Avdat

Blinkered

The first comment at this Ivy Bush post is a pretty good example of the blinkered world view that keeps the fiasco in Iraq chugging along.  The commenter boils down "the Muslim World," a truly vast world that stretches from Lagos to Jakarta, encompassing deserts, jungles, and frigid mountains, where over a billion people live in cities, towns and villages, some under pro-American dictators, others in democracies, still others under anti-American dictators, to the hard-core ideology of Al Qaida. 

These people (all these people, apparently) needed to be taught a lesson after 9/11.  These people (again, all these people, I suppose) can't be trusted with nukes.  Deposing the Taliban in Afghanistan just wasn't enough to accomplish either of these goals.  So you get the invasion of Iraq.  Which, incidentally, fits the requirements for Just War for the above mentioned reasons.

Set aside the obvious fact that it's we who are getting taught a lesson by this little foray into imperialism.  In this world view, it doesn't matter whether the war is progressing well or not.  All that matters is that Muslims are getting killed in great numbers.

"Hopefully, the introduction of quasi-democracy and quasi-human rights in Iraq will do the trick," he writes.  Well, there isn't even "quasi-democracy" in Iraq.  There is a rump government, propped up by the Americans, that can't even command the loyalty of its own police and army, much less the millions of Iraqis it purports to govern.  But all that proves is that "these people" need their attitudes adjusted even more.  Heads I win; tails you lose.   

And set aside the fact that perhaps the rest of the world is as dubious about our stewardship of nuclear weapons as we are of theirs.  After all, we alone have actually used them.  It doesn't matter what a billion potential suicide bombers think.

What's truly preposterous is the idea that this makes for a Just War.  Going to war today to prevent something that might happen twenty years from now is in no way a last resort.  Moreover, it's hard to read off the pages of the New Testament, or even much of the Old Testament, a 21st century foreign policy of bombing people into an attitude adjustment.  It's all reason (of a decidedly warped kind), and no revelation. 

This is the mentality of the three out of ten Americans who still think that President Bush is doing a good job, and who rely on Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham and Bill O'Reilly to inform them about what's happening in the world.  I laud Jonathan for his perseverance, but I am not sure there's any argument than can break though the willed ignorance, myopia, and ethnic and religious prejudice that prop up such a mentality.

Three out of ten is still a pretty big number.  To quote Thomas Jefferson, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever."

Appalling

These guys say that, for less than the cost of the war in Iraq, we could convert the U.S. electrical grid to mostly solar power by 2050.  Sounds like a bargain to me!  Now, where's the political leadership to make it happen?

Not in the present administration, whose thinking is stuck firmly in the Industrial Middle Age.

And so we continue scandalizing our grandchildren.

Munich

If you're looking for reviews of the latest movies, then this is definitely not the blog for you, but I will mention that we got around to seeing Munich the other night, and it's a fine film.  In case you're unfamiliar with the plot, it centers on a Mosad agent named Avner (Eric Bana), and four others who are dispatched to assassinate eleven Palestinian militants after the Black September raid on the 1972 Olympic Village that resulted in the deaths of eleven Israeli athletes.

The movie raises questions about to what extent the Jewish state should embody the values of the Jewish people and religion, and the tension between Israeli Jews and Jews in the diaspora.  It will also wind you up, as all good thrillers do, especially the ones in which the hunters become the hunted.

I walked away from it feeling something like emptiness.  I think that Spielberg and Kushner want the viewer to understand that vengeance hollows out the souls of both societies and individuals.  There's simply no return to normalcy after a person or a people set out on such a mission.

Why do I bother?

Lots of people have been commenting about this ad:

Hugh Hewitt praises the ad's clarity and seriousness.  Kevin Drum pans it as "a puerile contest to see who can stuff the most World War IV bullets into a single 30-second spot."

Obviously I agree with the latter sentiment and find the former, well, mind-boggling.  They're a bunch of religious fanatics holed up in caves.  They aren't the Red Army.  They aren't the Wehrmacht.  That a bunch of nutters in caves armed with box-cutters killed 3,000 people six years ago was a very bad thing, and says a lot about the hearts of those evil men, but says much more about our incompetent intelligence and law enforcement agencies than it says about the magnitude of the threat that they pose.

And even if a bunch of religious fanatics holed up in caves does pose a Wehrmacht-sized threat, then that merely begs the question, "Why are 165,000 U.S. troops in Iraq instead of Afghanistan?

But when you ask that question, or others like it, you tend not to get a straight answer.  You tend to get told that your wife will look great in a burka. 

Why do I bother?

If It's Elmo, Duck!

I was overcome with a fit of nostalgia for those good ol' days of Reality Based Ivy Bush blogging when pointing out facts meant that you were a French Fry eatin' Freedom Hater.  "Just what is our terror alert level running at right now?"  I asked myself.

So I Googled terror alert level and was pleased to see that some of my fellow travelers from 2002-4 are still maintaining their sense of humor:

Party Like It's 1939

Islamofascism.

Existential threat.

Axis of Evil.

There was a time when such phrases did have some meaning.  Remember those days right after 9/11?  An evil enemy had killed thousands of Americans on our own soil.  It was our generation's Pearl Harbor.  It seemed to portend an exhausting global conflict.

Those were frightening days for me.  I say this to my shame.  When I was in college I read John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus.  It converted me to pacifism.  I remained a pacifist throughout the 90s, but I never really had to answer for it.  I could hide in the thickets of Just War Theory, and snipe at our bombing of an aspirin factory in Sudan and our super-sized defense budget without raising questions about violence per se.

That wasn't the case after 9/11.  American hating leftists might have chanted "No blood for oil," and muttered conspiratorially about pipelines through Afghanistan, but I don't hate America, and while I'm a Democrat, I'm not a true-blue leftist.  That's not where I could take my stand.  If I were going to oppose this war, I'd have to be a fool for Christ.

That was scary.  Would there be a draft?  Would there be a war tax?  Would my congregation demand an American flag be placed in the sanctuary and me lead the Pledge of Allegiance?  I hadn't counted on being a pacifist in a "Good War" atmosphere in which there might be unpleasant ramifications for renouncing violence.

But lucky for me, I didn't have to answer for my beliefs after all.  All I had to do was not duck the issue when my turn came to submit an op-ed for The Charlotte Observer.  I didn't duck it.  I got a lot of hate mail.  But I also made a new friend. 

Instead of spending the post-9/11 period revising my conscientious objector application, I got on with my life.  That's what the President told me to do.  I went shopping.  I bought Christmas gifts.  I went to the beach for a summer vacation.  And, unless you're a member of the U.S. military, or a close relative of someone who is, you got on with your life too.

That's the weird thing about this war.  We can be in the throes of the enemy's death grip, and still find time for American Idol.  Far from gas rationing, this World War demands a commitment to driving a Hummer. Not one with a machine gun mounted in the back, but one like LeBron's.  Livin' large is a big middle finger raised at bin Laden, Saddam, and every other Eye-Racki and A-Rab who's thinking dark thoughts about us.  Why levy a war tax when you can just borrow the money?  "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what Chinese bond traders can do for your country." 

One might ask whether this home front lifestyle is really advancing the war effort.  We're five years out from 9/11 and three and one-half years into our occupation of Iraq.  Three and a half years after Pearl Harbor, Germany had surrendered, and it was raining bombs on Tokyo.  The end was in sight.  Can anyone say that about this war?

So I'd have to conclude from the administration's recent rhetoric that they, 1. Don't know how to fight a world war, or 2. Are cynically using the rhetoric of "Islamofascism" as a cudgel against their critics.

But if George W. Bush didn't put me on a cross, then my commitment to nonviolence has been tested in other ways.  Our oldest son is autistic.  He's aggressive, and he weighs almost as much as my wife.  Medicine and psychotherapy help him, but there are those days...  It's taxing to stay in control when he is out of control.  It's not as sexy as the Berrigan brothers tapping on fighter jets with hammers, but that's what my commitment to nonviolence has boiled down over the past five years--not losing it when he's losing it.  It's boiled down to that because George W. Bush doesn't know how to meet an existential threat.

Funny thing is, five years later, all those possibilities that would have raised issues of conscience for me--those are the things I wish for.  I wish there were a war tax.  I'd be happy to pay it.  War is bad.  War debt is awful. 

I wish there were gas rationing.  I'm driving a Prius, not a Hummer.  I live a hundred yards from the hospital, and 1.1 miles from the church.  I could get by on gas coupons.

I wish there had been a draft.  It would have concentrated the attention of all the Idol watchers who were glibly for "going in there and getting Saddam." 

If there were a draft right now, I'd have to think about what I'd do.  I'm exempt because I'm clergy, but I might have to wave that exemption.  I don't think I could be a military chaplain.  If a soldier or Marine came to me with scruples about killing, what could I say to him by way of reassurance?  Maybe I'd be a Navy corpsman instead.  My Dad was in the Navy.  I should probably check with my wife first before I commit her and the kids to living in base housing on an enlisted man's salary.

I know that all the military jobs ultimately serve the pointy end of the spear, but pacifism, if it's worth anything, isn't about keeping oneself pure.  None of us are pure.  It's about receiving a gift from the Holy Spirit, and giving that gift to the measure of our abilities.

In short, what I wish for is a President who was so reluctant to wage war, but when the time came, so competent and so determined to share the burden across society, that I'd have to be stark raving mad to say No to war.  Maybe that's another way of saying that pacifists and good Just War people need each other.