Sermon: On the Edge of Empire

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On the Edge of Empire

By Charles Rush

November 23, 2003

resident Bush gave an important speech earlier this week in Britain, explaining the rationale for American foreign policy in the Middle East and this is probably the best time in a while for us to stop and have a discussion about what we are doing.

I don't do so in the expectation that I have many of the answers. In this case, I am most skeptical of people who are convicted of what we should do, particularly if they have that moral tone in their voice. But, it seems to me, that being a democratic republic, it is ultimately up to us to formulate mature opinions on the world around us, to articulate core values as people of faith, and to morally and spiritually evaluate what our country is doing and our participation in it. We need to have a place where we can think out loud together for that to happen, particularly those of us who are extraverts.

So what I want to do this morning is to frame a few issues and then turn open the floor for discussion so that we can hear from each other, hopefully the Spirit moving amongst us in such a way that we sharpen one another and together we become better.

Now is the time to raise some questions because we are far enough away from the raw emotion of two years ago that it is time for sober reflection on the new frontier of American foreign policy.

If you remember back to the time, there was a wide consensus to support the invasion of Afghanistan. I suspect that most of us felt at the time that not invading Afghanistan would have been dishonoring our friends and neighbors so ruthlessly and inhumanely cut down on their way to work. It was a gut reaction.

Yet there were important concerns at the time, concerns that have not abated over the past couple year. Afghanistan is a feudal society with rudimentary education, historically underdeveloped with no sense of national identity, little engagement with the outside world save those travelers who have crossed their high mountain passes. They are essentially a clan structured society, probably not that different from Scotland 1000 years ago which means that the dotted line between Afghanistan and Pakistan may mean something to a cartographer but really nothing to local people since there effectively is no military or police control of that very large Pashtun region that encompasses the northern part of both countries. Economically, it is very difficult to see how they could become developed in the next decade. Politically, they have no history of democracy. Militarily, it is hard to see how this will ever be anything other than an occupation since Al Qaeda can just slip over the border to Pakistan with relative impunity. So there are very limited prospects for development, very limited prospects for national stability, which means that we are likely to be there for a protracted time- on the order of a decade- and it is not likely that there will come a time when we can say decisively that it is time for us to withdraw.

Closely related to that are concerns about civil liberties. The invasion of Afghanistan started off as a war action and those captured were treated as prisoners of war and held indefinitely in detention according to the Geneva Code. Legally, they can continue to be held until such time as the war is over. But morally, this is unlike any military operation we have faced. We are not actually fighting an organized army fielded by a nation-state, the reality that the Geneva Code was principally devised to address. We are fighting a series of clandestine, terrorist cells, drawn from many nations and disbursed internationally. Given the overwhelming military power of the American soldiers, these enemies dissolve into the landscape quickly. The battle is short but the protracted struggle of the War on Terror is very long. This leaves these prisoners in a legal limbo. The original idea behind indefinite detention was to prevent enemy soldiers from rejoining the fight to kill us again. But, there was an implicit assumption that the duration of war was limited and measurable. This has changed and we have to ask what the just and humanitarian solution should be to the fate of these prisoners. I think we can all see that there is going to come a day in the not to far distant future when we may still have the legal authority to detain them but we will increasingly lose the moral authority to detain them in the eyes of world conscience. It is a considerable issue.

And then we invaded Iraq shortly thereafter. Most of my colleagues opposed the invasion at the time but after listening to Secretary Powell's eloquent presentation before the United Nations, many Americans supported the mission.

He reminded me of the Generals that I met at the 45th National Security briefing at the United States Army War College. As a group, they are very reluctant to engage in battle. They are trained to think through all of the consequences politically, economically, culturally, religiously. They are trained to understand the full range of diplomatic options that are available. They define the threat accurately and delineate ways to contain it other than involving troops. It is only after a range of other options are proven to be futile that they consider the use of force. Secretary Powell's presentation very much represented that tradition of thorough review and restraint. When he finally said, ‘we have to use the military' that carried a lot of authority.

We trusted our leaders when they said that they had credible intelligence that there were weapons of Mass destruction that posed an imminent threat. We presumed that we were only being publicly shown the grainy photos for security reasons and that those photos were backed up with credible ground intelligence and other forms of information gathering that were solid and would be borne out after the invasion.

This proved not to be true. We did find mass graves. And as the Atlantic Monthly reminded us in their latest issue, Saddam Hussein was a tyrant of monstrous proportions. Human rights organizations estimate that 290,000 Iraqi citizens were killed by his regime in the past decade- he was in a category all his own for barbarity. But, the immediate threat turned out to be false.

American credibility suffered an enormous casualty. Probably too many of us had an inflated perception of the governments ability to gather information that comes from Hollywood. After all, when Denzel Washington and Gene Hackman hack into the C.I.A. computer system and type in the identity of someone they want information on, up pops his whole life history, pictures, even the name and breed of his dog. A few clicks here, a few clicks there, and presto, you can tap in on the President's phone line on Air Force One. Turns out, it is not quite that way.

Not surprisingly, when the rest of the world looks at this gross mis-estimate from the only World super power, they project onto to us conspiracy; they project onto us cynical play for power; they project onto us duplicity of motive. As best as I can tell from conversations with friends at the Pentagon, the actual answer is ineptitude. We didn't have good intelligence on the ground, shut out as we were since the last Gulf war in 93, and we way over estimated Hussein's actual threat and way underestimated the degree to which he had pilfered the country and was propping up a paper tiger. Nobody abroad wants to believe in ineptitude. Regardless of what others think, we citizens simply cannot accept this level of miscalculation on the part of our government. It has created a very big problem for us.

Yesterday, President Bush assured the world that we would stay the course in Iraq and that we would not be deterred by terrorist insurgents. There is a wide consensus that this is the "least worst" option available. The very lengthy article in the New Yorker this week by George Packer, who has spent many months in Iraq and reports on the considerable difficulties on the ground, says the same thing. If we withdrew shortly, we would project weakness in the region, embolden the terrorists to expand their range of attack, and set back political reform in the Middle East for decades.

As you know, the rationale for our continued involvement has shifted. Interestingly on this score, you have neo-liberal internationalists like the Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, Thomas Friedman in large agreement with the conclusions of neo-conservatives in the Defense Department like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. For different reasons, they now argue that the really important American mission is not simply eradicating an immediate threat to our sovereignty but the establishment of institutions that will propagate economic self-development and political democratic self-direction. These will lead to a stable society based on rule of law, undergirded by a wide appreciation of human rights, nurtured in the social virtues of civil discourse and tolerance for dissent. Over time, they stability and prosperity of Iraq will have a leavening influence throughout the region that will pressure political and economic reform in Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, et al., addressing the conditions which allow the weed of terrorism to flourish in the body politic at all.

It is a noble vision that seeks to plant the best of what we have learned socially, economically, and politically in the soil of a rich and educated people, and let it flourish with very different religious values and even more different cultural mores. And it is probably right that it will prove to be a leaven in the region that will have substantial influence for the next century.

But we have backed into a new foreign policy before we really had any time for discussion of its implications. We are, in effect, expanding our mandate to include nation-building in the broad sense that I have just described. And we are in Afghanistan and Iraq for an extended time, with considerable expense.

In his speech on Wednesday, President Bush reminded us of the breadth of terrorist attacks that we have lived through in the past few years. It was not only New York and Washington but also Bali, Jakarta, Casablanca, Bombay, Mombassa, Najaf, Jerusalem, Riyadh, Baghdad, and lately in Istanbul. In all these places Al Qaeda has been explicitly linked to major terrorist attacks.

He also reminded us that these attacks will not end, if we simply bring our troops home, hide ourselves up in our quadrant of the world. The implicit assumption that many people have that we somehow bring this on ourselves by being involved around the world simply doesn't understand terrorist motivation and resolve.

It strikes me that this battle against terrorism is unlike other wars that we have been engaged in previously. In an op-ed piece last Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, David Rivkin and Lee Casey addressed the issue of the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, an issue which is the subject of vigorous debate in Europe. They said that the prisoner are not being held indefinitely and that our war against terrorism will be won at the point where we have eradicated the infrastructure of Al Qaeda and interrupted their ability to organize and carry out their work.

But how would you measure that? Since their organization and their structure are clandestine, how could you really know when you had substantially interfered with their structure? It forces the citizens of the United States to rely on the authoritative assessments of our Intelligence Gathering Agencies. As we know from the very nature of their work, they are not going to share with us a broad picture of the world as they see it that allows for independent critique. Without that we must necessarily cut short public debate, and to the extent that this continues into the future, we undermine the democratic process on which our country is built. Of all things important, certainly you would like a maximum of public input and discussion whenever we introduce armed conflict and ask our soldiers to bear that immense duty.

At the moment, this is not a critical issue, because we are not far enough into this new era. But we are likely to be there soon enough. Just this week, the Pentagon announced that we are committed to being involved in Iraq until 2006 and that is probably a conservative estimate.

My sense is that some anxiety around this issue pervades European criticism of the United States, in ways that they are not able to articulate quite yet. You can see it partly in the animus directed towards President Bush. One of the British papers made a comment about his speech that gets at this anxiety. They said that President Bush delivered a speech with an important moral vision but that he lacked the moral authority to deliver it.

At the moment, it is easy for the European press to focus on the President in this way. He is from Texas. He has a manner and way of speaking that pumped a bit with swagger or bravado. But he is too easy to caricature. And really, the issue is discomfort with an open-ended mandate to curb terrorism which appears to be a new constant on the social scene. It is a discomfort that we are defining our security interests as potentially allowing us wide leeway to be involved in the internal affairs of other nations. It is a discomfort that we are unable, as yet, to define the limits of our future military involvement. They can't yet put words on it, but they don't like it…

It is always harder to speak on these subjects, important as they are, before the issues are clarified and a moral discourse is established. Then you can pick sides more easily. We are at the front end of a new future. And we are a democracy. The onus of responsibility lies with us to formulate our policy and guide our leaders. With that belief in mind, and the Christian affirmation that the Holy Spirit moves among us when we engage in constructive dialogue as a church, I turn the floor over to you for a response, for the articulation of one of the many other parts of this discussion I obviously could not get to. What are you thinking these days on where we are at and where we are going?