February 2012 Philadelphia Chapter of Pax Christi U.S.A.

The Iraq War!

On Friday December 30, 2011 a service was held at the Arch Street Methodist Church to commemorate the end of the Iraq war. It was more of a lamentation than a celebration. People from various groups that opposed the war from the outset, including veterans, clergy, a Goldstar mother, Celeste Zappala, who had vigiled against the war weekly since her son’s death in 2004 in Iraq. All present resonated with the biblical verse spoken: “A voice was heard in Rama … Rachel weeping for her children. She would not be comforted because they are no more” …

I remember vividly February 2003 when millions in Europe took to the streets in absolute opposition to the U.S. impending invasion of Iraq. Perhaps two world wars on their very soil and millions of their countrymen dead, provided deeper insight to the real cost of war. Their desperate pleas went unheard in Washington, D.C.

The human cost of the war is incalculable but a few salient statistics reveal the horror. There are widely different estimates of casualties, no official count; the most reliable is between 450,000 to 600,000 Iraqis killed (John Hopkins Univ.). There are 2.5 million refugees who have exited the country and 1.5 million internal refugees. Unemployment is 50%, malnutrition 28% and untold numbers of orphans. These numbers, referring to human beings, are difficult to absorb. U.S. casualties are 4854 killed , including suicide which percentage wise vs. combat deaths is the highest of any U.S. war; a matter to contemplate. There are 36, 000 wounded, and certainly additional thousands, not counted, but suffering the consequences of killing. The description of the battle of Fallujah alone is a nightmare of the violent death of civilians and soldiers.

The recent 99% occupation movement vs. 1% of very wealthy Americans mirrors an interesting analogy to the war. Dr. Ted Beal, a Psychiatrist treating soldiers at Walter Reed Hospital refers to the 1% of Americans in the military who fought the war, on behalf of

us 300 million. We civilians experienced no particular deprivations during the war, except for the poor who are victimized by our

$700 billion “defense budget” and the two trillion dollar cost of the Afghanistan- Iraq debacles. Martin Luther King during the Vietnam War spoke of the Iron Triangle of, Militarism, Racism, and Materialism victimizing both Vietnamese and American children.

To more fully grasp the scope of the Iraq war, we need to reflect on U.S. involvement in the Mid- East these past thirty years, especially with Iraq and Iran. In 1980 with financial support from the U.S; Iraq invaded Iran. The war endured till 1988, a stalemate,

500.000 from both countries died. There is an infamous picture of Donald Rumsfeld, President Reagan’s envoy to Iraq, shaking Saddam’s hand, at the height of the war, ensuring Iraq’s President of the U.S.’s unwavering friendship and support. Simultaneously Reagan was selling, unbeknownst to Congress, weapons to Iran to arm the Contras for a bloody civil war in Nicaragua. Later, Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense was the mastermind of the “shock and awe” visited on Iraq in 2003, commencing the war.

In 1991 President G.H. Bush, after Iraq invaded Kuwait launched Gulf War I and in a matter of weeks dispatched the Iraq army, resulting in a massive retreat. G.H. Bush ended the war without invading Bagdad or eliminating Saddam. The neo conservative, powerful Project for a New American Century were unforgiving of this tactic, and were a dominating influence (Chaney, Rumsfeld et.al) in having the son, G.W. Bush complete their vision of a new Iraq.

President Clinton in the 1990s imposed on Iraq the most stringent sanctions in modern times, with repeated bombings of both military targets and the country’s infra - structure. Our own Fr. Fran Meehan spoke prophetically, “At the end of the day when the world of the Middle East gazes upon U.S. bombs falling on Iraq – will we have safe guarded our children and grandchildren or have we assured that they will be the victim of terrorists’ attacks by persons seeking revenge – an eye for an eye.”

Weapons of mass destruction, the rational for the war, were a nonexistent reality, repeatedly affirmed by the U.N. investigative team which scoured Iraq in search of weapons. Secret ties to al Qaeda were found to be nonexistent. Congress and the American

people acquiesced to a sophisticated presentation of “preventive war” to save us from terrorism, “to rid the world of evil.” Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope, commented, “preventive war is not in the Catholic catechism.”

Richard Pearle, one of President G.W. Bush’s inner circle sums it up well, “We’re fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All the talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq, then we take a look around and see how things stand. This is entirely the wrong way to go about it… If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage total war… our children will sing great songs about us years from now.”* or Thomas Friedman of the N. Y. Times, “For globalization to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is. The hidden hand of the market will never work without the hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas the designer of the F15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technology is called

the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”*

Eugene McCarraher, a Villanova Professor outlines in an essay in Anxious About Empire, why the State trumps the Church or any peace maker, on matters of war. The allegiance to the flag is our civil religion; it hangs in many churches next to the cross. It repeatedly asks for your life. McCarraher has very strong words to describe it.

“It’s time to realize that the American empire is a sacral order, a more beguiling and frightful incarnation of the earthly city described by Augustine in The City of God. Just as the Roman empire embodied in William Cavanaugh’s words, ‘a dim archetype’

of the church, so the American imperium is a paradox of ecclesia, a false copy of the Body of Christ…it worships a triune god of Caesar, Mammon, and Mars. It adheres to covenant theology which we might call the ecumenical – corporate dispensation…that defines redemption as participation in the liberal state and the capitalist market.’”*

One of the strong influences on McCarraher is a book The State, 1918, by Randolph Bourne who opposed the U.S.’s entrance in WW I, “The State is a jealous God, and will brook no rivals, and its jealousy extended to the taking and sacrifice of life in war… War is the health of the State: kind of existential completion through sacrifice on the battle field.” G.W. Bush offered, “History has called America to action… We have the responsibility and the privilege to fight freedom’s fight.” Another quote in the essay is from anthropologist Michael Toussig, the contemporary state “has a deep investment in death, because death endows the Nation State with life.” Symbols abound, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the Korean and Vietnam memorials.

If the language describing state/nationalism seems harsh, consider the most prophetic people of our generation were either imprisoned by the state or assassinated by thugs. Martin Luther King spent many nights in Alabama jails and was assassinated in 1968. Phillip and Dan Berrigan were imprisoned for years for opposing nuclear weapons and the Vietnam war, Dorothy Day regularly was jailed for non-violent support of the poor and total opposition to war, Fr. Ray Bourgeois, founder Of the School of Americas Watch, along with a host of supporters have repeatedly been jailed for opposing the training of Latin American soldiers engaged in war on their own people.

The guns and bullets that assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 and the four American church women were manufactured in the USA. I remember a group of us knelt in the Capitol Rotunda, in 1983, protesting military aid to El Salvador for which we spent a night in D.C. jails. The aid continued as well as the execution in 1989 of six Jesuit priests and their house keeper and daughter in San Salvador. And, John Dear and Steve Kelly, Jesuits imprisoned regularly for their opposition to our nuclear arsenal, which is now being updated rather than dismantled. Franz Jägerstätter and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were executed for opposing the Nazis. The list is endless.

McCarraher concludes: “In these times, when death is so readily offered as the solution to inconvenience, loss, injustice, or death, the affirmation of life is our most urgent and emancipating duty. From poverty, unemployment, and alienation, to abortion, capital punishment, and ‘total war’, the empire thrives, not only on death, but on our countless efforts to evade or sacralize it… The Magnificat, we should recall, is a hymn of celebration and judgment. ‘God has remembered God’s mercy,’ Mary proclaims. and how has he remembered it? ‘He has lifted up the lowly, and cast the mighty from their thrones.’ Let the empire tremble.”

Joe Bradley

Joe is a member of CPF

*Anxious About Empire, Wes Avram, Ed., Brazos Press, 2004, Chapter 8