WAR...IMAGINE BETTER

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.