With headstrong determination, President Bush has defied the advice of his own Methodist bishops, with whom he refused to meet, as well as the pope, not to mention countless voices of wise and thoughtful disagreement within this nation and abroad.
While decrying the obvious and despicable evils of malevolent dictators, the president has done so without acknowledging the self-denied evil, the egregious will-to-power, of the most potent government with armed force on the face of the globe, which now has no counter-superpower to hold its zealous willfulness in check.
Moreover, it should be asked, has the president, as a professing Christian, utterly discounted the salient warnings of the Jesus of the Gospels, who questioned, “How can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye?” and declared, “All who take the sword will perish by the sword”?
By instigating a premeditated, preemptive, and preventive attack against another nation, as wicked and heinous as Iraq’s political regime definitely is, the Bush administration has turned the wisdom of the ages, and the long-considered wisdom of Christian teaching, on its head.
The president, along with the enfeebled and blind consent of the congress, has set a flagrantly dangerous and reckless precedent whereby any nation can now find reason to justify a first strike against another nation without provocation of aggression toward the one acting preemptively. Such a state may argue, as Bush has, that it does so because it wishes to express indignation at what another stands for, or opposes how another conducts its internal and foreign affairs. Not coincidentally, this is precisely the argument that rogue terrorists use for justifying the first strikes of terrorism, whether state sponsored or not.
A doctrine of military or paramilitary insurgency seeks to accomplish its aim by deliberate exploit: strike first at evil while at the same time denying the very evil that is perpetrated by the first strike. Ironically and tragically, the Bush Doctrine has espoused and co-opted as official policy the dogma that terror must be met with terror — “shock and awe” — and that violence must thus intentionally beget more violence in order to thwart violence. Will such violence once again be exercised in disproportion to evils committed by any nations that do not choose to strike first at the United States, as was the case in Vietnam where 3.8 million Vietnamese died in the war, in contrast to 51,000 Americans?
Are weapons of mass destruction safe in the hands of states that concurrently produce and stockpile them — the United States, Russia, Israel, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and Iraq? Or, safer in the hands of the only nation that has already employed them — the United States? Or, safest in the hands of the single American who has authority to command their use — the same George W. Bush who declared to Senator Joseph Biden that “I don’t do nuance”?
Yes, it is true that brutal dictators deserve the fate to which free peoples consign them — to the dung heap of civilization, as well as to the final destiny that belongs to the transformative judgment and grace of God.
Yes, it is true that wars of liberation are sometimes — not all of the time — the proximate but not ultimate antidote to the imposition of tyranny, except for those persons who in conscience, like Jesus of Nazareth, refuse with belligerence to bear arms.
Yes, it is true that brave soldiers, who pay the highest price so that others may gain their freedoms, are due thankful praise for selfless courage. Yes, when these sons and daughters fall during battle, they should be raised up in sacred remembrance for having made the ultimate sacrifice, being sheltered at last by the eternal mercies of God whose protection neither sword nor missile can destroy.
Yes, it will be a festive day when God’s beloved children in Iraq, and oppressed persons everywhere, no longer live beneath the flags of despotism or suffer the cruel indignities and inhuman tortures of repression.
And, yes, the best example that the United States of America can set — now as a less-than-respected leader of the Free World, due in part to injudicious decisions of its own making — is to exemplify such precious freedoms without sacrificing them to the imperialistic impulses of a political ideology that steadfastly threatens to wage perpetual war in quest of universal hegemony over every form of evil that does not serve its particular self-interest, and which, by doing so, make certain the eventual downfall of this great nation by aggrieved and humiliated enemies who seek to attack it for its strident and arrogant uses of power.
Charles Davidson, a Presbyterian minister living in Concord, Va., is pastor of New Concord church and a staff therapist with Pastoral Counseling Services of Central Virginia.
RESPONSES:
Re: “Praying for the powerful” I was astounded and relieved by your comments about the risk of overthrowing governments, and the connections between the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the recent terrorist attack in Beslan, Russia. Astounded because that is not exactly received opinion, and relieved that you could attribute similar views to “many people”, of which you are one – and I am another. Staying short of conspiracy theories, it seems clear that short-sighted U.S. interference (on the wrong side in Afghanistan from 1979/1980 until the Soviet withdrawal, and in other ways as well), merely turned what might have been an orderly transition to more liberal governments in Russia and the Soviet republics into chaos – which is what is hazarded when governments are overthrown. The connection to Al Qaida is also clear. You may not “connect the dots” in quite the same way, but I interpret your remarks to be roughly consistent with this brief account. I will add that (in my view) the American Revolution succeeded, where the French and Russian did not, not without terror, because the first was more of a revolt than a revolution, which left the governing bodies and commercial interests of the colonies largely intact. An opinion piece by Richard Young in the same issue expresses another important but generally sidestepped issue: the abdication by Congress of the authority to declare war, which is particularly poignant when Presidential campaigns are vying for the distinction of being the more willing to go to war preemptively. These are not popular views, as the almost universal deification of Ronald Reagan has made clear. I fear that, despite “many people” who may share at least some of these insights, there will not be enough of us, it appears, to counter what is sure to come as the world faces dwindling resources. And that will be a tenacious attachment to greed and to conflict, which we have seen elevated to an ideology. Therefore I wish to encourage you and the Presbyterian Church and the National Council of Churches (whose ten principles for evaluating candidates were also reported in the Oct. 4 issue) and your congregations in your humane endeavors. Thank you for your leadership. Ralph Bertonaschi |
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