Cover It Up

Two news stories about our country's wars in the Middle East have garnered a lot of attention. The first story involves wikileaks, a website that publishes confidential government information, releasing a video that shows U.S. military helicopter crew members killing civilians; including a reporter from Rueters. There is a lot of controversy surrounding the exact nature of the video and the context around which the helicopter attack occurred. The U.S. military initially claimed that all the civilians were insurgents but now there a lot people are alleging cover-up.

Which brings us to the second story. General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. Commander in Afghanistan, admitted that U.S. soldiers have killed :an amazing number of people who were not threats." A soldier under his command asked Gen. McChrystal a question about problems with escalations of force and the general responded,

"I do want to say something that everyone understands. We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there's danger, they're asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. That doesn't mean I'm criticizing the people who are executing. I'm just giving you perspective. We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."

There is, I believe, a conspiracy and General McChrystal gets at the reason for it in his reply. The U.S., and other western nations, put in a lot of effort to give the impression that there are rules and order to what happens in war. The reality is quite different and the conspiracy is the effort to hide that reality. You cannot make orderly what is by definition disorderly, chaotic, brutal and inhumane. The conspiracy is in place so that people who don't know better, and quite a few that do, will continue to support the war effort thinking that the means and the ends are more nobler than they really are.

On Armistice Day

Today is Veteran's Day is the U.S. but originally today was called Armistice Day. Today commemorates the signing of the armistice that ended World War I. Over time, the day has morphed into Veteran's day and I feel like that is unfortunate.

Veteran's Day has turned into a celebration of all things military instead of the somber remembrance of war that it should be. War is always industrialized mass murder and a military is the organization dedicated to carrying out industrialized mass murder.

Armistice Day began as a way to remember those who died in the calamity of World War I. When President Woodrow Wilson signed the bill creating Armistice Day into law he said the purpose of the day was to "be dedicated to the cause of world peace."

I wish that instead of a day glorifying the military we could actually work on the original cause for the day. One way we could do this we be to look at just what a calamity war really is. We could perhaps reflect on the fact that there were nearly 11,000 casualties on the last day of World War I that occurred after the Armistice was signed but before it could take effect.

We could look to World War II, which as we all know was an unambiguous "good war." The war started when Hitler's Germany invaded Poland and when the war ended Stalin's Soviet Union occupied Poland.

Perhaps instead of taking pride in our immense military might we think about what it actually gets us. War is more destructive then we ever imagine and as we enter into our eighth year in Afghanistan with the capture of Bin Laden looking less and less likely it should be clear that we are not going to get out of the war in Afghanistan what we put in.

Perhaps if we reflected on these things then we would see war as the stupid and sadistic state of affairs that it really is then we might come closer to the original intent of the day.

Memorial Day Wish

My wish for this Memorial Day is that we remember ALL who die due to war; not only soldiers but also civilians, refugees, and victims.  I also wish that as we memorialize the dead that we do not memorialize war.   

Just War?

Over at The Pocket Mardis, my friend Matt is posting on just war theory.  I am not a big fan of the just war theory.  I find it often to be a way to mitigate the very radical antiwar message of Jesus and to make sure that Christians are treated as "serious" players in the debate to go to war. 

In trying to decide if a war can ever be called just, I go back to Jesus and and I like to focus on the passage in Matthew 26 where Jesus says the all who live by the sword will die by the sword.  This passage occurs in the Garden of Gesthemane when Jesus is arrested.  It is worth noting that in Hebrew Jesus is named Joshua which is a name he shares with the greatest warrior in Israelite history.  Also Matthew is an attempt to tell the Jesus story by using the motif of the Moses story.  So the story is that on passover, which is celebration of God's victory over the demi-god Pharaoh, God dies at the hand of a Roman empire headed by the demi-god known as Caesar.  Among many other things, I believe that the passion story is a story marked by God's renunciation of violence and armed force as an answer for the world's problems.

The only victor in war is war itself.  The war to end all wars led to the good war that led to the cold war and now we find ourselves in the never ending global war on terror.  After observing the carnage of the 1st day of the Battle of the Somme, Edmund Blunden remarked that "The war had won, and would go on winning."

One way to look at the cross is to see that Jesus took upon all the evil in the world and the price has been paid.  Therefore, there is no need for for any response and the debate on proportion becomes moot.  By putting down the sword, God is demonstrating that vengeance will no longer be the source of God's motivation and force the response to all the evil that has been or ever will be done.

This is a weak foreign policy and it may lead us and many others to die but I have to ask, "Don't we believe in the power of the resurrection?"

It is the power of the resurrection that allows all of us, Christian, American, Israeli, and Palestinian to understand that we stand forgiven for the lies we have told, the violence we have committed, the torture we inflicted, and the wars we start.

If all of us are forgiven then all of us can submit to God and to each other.  This radical action is how swords are beaten into ploughshares, and the Kingdom of God becomes a more present reality. 

Just war theory often strikes me as an attempt to short circuit this process and trade the radical message of Jesus for a vain attempt at respectability.  

The Danger of High Positions

On Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked  Vice President Cheney to name the high point from his years as Vice President.  Cheney answered by stating that 9/11/01 was the most important.  Various commentators have blasted for the Vice President for this answer.

I am not sure the Vice President deserves condemnation for his answer.  People become politicians because they want to be at the center of events like 9/11.  They want to shape world changing events, and so they enter politics to do just that.

However, Cheney's words do reveal a danger that comes from the people who lust over positions at the center of great events.  That danger is they lose all perspective on the results of their actions.

Let me illustrate with an example.  In World War 2, Winston Churchill had a map room in his underground bunker.  As an aside, Liturgygeek and I saw Churchill's Bunker on our honeymoon in London.  When the US entered the war, President Franklin Roosevelt thought he too needed a map room and he created one on the ground floor of the Whitehouse.  In this room, Roosevelt could track the movements of fleets and armies, and he could communicate with the various theaters of the war.  Roosevelt could also find out the current location of the allied leaders.  A cigarette holder marked Roosevelt's current location, a cigar stood for Churchill, and a pipe represented Stalin.  Access to the map room was limited to Roosevelt and a handful of aides and military chiefs.

Eleanor Roosevelt did not usually have access to the map room but one day she got a peek and what she saw disturbed her.  The First Lady saw President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill studying the maps.  She described them as "two little boys playing soldier.  They seemed to be having a wonderful time, too wonderful in fact.  It made me a little sad somehow." 

That's the issue that the Cheney interview brings out.  It's not that Cheney is a uniquely evil man.  It is easy to to believe that some Democrats approved what the administration did.  What Cheney demonstrated is that it is easy to commit evil when the results are an abstraction or pins on a map.  It's not a real human being that we are torturing but an "enemy combatant."  There is no such thing as the Iraqi people but just people in Iraq.  

The key is not to view Cheney as the disease but as a symptom of country that pursues a policy of perpetual war for perpetual peace.