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What Would a Pacifist Do About Iraq?
A Sermon Given
by Rev. Roger Fritts
on September 29, 2002
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
President Bush gave a speech last Thursday evening in Houston. About
Saddam Hussein the President said: "There’s no doubt his hatred is
mainly directed at us. There’s no doubt he can’t stand us. After all,
this is the guy that tried to kill my Dad . . ."
Like the President, I can imagine that, if a man tried to murder my
father, I would carry inside me great anger. I would feel a desire to
kill anyone who tried to kill my father, not just for revenge, but also
because, if Saddam died, my family would be safer.
The story of a son saving his father is a common theme of modern
storytelling. In the movie and the Broadway play the Lion King, an evil
uncle kills the father, the son gets revenge defeating the evil uncle
and becomes the new king. In the original Star Wars’ stories the son
saves the father who is under the control of an evil emperor. In
Pinocchio the son rescues the father from a whale and in the process
becomes a real boy.
I can imagine that, if I were President Bush, killing the man who
tried to murder my father would be emotionally satisfying in two ways.
First, I would earn my parent’s approval for defending the family.
Second, by changing the government in Iraq, I would differentiate myself
from my father by accomplishing something he had failed to accomplish.
President Bush’s emotional needs fit with the emotional needs that
many people in the United States also have for revenge following the
attacks of last year. I can easily identify with this desire. Arabs
attacked us. Many of us feel a need to hurt someone else the same way we
were hurt. The war we waged against Afghanistan was not enough. Our need
for revenge is still strong. Although only a small connection exists
between last year’s attacks and Iraq, it is enough for many people.
Also, last year’s attacks were so unexpected, so unbelievable, I can
understand the feeling that now anything is possible. Before the
eleventh of September most of us did not consider an attack on the
United States with biological, or chemical, or nuclear weapons likely.
Now it feels possible. Although Iraq has not attacked us, knowing that
their leader hates us and could attack us is enough for many people.
So I understand the desire for war. Still like President Bush, I have
a desire to please my parents, and my parents raised me differently then
Barbara and George Bush raised our current President. My parents raised
me to look for nonviolent alternatives to war. My mother’s views came
from the New Testament teachings of Jesus. My father’s rejection of war
came from the movie "All’s Quiet on the Western Front." He particularly
liked the point in the movie where a soldier suggested that we should
put leaders of the warring nations in a big pen and tell them to fight
it out among themselves.
The minister of the church where I attended preached sermons that
agreed with my parent’s views. He taught that every human life is
sacred. He said that no one had a right to take the life of another
human being. To take another human life was the ultimate act of evil.
Coupled with this was the idea that human beings are divine. Each person
had a spark of divinity in their soul, which, if properly nurtured,
could help them develop into a sensitive, compassionate person.
Like most of us, I long for the approval of my parents, even when at
times I worked to develop my own individuality. Now as a fifty-one years
old adult with both my parents dead, I still work for their approval.
Freud called this the super ego, the voice of our parents inside us.
So here I am a minister in Bethesda, trying to imagine, if my father
and mother were alive, what I might say about the current world
situation that would please them. Meanwhile a few miles away at the
White House, the President is trying to do what he thinks is right. Just
like me, his understanding of what is right comes in large degree from
what his mother and father taught him.
The President and I each choose the evidence on which we decide to
focus, based of the values our parents taught us. The President, because
of his background, is likely to focus on Prime Minister Tony Blair’s
report to Parliament last Tuesday. The Prime Minister told an emergency
session of the British parliament that:
Saddam Hussein is continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction,
and with them the ability to inflict real damage upon the region, and
the stability of the world. His military planning allows for some of the
weapons of mass destruction to be ready within forty-five minutes of an
order to use them.
Blair’s report said that Iraq has tried to get "significant
quantities of uranium" from Africa. If Iraq obtained uranium, the Prime
Minister estimated the country could produce a nuclear weapon in one or
two years. The report also said Iraq had up to twenty missiles that
could carry chemical or biological warheads. The missiles have a range
of four hundred miles. Tony Blair concluded by saying, "Alongside the
diplomacy there must be genuine preparedness and planning to take action
if diplomacy fails."
Because of my own background, instead of taking my lead from Tony
Blair, I prefer to focus on Iraq experts opposed to going to war with
Iraq. Scott Ritter is an example. A former United States Marine Officer,
Ritter served as an aide to General Norman Schwarzkopf during the Gulf
War. After the war, Ritter became a leading weapons inspector in Iraq
for the United Nations Special Commission. He resigned as an inspector
in August of 1998.
On July 17 of this year CNN interviewed Mr. Ritter. He said:
No one has substantiated the allegations that Iraq possesses
weapons of mass destruction or is attempting to acquire weapons of
mass destruction. . . . As of December 1998 weapons’ inspectors had
accounted for 90 to 95 percent of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction
capability. We destroyed all the factories, all of the means of
production. We couldn’t account for some of the weaponry, but chemical
weapons have a shelf–life of five years. Biological weapons have a
shelf–life of three years. To have weapons today, they would have had
to rebuild the factories and start the process of producing these
weapons since December 1998. . . . Every site we wanted to get to, we
eventually got to. . . . When I make an assessment about Iraq’s
disarmament level, it has nothing to do with what Iraq has declared. I
do not trust them, I take nothing they say at face value, it is based
on the hard work of weapons’ inspectors who have verified that Iraq
has been disarmed through their own independent sources.
Secretary of State Colin Powell dismissed Ritter as "somebody who’s
not in the intelligence chain any longer."
Ritter responded, saying that his "information is current, it is
accurate, it is viable." His last visit to Iraq was in August.
I want to believe that Scott Ritter’s facts are more accurate then
Tony Blair’s, Colin Powell’s or President Bush’s. I have not been to
Iraq myself and I am not a weapons inspector. Because of my own
background I want to trust this man, who has been there, who is a
weapons inspector, and says that the situation does not call for war. In
this situation each of us must look at the evidence and decide which
experts we believe.
In my own case, having decided to trust experts like Scott Ritter, I
will write the President and my representatives in Congress and
encourage them not to go to war.
In my letter I cannot, however, take the position of a dogmatic
believer in nonviolence, and encourage the President and the Congress to
immediately withdraw all American military forces from the area. Reading
the accounts of Sadden Hussein’s past treatment of the Kurds, it does
appear likely that an immediate switch by the United States from a war
footing to nonviolence would result in many deaths.
In his writings, Gandhi (who is my guide in this area) called himself
a practical idealist. He said that resisting evil with violence was
better than not resisting evil at all. Instead of staying on the
sidelines during war, Gandhi organized an Indian Ambulance Corps in
South Africa during the Boer War, and again in the Zulu Rebellion. In
1914 he was a leader in the formation of an Indian Field Ambulance
Training Corps in England. In mid 1942, faced with the possibility of a
Japanese invasion of India, Gandhi agreed that his country could not do
without the assistance of allied soldiers for India’s defense. In the
same way I believe that protecting the Kurds is a situation where a
small, focused act of violence, or threat of violence against a
monstrous, immediate evil is justified.
There is however, another point that I will make in my letter to the
President and my representatives. I will encourage them to end the
economic sanctions against Iraq. I will argue that the sanctions have
crippled Iraq’s population while creating no meaningful change in its
government. My evidence comes from a number of experts.
Dr. Rania Masri, an environmental scientist at the United States
Institute for Southern Studies says, "When the United States bombed
water and sewage treatment centers throughout Iraq during the Gulf War,
and then blockaded their repair with the sanctions, it was entirely
predictable that massive numbers of people would get sick and die."
Dr. Thomas Nagy, an ex refugee/displaced person born during a bombing
raid in WWII and professor at George
Washington University, argued in a paper presented to the Association of
Genocide Scholars that the purposeful destruction of Iraq’s water
treatment facilities during the Gulf War amounted to "a plan for
achieving extermination without the need of constructing extermination
camps."
Dr. Ragheed Ryadh works at a Pediatric hospital in Baghdad. He
described the difficulty of treating critically ill children given the
shortages of proper medications and equipment. He states that, "there is
a decrease in average body weight of newborns due to malnourished
mothers, lack of food and dysentery."
Dr. Mahmoud Mehi a director at another hospital in Baghdad reports
that one out of every four Iraqi children remains severely or
chronically malnourished.
The American Friends Service Committee reports that only 41 percent
of the people in Iraq have access to clean drinking water. Electrical
capacity, crippled by bombs and the lack of spare parts, stands at a
third of 1990 levels, affecting hospitals, food supplies, and schools.
Eighty–three percent of Iraq’s schools are in need of repairs.
Kofi Annan reported to the Security Council that "access to clean
water is still far less than the demand, and sewage flooded streets,
caused by sewer blockages, have become a common phenomenon. . . ." Kofi
Annan reported that dysentery, typhoid, and other diseases "are not
under control due to the poor state of water, environmental sanitation
and related infrastructures." Kofi Annan’s report criticized
the holds placed on humanitarian supplies by the United States and
United Kingdom members of the UN Sanctions Committee.
The United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, estimated that in the
eight year period between 1991 and 1998 there were half a million deaths
of children less than five year of age because of the sanctions.
The Director of a British Catholic Aid Agency wrote a few days ago,
"The danger of unilateral action, in the form of a pre–emptive strike by
the United States possibly with the support of the United Kingdom,
cannot be underestimated. It would be difficult to imagine a single more
effective way of wrecking further devastation on an already devastated
country and creating a major humanitarian crisis with hundreds of
thousands of innocent victims."
I will write my letters opposing the war, supporting the protection
of the Kurds, and supporting and end to sanctions. I feel it is my moral
responsibility to speak out. Because of opposition in the United States
and around the world, a chance still exists to stop this war. On
September 16, Iraq’s Foreign Minister pledged to allow United Nations
weapons’ inspectors to return to his country. If these inspectors do not
encounter serious Iraqi obstruction, President Bush will have no
justification to go to war.
Still, as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, said in
speaking before Congress on Thursday, there is in America an "irrational
exuberance for conflict." I fear that one day soon I will turn on the
news to heard that our military has started a sudden attack on Iraq.
If we go to war, I pray that our victory will be fast, and that few
people will die. I pray that after the war our military will withdraw
quickly. I pray that under a new Iraqi government the people of that
country will prosper and will live in peace.
But I fear that Scott Ritter is right. On September 16, in an
interview with the Associated Press he said:
The United States is committing diplomatic suicide right now.
You’re seeing the Bush administration apply this power to coerce, to
bribe, to threaten nations into supporting their war on Iraq. We may
succeed in getting rid of Saddam Hussein, but we will lose the war.
[We will lose] The war on terror, [and] the war on how the world views
us.
Office@CedarLane.org
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