IRAQ WAR: I have vivid memories of walking down Market Street with hundreds, protesting the impending war in Iraq. It was 12 years ago. “No More War” signs; one in particular, “Blessed are the Peacemakers”, Jesus vintage. The carrier, Lee President G.W. Bush and Vice President Dick Chaney were committed to invade Iraq; the so called evidence to justify this enormous tragedy proved to be totally without merit. They hungered for a U.S. presence in the Middle East - oil and location. Iraq, irresistible to their long range plans. As we lament the ongoing tragedy of Middle East wars, Andrew Bacevich, a retired U.S, Colonel and Vietnam veteran, writes (Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country) that U.S. wars of recent vintage are no longer citizen wars. We Americans were disengaged from this war; there was no tax bite to fund it, rather a monumental deficit. Bacevich refers to the 2% who are the backbone of U.S, wars; the 1% of American military volunteers, and the 1% of corporations who are enriched by war beyond your imagination. In the Iraq War there were about 22 PSCs. One, KBR, inhaled 39.5 billion dollars. In 2010 there were 260,000 private persons on pay-roll, more than all U.S. troops in action. Bacevich states that ”war planners” engaged in 60 billion dollar contract fraud and abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan. The best estimate of casualties from 2003 to 2013 is 174,000 combatants and civilian deaths. The U.S., at a point in time, was an ardent supporter of Saddam Hussein in an endless war from 1980 -1988. Saddam initiated the war, a predominately Sunni state vs. Iran’s Shiite Muslim people. Saddam was asserting who was the Power in the Middle East, and land and oil were the stakes. There were more than 100,000 Iranian victims of Iraq’s chemical weapons during the eight year war. The total Iranian casualties of the war were estimated to be between 500,000 and 1,000,000. (Wikipedia, History of Iran) There were other Western supporters of Iraq. Both the colonial and modern history of the West in the Middle East is a tale of death. Bacevich in The Limits of Power reflects on Reinhold Niebuhr’s worldview, “Realism in this sense implies an obligation to see the world as it actually is, not as we might like it to be. The enemy of realism hubris … finds expression in an outsized confidence in the efficacy of American power as an instrument to reshape the global order.” I’ve heard reputable scholars say there is no military solution to the wars in the Middle East. The Sunni/Shiite religious chasm began in a dispute over the legitimate heir to Mohammed, and remains till this day. The extensive quote from Bacevich is not an appeal to have all Americans on board for the next war. It is a call to all of us to seek alternatives to war. The call to nonviolence is straight from Christ, "love one another, love your enemies.” Dan Berrigan S.J. has been pleading for 50 years killing and Christianity are incompatible. Bonhoeffer told his fellow Christians in Germany, “you can-not kill Jews, Jesus is a Jew.” It applies to all humans. There are giants
Iraq War 2003-2015 2 who took up the mantle of nonviolence; Mandela in S. Africa, Gandhi in India, Martin Luther King, Jr. in the U.S., and Dorothy Day a pacifist even in WW II much to the dismay of fellow Catholics. We’re not all giants, but we can inhale the message of nonviolence and a slow transformation can begin. It’s contagious. I pass on the message of nonviolence, unsure of my own commitment, because it is the “Message of Jesus.” Joe Bradley
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