WAR…IMAGINE BETTER
As a Christian I have been
opposed to the US military’s international interventions since George W. Bush. I
jumped on his bandwagon during his first run for the White House. The idea of “compassionate-conservatism”
appealed to me. “What a concept”, I thought. “It’s the best of both worlds.”
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However there is a vast
difference between compassion and sympathy.
Sympathy sees a need and feels sorrow for the sufferer. While that is better than feeling contempt it
is not compassion. Compassion acts on behalf of the sufferer. I am sure G. W.
Bush is a very kind gentleman but a compassionate president, he was not. However, for me, that wasn’t as bad as taking
the nation to war in Iraq.
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I am a fairly gullible person
so I could excuse being hoodwinked with the substitution of pity for policy. Nevertheless I could not excuse being pulled into
the very hawkish first-strike military engagement in Iraq. I expressed my disapproval quietly by
refusing to vote for him in his run for a second term. Yet feeling a certain
amount of loyalty to the Republican Party I vote an almost solid Republican ticket
without choosing any presidential candidate at all. I have since given up and become
one of those rear oddball Christian-Democrats.
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Even as a Conservative Christian-Republican
I always considered war a population’s admission that they had no better ideas
for dealing with an issue. Violence is what people resort to when they just can’t
envision a more creative positive way of respond to an aggressor. Fareed Zakaria’s GPS, CNN TV, reported an interview
taken from one of the French gunmen discussing his thoughts prior to his
violent attack.
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“Cherif Kouachi, one of the Paris terrorists, revealed the
source of his radicalization: ‘I was ready to go and die in battle. . . . I got
this idea when I saw the injustices shown by television on what was going on
over there [in Iraq]. I am speaking about the torture that the Americans have
inflicted on the Iraqis.’ So U.S intervention in the Middle East caused him to
become a jihadi.”
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“Scholars Robert Pape and James Feldman analyzed all of the more than
2,100 documented cases of suicide bombings from 1980 to 2009 and concluded that
most of the perpetrators were acting in response to U.S. intervention in the
Middle East rather than out of a religious or ideological motivation.”
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“In a well-documented report for the Brookings Institution
on the threat of terrorism from foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, Daniel
Byman and Jeremy Shapiro examine all the known reasons for these jihadis to
become engaged. The reasons vary from a sense of adventure to religious
radicalism, but battling a foreign (Western) intervention is often high on the
list”.
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The evidence shows that the pre-9/11terrorists trace their hatred
of the US to our bombing of Serbia, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan along with our
bases residing in various Arabian countries.
Most of the more resent terrorists have been attracted to radical Muslim
by the US’ ongoing drone, missal, and bombing strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and
now Syria. In general, they perceive the conflict as appropriate retaliation
for the decades of US military interventions in Islamic countries. Fareed
Zakaria asked a telling rhetorical question in a 1/25/2015 Washington Post op-ed
article, “Perhaps we should have turned the other cheek. And not only did
the surge in Afghanistan make them angry, but so did our withdrawal. How
can sending troops in and pulling them out both make the radical Muslims angry?”
The obviously answer is, they simply can’t imagine a better way of dealing with
an aggressor…the USA.
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Fareed then offered the question
posed by another regional expert, “To argue that the only way to stop terrorism
at home is for the United States to intervene militarily and stabilize the many
parts of the Middle East that are in conflict is to commit Washington to a
fool’s errand for decades. Scholar Andrew Bacevich has pointed out that before
Syria, Washington had already launched interventions in 13 countries in the
Islamic world since 1980. Would one more really do the trick?”
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US leaders in the past have taken us
into wars without doing the hard work of devising a more positive strategy. As
frustrating as it is to sit by and watch the heartbreaking horror that is
playing out in Syria and Iraq I for one am glad they are taking their time on
this one. I suppose this is a moment when substituting sympathy for compassion,
pity for policy, is justifiable. However, I am praying that they come up with
something better than war.
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With that in mind, several months
ago I submitted a proposal outlining a nonviolent strategy for the US to deal
with the Syrian/Iraq War. I emailed my suggestion to the US State Department,
my US Senator, a senior member of the Senate-Foreign Relations Committee, and
the US Peace Corps. Do I really expect anything to come of my efforts? Frankly
that is not why I wrote it. I sent the proposal in the hope that if someone
notices an old salty retired charter-boat captain from San Diego had imagine a nonmilitary
strategy perhaps someone in Washington would be encouraged to imagine an even
better one. The good news is that one of the agencies actually emailed me a
personal response. They informed me that they were unable to commit any resources
to new programs…I’m good with that.
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BTW ~ all of the officials I sent the proposal
to were Democrats knowing that Republicans by in large are even less likely to
consider anything other than escalated military intervention.
