Sermon: What About Iraq

[ previous | index | next ]

What About Iraq?

By Charles Rush

May 27, 2007 - Memorial Day

[ Audio (mp3, 6.1Mb) ]

get a number of e-mail requests to "Support our Troops", probably half of them coming to me because I have a Son in the Army. The question for this Memorial Day is "What does it exactly mean to support the Troops?" in the context of Iraq.[i]

It is true that having a child in the military provides some personal depth to that question. My son served an extended time in Afghanistan. Indeed, he was drafted for an extra year and a few months over his 4 year commitment because this is widely happening at the moment. His unit is in Iraq right now, though he is stationed back at the base in Hawaii- it is not too tough an assignment and we have made the sacrifice to visit him at Christmas time for the past two years…

I am personally sensitized to the toll that the present situation places on families of soldiers. What we are doing drafting our National Guard and Army reservists to fill the ranks of a regular standing Army is simply not right, not just and it needs to stop.

These people agreed to serve actively in a national emergency and the military deployment in Iraq is not an emergency. They will serve when called but we should not be calling them up for this. It puts enormous, unnecessary strain on these families.

My son has been responsible for interacting with the families of deployed soldiers in his unit, an enormous task for a young person 22 years of age. He called me a while ago because he had to speak at a funeral for a 7 month old child that died from Sudden Infant Death syndrome. It turns out that this child took walks with his daughter. This assignment is difficult enough.

And if you add the problems of dealing with a father that is in Iraq- my point is simply this, even our soldiers that are not on the front lines are going through a great deal of difficult stress. I know that in my son's battalion, something like 9 young men have died in the past year.

Under optimal conditions, war is very difficult. As a maxim, we owe it to our soldiers and their families to provide them with a clear, definable mission… Absent that, we have an obligation to bring them home as soon as possible.

Then you come to the muddled political question of what we should actually do in Iraq and this becomes much more difficult to discern. Perhaps you saw the review of Al Gore's new book last week. In that book, he apparently accuses the Bush administration of ineptitude, arrogance, and incompetence. It lacked an academic, qualified tone.

No question, we are all experiencing a great deal of frustration… We don't entirely understand the nature of the 'Insurgency'. There appears to be at least the usual level of corruption and graft that attends war- and Americans are regularly scandalized that the rest of the world operates so brazenly around pay-offs, kick backs and bribes. So there is ennui and inefficiency. The original goals of re-construction seem to be receding. There are a significant number of people that question our moral authority for re-constructing the country since our original reasons for invading turned out to be in error- simply that the regime was not so close to being able to deploy weapons of mass destruction and was not a genuine threat to our national security as Admiral Hyman Rickover has argued with some authority.

I'm sure that I'm not alone in speculating that when the historians review this chapter 100 years from now, they may well define the era by contrasting the "Orange revolution" that happened in the Ukraine- where the movement for democracy came from the people and without force- with the attempt to 'Establish democracy through force in the Middle East' with the invasion of Iraq. Did the neo-Cons fall prey to many of the same mis-conceptions that attended the idealism of the Wilson administration 100 years ago?

On the other side, there have been a remarkable spate of thoughtful essays arguing that we should stay in Iraq in the past few weeks in the Wall Street Journal. Max Boot, the author of "War Made New" argued that the surge is working, that a low-grade civil war has been in the making for quite a long time and that the American army is making a stabilizing difference if you take the time to carefully analyze a number of subtle indicators.[ii]

Bernard Lewis, the Princeton Professor of Middle Eastern studies, argued that chaos was the strategy from the beginning on the part of Al Qaeda and that they presumed we would not have the stomach for it, which is why we should stay the course.[iii]

Melik Kaylan, the Turkish reporter that reported on a recent trip he made with the Iraqi soldiers and their American counter-parts from Baghdad to a small village in Anbar province, where they were making a palpable difference and had the support of the local people.[iv]

Finally, Bob Kerrey, former Democratic Senator from Nebraska, member of the 9/11 Commission and President of the New School for Social Research, asked the question of his fellow liberals how they can ask for military intervention in Darfur, Somalia, previously Rwanda and Bosnia to end sectarian violence and not see the sectarian violence in Iraq as a matter of conscience also? His plea was for a 3rd way, a long-term strategy to combat terrorism without occupying Iraq.[v]

But what caught my eye recently were two articles by Fouad Ajami, the professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University, who has earned a reputation for discernment and balance in the past 6 years, as he has been called on increasingly as an interpreter of the Middle East for the our news shows.

Professor Ajami wrote a lengthy book review in the New Republic[i][vi], a book that appears to be required reading for those that want to know the story behind the story. Ali Allawi's family was expelled from Iraq 40 years ago. Educated in England and at MIT, he was asked to be Ambassador from the United States to Iraq, which he declined because he could not support the Bush administration policies in good conscience. He has served as Finance Minister in Iraq, and was part of the team that calculated the theft from the treasury in Bagdhad at between 1.3 billion and 2.3 billion. I love that fudge factor, just over a billion dollars. I know I'm just a country preacher but it hard for me to understand how that kind of theft doesn't leave quite a trail behind it.

Allawi's new book is The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace.[vii] Apparently it's great value lies in explaining the various factions in Iraq and how they have evolved in the past 30 years. Both author and reviewer take special note of the American narcissism to look at Iraq simply through the lens of what the American military has done or what the American government has done, without any substantive analysis of the internal issues that keep responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the Iraqi's for their destiny.

Both of them suggest that Iraq is probably one of America's 'greatest strategic blunders' for reasons that are so familiar by now they don't bear repeating. We didn't know what we were getting into- in many cases we lacked even an elementary understanding of the peoples, the faiths, and the tensions between them. On the other hand, they point out that Iraq was one of the most insular countries on the planet.

Among other things, we will collectively come to a sobering recalculation of the depth of social dysfunction that attends societies that have been subject to 3 decades (2 generations) of unremitting tyranny and terror. By the time the Americans invaded Iraq, this country with its proud history of education, saw more than a quarter of its population no longer attending school and over a third of its residents illiterate.[viii]

Moreover, once the stifling authoritarian repression was removed, the ancient historical tensions between the Sunni's, Shia, and the Kurds resurfaced to fester in public. "Essentially, it was based on the recognition by the Shi'a elite that they might have some share of central power, within limits that would satisfy the more ambitious of their leaders. But they should not aspire to control or run the state, even though their numbers might warrant this. At the same time, the state, dominated by Sunni Arabs, would recognize and acknowledge the props of Shia identity, and would not move to alter or shrink them in any significant way. Essentially, the Sunni Arabs controlled the state, while the Shia were allowed their civil, mercantile and religious traditions. It was a precarious balance, but it held…"[ix]

But for two decades previous to our arrival on the scene, the Sunni's, through the Baath party of Sadam Hussein, had been destroying this arrangement, disenfranchising the Shia mercantile class, their cultural institutions, leading to a mass exodus…

You may recall that after a year of the occupation, the American forces were led to a mass grave in the marshes of the South of Iraq, a mass grave that contained somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 Shia that had been murdered by Sadam Hussein. We covered this in the U.S. but we were unable to understand exactly how deeply this discovery affected the Shia in the region and fueled their radicalization, according to Mr. Allawi. This concrete symbol filled them with a moral outrage that had been accumulating for decades of overt repression, an outrage that has yet to be resolved.

Likewise, as we bitterly know now, the Sunni's were also becoming radicalized. As Professor Ajami points out, in a rational world, the Sunni's might have calculated that given their responsibility for the egregious tyranny of the Hussein regime, they might have made a cool calculation to accept some representation in the new government and cede their dominion. But this is not the way human ego works. "They had the habits and the memories of power, and they had their sense of entitlement to it." So when the Americans began the inevitable process of de-Baathification, they effectively declared war on the Americans and opened their doors to all manner of Sunni jihadists from the surrounding countries of Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia. This is the point when nuttiness began to spiral out of control.

The value of Allawi's book is that he details the way that these developments formed new sub-groups in the Shia community and in the Sunni community, so that you understand there is no simple 'Shia faction' anymore than there is a simple 'Democratic faction'. It allows you to better understand the shape that the political future is likely to hold in the near term.

As you know, after a few months of supporting the use of terror against the Americans, the Sunni's came to a collective decision that jihadists were killing their country to attack Americans and they have now formed an alliance with the American forces to rid their provinces of the very elements they invited in. Indeed, the Sunni's at present regard the Americans as their best hope for redemption.

A great deal more analysis should be developed but I can't for lack of time. So I cut to Professor Ajami's summary… "It is true that the carpetbaggers and the profiteers have returned to Baghdad, and it is true that decent men and women have fled the terror of Saddam Hussein. It is certainly true that the sectarian violence in Iraq is excruciating, and a threat to all prospects of decency. And yet it is not nightfall that has descended on Iraq, but a savage and uncertain dawn. In those sentences that reporters and travelers and outsiders have brought with them out of Iraq, my favorite remains that of a professional woman who declared that under Saddam Iraqis lived in a big prison and now they are in the wilderness-- and that she prefers the wilderness.

And finally this, Professor Ajami says that Iraq may be America's greatest strategic blunder… "But all is not yet lost"… he adds.

"President Bush's Wilsonianism may have erred on the side of excessive optimism, and may have come to him only after the hunt for weapons of mass destruction ran aground; but that is only the American side of the story. The Arab side is that modern-day Arabs had for decades been lamenting the cozy accommodation of American power to the forces of local autocracy. Lynndie England and Charles Graner were brutes and sadists, but tens of thousands of American soldiers had for Iraqi's nothing but tender mercies. The terrible errors of this war can never smother its honor… A new history is opening itself to the Iraqis, and in the tale of disappointment…, there is still the furtive shadow of hope, and echo of deliverance, and undisguised sense of fulfillment at the spectacle of men and women released from a terrible captivity."[x]

I cannot close without a reminder of the high cost that we are paying. And it is true that there are losses on all sides and the only way to keep those real is to remember the only way that they are experienced, as personal losses to families and friends. This one from a couple weeks ago. "FIRST LIEUTENANT TRAVIS L. MANION, U.S. Marine Corps, was killed during combat operations on Sunday, April 29, 2007, in the Anbar Province of Iraq while serving his second tour of duty while assigned to the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force, based out of Camp Pendleton, CA. Born November 19, 1980 in Camp Lejune, NC, he was the son of Thomas and Jannette (nee Lemma) Manion. Travis graduated from LaSalle College High School in 1999 where he lettered in Wrestling, Football and Lacrosse and was a member of five Catholic League Championship Teams, was named to both the Wrestling and Lacrosse 1st Team All-Catholic teams, and earned All-American honors in Wrestling. Travis was the recipient of the Hal Selvey, Jr. Memorial Award for Unselfish Dedication and Leadership presented by the Philadelphia Wrestling Association in 1999.
Travis graduated from the US Naval Academy in 2004 where he was a 2004 preseason national top 20 wrestler. He won the 2002 - 2003 Weems Award for Leadership and Dedication presented by the Naval Academy Wrestling Association…"[xi]

These really are our brightest and our best. It is a reminder of just how spiritually expensive this enterprise really is and just how much sober judgment we owe them as we develop a way out of the complicated morass we have created for ourselves. Amen.

[i] I was originally responding to an article I never mention in the text. It was Fouad Ajami's "Iraq in the Balance" in the Wall Street Journal, on April 11, 2007 the lead Op-Ed article for the day.

[ii] "Surging Ahead" WSJ (Tuesday, May 15), A17.

[iii] "Was Osama Right?" WSJ (Wednesday, May 16), A21

[iv] "Battling al Qaeda in Iraq", WSJ (Monday, May 21, 2007) A17.

[v] "The Left's Iraq Muddle", WSJ (Tuesday, May 22, 2007), A15.

[vi] I believe that it can be found in TNR (April 26, 2007). I actually got it from a website as my on-line subscription had run out. See www.powells.com/review/2007_04_26.html

[vii] The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace, by Ali Allawi -- http://www.amazon.com/Occupation-Iraq-Winning-Losing-Peace/dp/0300110154

[viii] from section ii of that article

[ix] Ajami's conclusion in section iii.

[x] See section iv. This is the conclusion of the article

[xi] http://www.legacy.com/Philly/DeathNotices.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonId=87729481