profoundly doubt that the aftermath of this war will leave our nation any more safe and secure from the threat of terrorist attack than we were before it started. In fact, it seems to me just the opposite -- that by repudiating the need to seek any sort of international consensus concerning our actions in Iraq, we have essentially thumbed our nose at the rest of the world, and isolated ourselves from the international community, effectively forfeiting both the legitimacy of international law and the so-called “moral high ground” that under different circumstances might well have proved our most dependable defense against “terrorism of global reach.” Instead, it seems to me that we have merely increased the amount of anger and resentment directed towards our nation, and are in danger of creating an entirely new generation of potential terrorists who perceive Americans, not as liberators and defenders of freedom, but rather as murderous aggressors who care about little else other than our own continued power and prosperity.
In my more cynical moments, I even question the sincerity of the President’s motives for initiating this war. I feel as though the President decided first to go to war, and only then started casting about for reasons he thought the public might swallow. The President claims that we have invaded Iraq in order to liberate the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator who possesses weapons of mass destruction that might someday threaten the United States. But that rationale rings hollow; I don’t believe him; it seems to me far more likely that the President has taken our nation to war in order to obtain effective control over Iraq’s substantial oil reserves, and to settle old scores in what for him is an extremely personal family vendetta, as well as to consolidate his own political power, by silencing potential criticism and dissent through the patriotic appeal to support our troops in the field.
If the President truly desires broad, bipartisan support for his policy against Iraq, he might easily take partisan politics out of the equation entirely simply by announcing that he will not seek a second term. But what do you suppose the odds are of that happening? About the same, I would suspect, as those that the siege of Baghdad will be a quick and virtually bloodless campaign in which our overwhelming high-tech military firepower will “Shock and Awe” our enemies into submission, thus transforming Iraq overnight into a peaceful, democratic society. It’s the naive, cowboy-inspired fantasy of those who have never experienced the reality of combat themselves -- shoot the bad guy in the hand, and they will “reach for the sky,” then walk away quiescently at gunpoint to the local hoosegow, leaving the Lone Ranger and Tonto free a few moments later to ride off dramatically into the sunset, while the grateful townspeople ask one another “who was that Masked Man?” You might see that program somewhere on basic cable. But you aren’t going to see it on CNN.
Ten days after the September 11th attacks against the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, the President appeared on television before a joint session of Congress, and cautioned the nation, and the world, against the “pretenses to piety” exhibited by “the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century,” who “by sacrificing human life to serve their radical vision, by abandoning every value except the will to power,” were following in the footsteps of “fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism.” “And they will follow that path,” the President warned, “all the way to where it ends in history’s unmarked grave of discarded lies.”
I worry now about the path the President has chosen to lead our nation down. It’s a path I’m sure may have once been paved with good intentions, but here we are, a mere ten days on the road, and I’m already starting to wonder when and where it will all end, and whether or not I really want to be there when it does. Because I fear that we are headed, not toward some sort of triumphant victory, but rather toward disaster, a bloody tragedy that will sacrifice the lives of thousands more Americans and Iraqis alike, and for no good purpose other than to make the world less safe for all of us, and for the children who will someday follow in our footsteps....
The word “repentence,” which we use in English to translate the Greek word metanoia, essentially means “to change or to transform one’s mind.” A generation ago our nation learned in the jungles of Southeast Asia a lesson learned by the Germans in the streets of Stalingrad (and Berlin), and by the French in Algeria and an isolated valley called Dien Bien Phu -- that the worst betrayal soldiers face is the realization that the leaders of the nation they have pledged to defend with their lives have lied to them, that the dangers they have been asked to face, the sacrifices they have been asked to make, are not in support of some noble, higher purpose, but that instead they have been ordered to kill, and to risk being killed, in order to defend an illusion, a fantasy, a nightmare, the arrogant pride of those who would willingly squander the lives of others in order to “save face” themselves. It’s a lesson it seems that we must learn again with each new war, no doubt because it is only when this lesson has been forgotten that it becomes possible for us to contemplate waging war at all.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 5:16 PM
