War is Poison

by Robert Hamerton-Kelly

Our Gospel reading shows us Jesus at his most benign and comforting. “That evening at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered about the door. And he healed many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons…” (Mark 1:32-34). The scene is set in the fishing village of Capernaum, outside the house of the fisherman Simon Peter. Jesus had healed Peter’s mother-in-law and the neighbors had spread the word. So the villagers milled around the front door and Jesus moved among them, healing and encouraging them. Jesus here brings healing, wholeness and hope to ordinary folk.

Against this backdrop I want to present some images, information and reflections that are possibly the opposite of healing, wholeness and hope, but nevertheless worth pondering as we go to war. I think Colin Powell’s presentation to the Security Council last week was tantamount to a declaration of war and all that remains for us Christians now is to pray that the Administration’s policy will succeed and that Iraq will fall without many casualties, its regime will change easily and its society stabilize soon as a democracy, that a democratic Iraq will with US aid become a beacon of the benefits of U.S. style democracy which will influence the non-democratic states in the region so strongly that they will soon all become democracies too. Once that has happened they will all affirm Israel’s right to exist and enter into cooperation with the Jewish State, the global threat of weapons of mass destruction will be dramatically reduced, the price of oil stabilized and the US economy set on the road to recovery. Anything less than the full success of this declared policy seems to me to be less than a sufficient justification for this war. So let us pray that the Administration succeeds in fulfilling these goals, because the price we are about to pay and the risks we are about to run on behalf of the whole human race are very, very high.

Here is an image: Last Tuesday at our prayer meeting of local clergy Fr Martin Mager told us that he had conducted the funeral for little Amy, the six-year-old whom a teenage driver killed as she, wearing her helmet and standing by her bicycle on the corner, waited for her Dad to catch up so that they could cross the road together. Fr Martin said that the little casket was especially poignant, and that it made him think of all the little caskets there soon will be in Iraq, and in fact already are. The driver of the fatal car was a teenager and the event was a sad accident. The flyers of the planes, the firers of the rockets, the droppers of the bombs, the drivers of the tanks soon to be again in Iraq will not be there by accident, we shall have sent them and paid for them, and the children they kill will not be killed by mistake, they will be part of what is called collateral damage, or unintended consequences. OK, grant that civilian deaths in a modern war are inevitable, at least since we moved away from hand-to-hand combat, nevertheless, the justification for such deaths must be very, very urgent and compelling. You cannot send agents to kill, knowing that amongst those they kill there will inevitably be six year old children, on the basis of a policy that purports to bring about a major but highly unlikely geopolitical realignment. The desire to remake the map alone does not justify the killing of children.

Let us ask ourselves what it would take to make us hire someone to go and kill Amy. Would you sacrifice Amy if by some magic her death would cure cancer? Of course not! Just recall the shock and sadness we felt when we heard that one of our little ones had been senselessly mown down by an out of control machine. Could we inflict death like that on anyone for any reason? Well, the only reason I could possibly think of is that that child was about to kill my child, not simply that there is a chance that she might do so at some undetermined time in the future, but that she is on the point of doing so now.  Even then I would feel it a sin and a tragedy to have to defend my child by killing another’s. The danger has to be clear and present; one cannot kill people because there is a possibility, even a probability, that sometime in the future they will try to kill me. I presume that the Administration judges the situation with Iraq to be as extreme as this. I presume they think that if we do not invade now Iraq or its surrogates will soon, very soon not just sometime, be killing our children – by poison gas, or bacteria, or nuclear weapons.

So I am not a pacifist. I do accept that because this is a tragic world there are extreme situations in which sin is unavoidable and one has, against one’s will and convictions, against one’s faith and hope, to commit the crime of war. I put it that way because I am of the school of opinion that holds that war must not be called legitimate excepting in a superficial sense, that is, that its cause and conduct do not violate the pertinent international treaties. Morally speaking war must always be coded as tragic, not legitimate. Tragedy is a category invented by the ancient Greeks to describe the human condition in its pitiful inability to avoid violence altogether, to record the fact that as a race we all die so that others might live, that no matter how hard we try we cannot avoid killing. I have never personally killed a human being but I have faithfully supported and paid for organizations that kill, and do so in my name in as much as the flag they carry is the flag to which I pledge allegiance as the emblem of the republic of which I am a loyal and law-abiding citizen. When the little Amy-like caskets pile up in the graveyards of Bagdad I will not be able to disclaim responsibility.

So the questions we must ask now are, “Is this decision to declare war on Iraq morally justifiable?” and “Is this decision wise?”  I do not believe it is morally justifiable and I do not believe it is wise, and let me repeat, I am not a pacifist. I do not believe it is justifiable because the threat is not clear and present, and I do not believe that we have exhausted alternative means of dealing with the problem. I believe that the reasons the administration gives for this act of aggression are not their real reasons, that is, I do not believe they are telling the truth, but rather that they are rationalizing action that cannot bear the light of moral scrutiny – something like Israel and Oil.

I do not believe the decision is wise. As a gamble the odds are too much against success. I rate the chance of success at about the same as the odds of winning the great lottery, in the tens of millions to one. The odds on losing are therefore very great, and losing would mean amongst other things, the disintegration of the Iraqi state, the spread of chemical-biological pathogens in the area and beyond, perhaps even here; the fall of the US friendly government in Pakistan and the advent of a Taliban type government there with nuclear weapons, thus achieving what our policy claims to be preventing. We know that North Korea and Pakistan are already exchanging know-how, rockets for nuclear equipment – according to an internal memo of the CIA that Seymour Hersh somehow gained access to and describes in the New Yorker (Jan 27, 2003, pp. 42 ff.). North Korea is a much more clear and present danger and our virtual ignoring of it shows that our agenda in Iraq is not primarily about wmds.

The title of this sermon, “War is Poison” comes from Chris Hedges, a war correspondent for the New York Times for 15 years. His new book is War is a Force that Gives us Meaning, (New York: Public Affairs, 2002) and arises out of his first hand experience of battle after battle after massacre after war. He says, in an interview on the Ethics and Religion program on PBS, “War is like a poison, and just as a cancer patient must at times ingest a poison to fight off a disease, so there are times in a society when we must ingest the poison of war to survive. But what we must understand is that just as disease can kill us, so can the poison. War is one of the most heady and intoxicating, addictive enterprises ever created by humankind. And the only way to guard against it is finally to understand that, at its core, war is death.” I like this comparison of war with chemotherapy. Some of you know the agony of chemotherapy, and you know that only the prospect of death justifies it. One does not take chemotherapy to lose weight or increase one’s breast size; only the clear and present danger of imminent death and the absolute absence of any other means justify ingesting the poison. War is indeed like that, and I for one am dismayed that the US has begun to talk of war as if it were just one more instrument on the surgeon’s tray when he sets about curing the world of things that we don’t like.

Let me ask you to ask yourself, “Do you believe the justification the Administration is giving, the claim that it is Saddam’s possession of wmd’s that necessitates war? If you believe that, what do you make of the North Korea case where they are closer than Iraq to having functional warheads, and have rockets that can deliver to Japan and some of our own Administration think to the West Coast of the US? Secondly, let me ask you, Do you think that it is of no consequence that the main advocate of this policy of belligerence, Paul Wolfowitz, is the son of an extreme right wing holocaust survivor with strong personal ties to Israel. And finally, do you think it of no consequence that the President is the son of a president widely faulted for not removing the Iraqi regime in 1991, and is from a state with hugely important financial connections to oil interests in the Middle East? May we not assume that these facts are pertinent and then ask, “Is it moral and is it wise to send our sons and daughters to kill their sons and daughters for reasons so murky and suspicious?” Finally, ask yourself, do you believe George W. Bush when he says, “We go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world”(Hedges, p4)?

At times like this we argue by historical analogy. The Saddam case, we say, is like the Hitler case; had we invaded Germany in 1933 we could have avoided WW2. We do not have the data to confirm that counterfactual argument. In the case of Vietnam we do have data. During the Vietnam War the Administration argued that the case was like the Hitler case, because if we do not stop the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese they will take over one country after another just as Hitler did when we did not stop him after he took over Austria and then Czechoslovakia. In the Vietnam case we have an outcome to show that that analogy was mistaken. The bad guys won, we lost, they threw us out of their country, and since then have stayed at home. They were and are not like Hitler despite the superficial resemblance. History informs but does not predict. Arguments by analogy from history are worth nothing. The Saddam case might or might not be like the Hitler case, and in the absence of data that is where the argument rests.

So we will be invading a foreign state within the month. It will be an unjust act of aggression, unworthy of the moral tradition of this great nation. Already we are contemptible to the civilized world because of our policy turn to brazen self-assertion by military power. What might we Christians do? Do not join in the patriotic cheering; repent of our sinful entanglement in this sinful act of our nation; pray for the military personnel made to fight in an unjust war and thus commit more sin than is tragically necessary; and finally, pray that the Administration’s scenario comes true and their policy succeeds. They are offering a very, very high moral, spiritual and political price for success, and it would be a pity if having given our souls we should not have gained even a small part of the world.

Amen.