Journal: A Theologian Speaks

Stopping the War: Politics, Strategic Options, ChristianEthics
by Gary Dorrien

America’s debacle in Iraq has reached a crossroads. Iraqi society has been ripped apart by ferocious insurgent and sectarian violence; the Maliki government is paralyzed by its sectarian basis; there is no military solution to the insurgency or the civil war; and by next spring the U.S. Army will be tapped out, necessitating reductions in troop levels.

All of this would seem to necessitate a major change in policy, just as, ten months ago, there was a brief flicker of hope for one. Republicans lost the November elections, Donald Rumsfeld was belatedly pushed out of the Pentagon, and the Baker-Hamilton Commission called for a strategy of redeployment and gradual disengagement from Iraq.

But that moment now seems long ago. President Bush is still making absurd statements about winning the war. He says the lesson of Vietnam is to keep fighting in Iraq. Thus Americans go on killing and being killed, the economic costs have soared past $500 billion, and some Bush officials want to bomb Iran too. Bush’s refusal to acknowledge that the war cannot be won is guaranteeing a worse outcome for its aftermath than is necessary, which is what empires usually do.

A Splintered IRAQ

The crossfire of insurgent and sectarian war in Iraq has become so complex that it defies concise description. Iraq is broken into rival groups of warlords, sectarian militias, local gangs, foreign terrorists, political factions, a hapless government, and a deeply corrupted and sectarian police force. In Bosnia it was possible to settle a civil war by turning the country into a loose confederation, because at least Bosnia had leaders of coherent political factions that cut deals and delivered their factions. Iraq is broken far beyond that. Two million Iraqis have fled the country—which is nearly everyone who had the means to do so; another two million have fled their homes within the country. This summer the New York Times interviewed 35 Iraqi college students who graduated later that week in Baghdad. All but three were planning to leave the country immediately after getting their degrees.

The Sunnis are enraged at being invaded, having their homes destroyed, and being subjected to a foreign power. As the nation’s traditional elite they assume their right to govern. Many of them believe that only Sunnis are true Muslims. They are terrified and appalled that the Western invader has paved the way to a Shiite government allied with Iran. They regard the Shiites as collaborators with the invader. They are deeply opposed to the new constitution. They want a strong central government that distributes oil revenue from Baghdad, and they are incredulous that the U.S. has enabled Iran to become the dominant force in the Middle East. The Shiites are embittered by decades of Sunni tyranny and the current Sunni insurgency, which includes Sunni protection of the foreign terrorists. Both sides have militia groups and bitter sectarian splits within their ranks, which are so bad on the Shia side that there is a serious possibility of a civil war between Shiites.

The longer the U.S. occupies Iraq with over 100,000 forces, the more it will fuel the resentment of Iraqi Sunnis toward the Shiite collaborators. There is no prospect of a political settlement as long as infuriated Sunnis view the Shiites and Kurds as collaborators with, and beneficiaries of, an occupying Western invader. And the problem of sectarian violence in Iraq merely begins with that fact. Iraq cannot get to a decent outcome as long as the Sunnis remain a hostile minority, Shiite leaders exclude the Sunnis from governing, and Shiite militias dominate the army and police force.

For two years, Bush officials assured that the Iraqi Kurds would curtail the Shiite religious parties and the majority Shiites would curtail Kurdish nationalism. In the end something like the opposite happened, as the Kurds and Shiites cut a deal favoring each of their interests at the expense of the nation. The Kurds got a constitution supporting regional autonomy and the Shiites got a theocratic legal system and constitution all the way through the Supreme Court.

Foreign Terrorist

As recently as January 2005 the war against the Sunni insurgency was consuming for the U.S. and the problem of foreign terrorism was growing but still small. Then the civil war erupted in February, creating a new worst problem. Today the sectarian violence is so bad that it has become the chief reason for extending America’s occupation. But that is the logic of empire, which puts the U.S. in the crossfire of a civil war. The blowback against it is escalating. The foreign terrorists, meanwhile, have thrived on the chaotic aftermath of the war, the lack of a stable government and police force, and the intense Sunni desire for revenge. They swim in a sea of disorder and alienated hostility that the occupation constantly refuels. They flourish in a failed state. Iraq had no foreign terrorists before the U.S. invaded in 2003, but now it has approximately 10,000 of them.

This summer the Bush Administration and Army made a stunning policy change that showed the extent of the U.S.’s desperation. The U.S. is arming Sunni insurgents throughout the Sunni triangle of Baghdad, Ramadi, and Tikrit, an area that includes Samarra and Fallujah. American intelligence officials believe that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown Sunni Arab insurgent group, is directed by foreign terrorists. This group has alienated Sunni tribal sheiks by bombing marketplaces, killing Iraqis indiscriminately. Last spring General David Petraeus, hoping to capitalize on the alienation, began giving weapons to tribal police forces and other militia groups in Anbar Province that promised to use them against foreign terrorists. Attacks on American troops went down after the policy was instituted, and so today, General Petraeus is rolling the dice in the entire Sunni triangle, despite the frantic opposition of the Maliki government. The very people that the U.S. has been fighting for the past four years are now getting U.S. weapons if they promise to use them against foreign terrorists.

An Illegal Democracy

As long as the U.S. occupies Iraq, the Shiites will be viewed in the Sunni provinces as collaborators; Sunnis will view the Army as a creation of the invaders that puts their enemies in charge; and Sunni leaders must fear that any cooperation they extend to the occupier will brand them as traitors. When the occupier pulls back, the toxic politics of collaboration and betrayal will be lessened. The civil war currently raging in Iraq is going to play itself out no matter what the U.S. does. But the U.S. set it off, we are refueling it every day, and our government is terribly overdue to recognize that more killing and destruction will not make this picture better.
All of this has occurred because the Bush Administration invaded Iraq with no regard whatsoever for the cultural and historical variables. The Pentagon, the Vice-President’s office, and the president had a privileged vision of what was going to happen and they did not allow it to be challenged. With an arrogance that would be hard to exaggerate, they dismissed warnings from the State Department and others about the perils of occupying the Arab world’s Yugoslavia.
They didn’t want to know that the process of modernization and urbanization was only an inch deep in Iraqi society. They had no idea that tribal values, born of surviving a harsh environment for centuries, held sway for most Iraqis. Rumsfeld, Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith and the rest looked at their exile informants, especially Ahmad Chalabi, and blithely assumed that democratizing Iraq would be easy. Today Iraq is a democracy—a profoundly illiberal one. There is precious little acceptance that abiding by the rules is more important than winning. The Shiite Arabs are unwilling to share their power. The Kurds care only about their autonomy. The Sunni Arabs want nothing less than a return to power. All are consumed with internal and external battles. And so Iraq is so broken that even Yugoslavia cannot be used as an analogy.

The Real Costs of WAR

Today the U.S. is spending $10 billion per month in Iraq, nearly all of it from emergency spending bills, which add up to over $500 billion thus far. These figures do not include disability and health payments for returning troops, inducements for soldiers to serve additional deployments, extra pay for reservists and National Guard members, and additional foreign aid to supportive nations. When all of that is factored in, along with the Pentagon’s unprecedented dependence on expensive private contractors, the bill for five years of Iraq is expected to run at least $2 trillion, all of it added to the federal debt. 1

That comes out to $18,000 per household, a far cry from what Americans were told to expect. Rumsfeld said the war would cost less than $50 billion; Wolfowitz assured that Iraq’s oil would finance the nation’s reconstruction. The U.S. could have fixed Social Security or provided health insurance for all uninsured Americans for the next half-century with the amount it is spending in Iraq.

The defense budget for 2008, which covers normal personnel, procurement, and operational expenses, is up to $481 billion. In addition to not including the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this figure does not include nuclear weapons ($22 billion, assigned to the Energy Department) or the defense expenditures of the National Defense Stockpile, Selective Service, FBI, and Coast Guard (approximately $5 billion). Neither does it count the State Department’s security programs ($38 billion), homeland security programs not in the Pentagon budget ($36 billion), the human costs of past and current wars handled by the Department of Veterans Affairs ($84 billion), or interest payments on the national debt related to defense spending ($75 billion), plus miscellaneous expenditures in other agencies. When these items are counted, total military spending for 2008 comes to approximately $885 billion. 2

Despite these immense outlays, budget analysts warn of a coming financial train wreck, because the appropriations in virtually every category fall short of the true costs of the U.S.’s military posture. The U.S. is caught in the classic imperial dilemma of spending fantastic sums on the military yet lacking enough military to cover its foreign policy. In November 2006 Army chief of staff General Peter Schoomaker withheld his required 2008 budget plan as a protest against what his staff called a “disastrous” and “unsustainable” situation in the Army. The Army’s regular budget in 2007 was $99 billion, but Schoomaker demanded a 41 percent increase, eventually settling for 19 percent that included a 55 percent increase in procurement. A senior Army official observed, “Yes, it’s incredibly huge. These are just incredible numbers.” 3

Congress is starting to get it. I started speaking against the war a few months before we invaded, and I’ve never had much hope for Congress, until now. In 2002 the Democrats that wanted to run for president thought they couldn’t do so if they opposed the war. Two years later they still thought so. Today John Kerry and John Edwards wish they had stood for something better, and many others are wishing the same. We need a peace movement that will help wobbly politicians find their nerve.

Nearly forty years ago, Senator William Fulbright warned that the U.S. was well on its way to becoming an empire that exercised power for its own sake, projected to the limit of its capacity and beyond, filling every vacuum and extending American force to the farthest reaches of the earth. As the power grows, he warned, it becomes an end in itself, separated from its initial motives (all the while denying it), governed by its own mystique, projecting power merely because we have it. That’s where we are today. If we take a long enough look at Iraq, perhaps this catastrophe will put us on a better course, one that repairs the damage to America’s reputation.

The Challenges of the War to our Faith

For the past six years the nation has gotten a toxic combination of bad theology and politics from the White House: God is on our side; an “axis of evil” has to be overthrown; the U.S. has a mission, as President Bush put it at the National Cathedral service, to “rid the world of evil.” In good theology God does not take sides among nations; nations are understood to be too prone to hubris and power-fixation to be instruments of redemption; and redemption from evil is God’s business. The response of any Christian or other religious tradition to world politics must feature a strong presumption against war and a predisposition to view the world from the perspectives of the poor, the excluded, and the vulnerable. In biblical teaching, the test of ethical action is how it affects the struggles of oppressed and excluded people. Christianity must be a movement that shows the peaceable and justice-making way of Christ and that asks at all times, “How does this policy affect oppressed or vulnerable people?”

For me the normative gospel ethic of peacemaking, loving one’s enemies, and what Jesus called the “weightier matters of the law”—justice and mercy—is integrative and contextual. It interrogates the ethics of prevention and defense on a case-by-case basis, and it has a place for humanitarian intervention. At the same time, the presumption against war must be very strong for an ethic to be Christian, and it must see the face of Christ in the faces of the world’s disinherited.

We need new forms of community that arise out of but transcend religious affiliation, culture and nation. All our religious traditions have propensities for dogmatism and prejudice that must be uprooted: racism, white supremacism, sexism, denigration of gays and lesbians, anti-Semitism, nationalism, imperialism. We need a wider community of the divine good. No one can know whether any of our endeavors will accomplish anything, but the necessity of struggling for the divine good is certain.

For months leading up to the Iraq war, the Vatican, the World Council of Churches, and many other religious communities pleaded against invading Iraq. Pope John Paul II declared that the future of humanity depended on the courage of the earth’s peoples and their leaders to reject what he called “the logic of war.” The Vatican mouthpiece Civilta Cattolica, a Jesuit journal vetted by the Vatican, described the war as “a wound and a humiliation for the entire Islamic world” that was bound to fuel acts of revenge for many years to come. The statements of church leaders against the war were rooted in the gospel ethic of sacrificial love and the scriptural command not to kill. Virtually all of them began with the gospel presumption against war and went on to emphasize international law, international cooperation, collective security, and real-world consequences.4

Today we need a peace movement that says, “I don’t want my country to invade any more nations in the Middle East. I don’t want my country to be dragged into wars that don’t come remotely close to being a last resort, inflaming resentments that will last for centuries. I don’t want my country to plant permanent military bases for itself anywhere in the Middle East. Not in my name do you invade any more Muslim nations in the name of making America safe.”

Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. An Episcopal priest, his many books include a critique of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, Imperial Designs, and a recently completed trilogy, The Making of American Liberal Theology.