Getting through the horror show at home

I feel sick and crazy.

I've heard the president of our country say over and over that we are going to liberate Iraq. It sounds pretty simple. And then we'll set up a democracy. That sounds marvelous. And we don't want to hurt the Iraqi people. Perfect. I don't know EXACTLY what is going on but I know nothing is that simple.

I go around humming the two-note line from my kids' Red Hot Chili Peppers album: "The story of a woman on the morning of a war, remind me if you will exactly what we're fighting for."

How did we get to this dark moment in our history? I know the United Nations demanded that Saddam Hussein get rid of his weapons of mass destruction quite a while ago. He was threatened with sanctions and then pressured with sanctions that have been in place for 12 and one-half years. I suppose they're still in place-still "threatening" Saddam. Since the sanctions haven't worked very well (as a threat to Saddam, that is—they've been very successful at devastating the Iraqi people), the United States (or the United Nations?) has bombed Iraq quite a bit over the past 12 years. That didn't work very well either (as a threat to Saddam, that is—it was successful at killing and wounding Iraqis). Finally the United Nations threatened all-out war in order to get weapons inspectors into Iraq (again) to look for weapons of mass destruction. That worked to a certain degree.

Originally, the goal was to disarm Saddam; then, a few years later, it was to oust him personally; and now it is to replace his whole regime. The goals have been getting bigger over the years. I presume it's the U.N. that's been changing the goals. I'm not sure but I think the fact that they couldn't accomplish the goals means something has broken down in the United Nations—I think its authority is in question.

Not that we're talking about a parent child relationship here, but I do know, as a parent, that you lose your authority if you try a strategy that obviously doesn't work and then continue to use it. That's insanity. When you cross over into the territory of threats and bribes, I know you also lose your authority if you threaten your child with some consequence they don't care about avoiding. And, you lose your authority if you threaten a consequence you are unable or unwilling to enforce. You have to be careful what you threaten—if you care about results.

So, since it looked like the United Nations lost its authority, the United States decided to take over. Is that what happened? For some reason, although our U.S. Constitution says only our Congress can declare war, our Congress last October voted to give the President the power to make that decision. I wonder how new that was, though. It's not like the United States hasn't been involved in other military actions. My friend Karin, who is an historian, sounds like she thinks our present war is just another war. She told me that when Colin Powell was Chief of Staff, the United States sent out troops 28 times. And my sister sent me an e-mail in which historian William Blum lists 22 countries the United States has bombed since WWII, some more than once. Where did those decisions come from?

Maybe that question doesn't matter. Maybe the question is, was there a positive outcome? Blum states there absolutely was not. None of those countries established a democratic government that was respectful of human rights as a result of U.S. bombing efforts.

The reason many people believe in military action is they believe something good comes out of it. The belief in the use of force and violence to fight evil is what theologian Walter Wink calls a belief in "redemptive violence." It's been around for centuries, and supports a cyclical view of history, the idea that the same things happen over and over. People who believe that history can make progress are the ones who believe in alternatives to violence. Our world seems to be divided into these two positions. I belong to the latter group.

I don't believe you can bring good through violence. There might be some short term positive results, but in the long run evil is here to stay. You can stomp on it and stomp on it all you want, and it won't do any good. One of the official reasons for this war-liquidating a cruel regime that commits atrocities against its own people—(I'm skeptical of "reasons" for wars) makes me think of a horror movie I saw years ago in which some kind of a supernatural monster keeps coming back to life. It gets pulverized, burned, decomposed, fragmented and what have you and always shows up again. At the end of the movie, when the monster is finally, for sure, for sure demolished, and the victims are sound asleep in their hospital beds ( I think it was a hospital), a shadow looms across the scene and it is clear the monster is alive and well. Anyway, evil isn't usually neatly packaged in one container. It gets into everything, like dust.

Revenge, completely natural to uncivilized children, is a force that perpetuates evil. If a kid hits another kid, children believe with all their hearts it is necessary to return the blow. Sometimes they will say they have to hit back to scare the other person so they won't do it again. Often I hear, "We have to go to war with Iraq because they started it [referring to 9-11]." Obviously I don't believe scores can be evened and I certainly don't believe revenge prevents more violence. (This is apart from the issue of what Iraq had to do with 9-11.)

People deal with the war in different ways. My friend Tim sent me an article from the San Francisco Chronicle describing high levels of stress and depression brought on, mostly, by fear. Some people ignore the war, refuse to watch TV or listen to the radio and go on gardening, shopping and listening to Mozart—or the Red Hot Chili Peppers. They are trying to save their sanity.

Loved ones of service people don't have the luxury of ignoring the war. They send care packages, give blood, cry and pray.

Some people watch TV 24/7 and live in a perpetual state of shock and awe. Or grief. Or cynicism. For some it's just lust for gore. Others watch constantly as a way to put meaning into their lives. Chris Hedges, a longtime war correspondent, wrote a fascinating, and strangely not cynical, article in Amnesty International's magazine about war as meaning: War is a thrill and a high unlike any other. The article was adapted from his book, "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning."

A serious cadre of individuals concentrates on defending the environment as well as the safety net for impoverished people while everyone else is focused on the war. Hopefully they are defending the protection of veterans, as well—veteran benefits have been cut and programs that provide school funding for children of military personnel are in danger of being cut while no one is looking—while future veterans are out fighting.

Then, there exists a small group of people who fast and pray. My friend Steve has been fasting since the war began. Some people put a light in the window as a symbol of hope. As far as I can see, these people are completely nonpartisan. The song, "He's got the whole world in his hand," comes to my mind. Wouldn't that be great? I suppose if God is "the ground of our being," as theologian Paul Tillich puts it, then God does have the whole world in God's hand.

Some people exchange a lot of e-mails and search the Internet and the library for knowledge that would help us understand what is happening. I get tons of e-mails and read tons of articles.

There are numerous articles about Saddam's atrocities and those of his two sons, as well.

There's an inspiring Web site for the Iraq Peace Team, 25 Americans and Canadians who are staying in Baghdad for the war to offer peace and solidarity to their Iraqi brothers and sisters. Two guys are camped in a tent next to the Baghdad water treatment plant, praying that Baghdad's water supply will not be touched. The peace team is not there to function as human rights monitors and they are not human shields, although there are a few shields left in Baghdad.

I found a very long story in the New York Times Magazine by Paul Berman, taken from his book “Terror and Liberalism,” examining "In the Shade of the Qur'an," an extensive interpretation of the Koran written in prison by philosopher Sayyid Qutb. Executed by Nasser in Egypt in 1966, Sayyid Qutb was the "Karl Marx" of Al Qaeda, the intellectual hero of every group that merged to form Al Qaeda. He was appalled at the separation of spirit and body that had developed in Western culture and called it a "hideous schizophrenia." He was also appalled at the western idea of separation of church and state. His ideal was a theocracy where everyone was required (coerced) to live by the rules of Islam. He believed that was the only way to true happiness. Here comes the sermon: it is important to remember that all Arabs are not Muslims, all Muslims are not Arabs, all Muslims don't belong to Al Qaeda and all Arabs don't belong to Al Qaeda, not all Iraqis are Arabs, not all Iraqis are Muslims, and probably not one single Iraqi belongs to Al Qaeda given that Saddam had them all killed whenever they tried to enter the country. You could safely say that all members of Al Qaeda are Muslims of a certain extreme kind. There are also Muslim pacifists, just as there are Jewish and Christian pacifists.

Another article I found, in the Christian Science Monitor, described the anxiety of certain evangelical leaders over Bush's rhetoric and his decisions. They were assured by Bush's spokesman that he makes his decisions as a secular leader, his religion doesn't enter into it.

For nonpolitical people the world over, war, finally, is like a hurricane or any type of natural disaster—you can't do anything about it.

About a week before the war started, I had despaired of any solution. So, I jumped for joy when I received an e-mail called "An Alternative to War for Defeating Saddam Hussein, A Religious Initiative," sent by Sojourners, a Christian social justice magazine headed by Jim Wallis, who represents the best of the Christian right and the best of the Christian left (see his book "Faith Works"). The ideas were both practical and spiritual. It was my last hopeful moment.

The introduction reads: "It is the eleventh hour, and the world is poised on the edge of war. Church leaders have consistently warned of the unpredictable and potentially disastrous consequences of war: massive civilian casualties, a precedent for preemptive war, further destabilization of the Middle East, and the fueling of more terrorism.

"Yet the failure to effectively disarm Saddam Hussein and his brutal regime could also have potentially catastrophic consequences. The potential nexus between weapons of mass destruction and terrorism is the leading security issue in the world today. This is the moral dilemma: a decision between the terrible nature of that threat and the terrible nature of war as a solution.

"The world is desperate for a 'third way' between war and ineffectual responses-an alternative to war as the way to defeat Saddam Hussein. If we are to find an effective response to Saddam instead of a full-scale military assault against Iraq, that 'instead' must be strong enough to be a serious alternative to war.

"In November 2002, the U.N. Security Council decided that Iraq was in 'material breach' of previous resolutions but gave Iraq 'a final chance to comply with its disarmament obligations.' Since then, the threat of military force has been decisive in getting inspectors back into Iraq, putting pressure on Saddam finally to comply, and in building an international consensus for the disarmament of Iraq. The Security Council also 'warned Iraq that it will face serious consequences as a result of its continued violations of its obligations' if it did not comply.

"Yet those 'serious consequences' need not be war against the people of Iraq. The consequences should mean further and more serious actions against Saddam Hussein and his regime, rather than a devastating attack on the people of Iraq."

On February 18, 2003, a delegation of U.S. church leaders—Jim Wallis, Executive Director and Editor-in-Chief of Sojourners; John Bryson Chane, Episcopal Bishop of Washington, D.C.; Clifton Kirkpatrick, Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church USA; Melvin Talbert, Ecumenical Officer of the United Methodist Council of Bishops; and Dan Weiss, Immediate Past General Secretary of the American Baptist Churches in the USA—accompanied by colleagues from the United Kingdom and the worldwide Anglican Communion, met with Prime Minister Tony Blair and his Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short, to discuss alternatives to war.

From those discussions and from subsequent conversations among the U.S. delegation, a six point plan was developed:

1. Remove Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party from power

The Bush administration and the anti-war movement are agreed on one thing—Saddam Hussein is a brutal and dangerous dictator. Virtually nobody has sympathy for him, either in the West or in the Arab world, but everyone has great sympathy for the Iraqi people who have already suffered greatly from war, a decade of sanctions, and the corrupt and violent regime of Saddam Hussein. So let's separate Saddam from the Iraqi people. Target him, but protect them.

As urged by Human Rights watch and others, the U.N. Security Council should establish an international tribunal to indict Saddam and his top officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity...Indicting Saddam would send a clear signal to the world that he has no future.It would cause world opinion to coalesce against Saddam's regime rather than against a U.S.-led war, as is now happening.

2. Enforce coercive disarmament.

a. Military enforcement.

Removing Saddam must be coupled with greatly intensified inspections to fully enforce all U.N. Security Council resolutions that relate to Iraq since the 1991 Gulf war. Inspections have shown progress-the agreement by Iraq to destroy its Al Samoud-2 missiles is significant. But rather than simply increasing the number of inspectors, inspections must be conducted more aggressively and on a much broader scale. The existing U.S. military deployment should be restructured as a multinational force with a U.N. mandate to support and enforce inspections.. . . . .

b. Strengthen the arms embargo

The current system for preventing Iraq from acquiring prohibited weapons must be strengthened by a more effective monitoring system and the installation of advanced detection technology on Iraq's borders. At present there is no international monitoring of commercial crossings into Iraq from Jordan, Syria, Turkey, and other neighboring states. The use of advanced monitoring and scanning technology along with sanctions assistance missions on the borders would significantly improve the capability to monitor borders and prevent illegal arms shipments.

3. Foster a democratic Iraq

The United Nations should begin immediately to plan for a post-Saddam Iraq, administered temporarily by the United Nations and backed by an international armed force, rather than a U.S. military occupation. An American viceroy in an occupied Iraq is the wrong solution.

4. Organize a massive humanitarian effort now for the people of Iraq

Humanitarian aid deliveries must be protected, if necessary, by a U.N. force under Security Council mandate.

5. Recommit to a 'Roadmap to Peace' in the Middle East.

The road to peace in the Middle East leads not through Baghdad, but through Jerusalem. It should guarantee a Palestinian state by 2005 while guaranteeing the safety and security of Israel. This would show the clear political and moral link between the deeply rooted and unresolved Middle East crisis and the larger war on terrorism, including the Iraq issue.

6. Reinvigorate and sustain the 'war against terrorism.'

The international campaign against terrorism has succeeded in identifying and apprehending suspects, freezing financial assets, and isolating terror networks-most recently with the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But it is in danger of being disrupted, both by acrimony and by lack of attention, as the world focuses on the impending conflict with Iraq. Most significant, a war against Iraq will fuel anti-American animosity in the Arab world, where cooperation in the war on terror is most needed.

“It is five minutes before midnight, as Martin Luther King Jr. might have put it. Unless an alternative to war is found, a military conflagration soon will be unleashed. A morally rooted and pragmatically minded initiative, broadly supported by people of faith and people of good will, might help to achieve a historic breakthrough and set a precedent for decisive and effective international action in the many crises we face in the post-September 11 world.”

Readers of the plan were asked to send it to everyone they knew, but most of all to send it to President Bush. Readers were also asked to pray for Bush, Blair, Kofi Annan, and Saddam Hussein.

The six-point plan got serious attention in the British government, at the United Nations, in the U.S. Congress and even the State Department. It was featured in an op-ed in the Washington Post and as a full-page ad in five British newspapers. It was discussed in the Star Tribune, as well.

Obviously it's too late to adopt an alternative solution to this war. But how about the next one?