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Crisis and Opportunity

Forrest Church • March 30, 2003

Preachers have only one non-optional task on Sunday morning. Whatever else we may have on our agenda, we must preach the good news. Even on a bad news week, our job is to light a candle against the darkness. Or at least plug in a nightlight. Anything to keep the monsters at bay.

Having found good news to preach the night after 9/11, certainly I can find it eleven days into our war in Iraq. The difference is today, to find it we must look through a different set of dust clouds, raised (in this case) by our own devising.

The difficulty of finding hope on one of history’s bad days is that history reads more clearly backward than it does forward. For this very reason, those most eager to make history sometimes lose patience with the past. Impatient for the future, they rush through lessons that might sober their enthusiasms.

Iraq, for instance, was born as a nation under the English flag after World War I, among the final creations of British Empire. That the Iraqis should nurture resentments toward the British (less than half a century after the monarchy imposed on them was overthrown) should not surprise us. We ourselves harbored deep anti-British resentments for more than a century after our own revolution. In our case, a majority of those Americans who despised the British were British themselves, with British ancestry, British folkways, and a shared British attitude toward statecraft. Take these factors away from the Iraqi equation. Then weigh lingering Iraqi resentment against the British. It should not be that difficult to do the math.

Further tempering the heretofore hidden native enthusiasm for Operation Iraqi Freedom is a deep suspicion of U. S. motives. This suspicion stems from many sources: resentment of our power and influence; real grievances against the accidental slaughter of innocent civilians; and, cynicism among those who rose up against Saddam twelve years ago at our urging only to be abandoned when we withdrew from their country. Not to mention that, any action taken by a foreign national, racial and cultural entity, even on behalf of indigenous populations, is a tough local sell. For such reasons, to the evident surprise of those who wrote the blueprint for liberating Iraq, growing antipathy toward the United States and Great Britain appears strong enough to trump even the considerable antipathy long felt toward Saddam Hussein both within Iraq and throughout the Arab world.

The American people will be the last people on earth to consider the United States an Imperialist power–we, who define the war in Iraq as an act of self-defense. Yet, given that others view us this way and, given further, that our principal war partner held hegemony over Iraq in living memory, we might profitably attend to the history of Imperialism.

The greatest lesson this history teaches is that Imperialism always finally fails. In the meantime, its impact is powerful but mixed. Imperialism gives eventual birth (if unintentionally) to a more independent and spirited nationalism. It cross-fertilizes cultures, spawning creative syncretism in religion and the arts. It bequeaths the gift of humility to frustrated and finally rejected overlords. Imperialism can also temper barbarism by introducing a higher legal and moral code. I am not a cultural relativist. There is nothing about the abject subjection of women, despotic police authority, or severe and often demeaning tribal justice that should earn anything but the world’s scorn. Its victims deserve the world’s sympathy, its perpetrators the world’s intolerance. From such an angle alone, taking over Iraq and deposing Saddam Hussein makes perfect moral sense.

There’s one additional thing about Imperialism perhaps worth mentioning. Its unselfconscious presumption creates situations that, to an outside observer, are intrinsically ludicrous. Since humor helps redeem even (perhaps especially) our darkest hours, let me share one story from the early days of English hegemony over India that may have parabolic overtones for us today.

Among the British exports to India was golf. The golf course they built near Calcutta abutted the jungle, nicely juxtaposing manicured lawns and primordial forests, yet unwittingly introducing a new player into the game. Monkeys, it seems (demonstrating kinship with their human ancestors) found great sport in chasing dimpled white balls from one place to another. Proper English gentlemen, schooled in the traditions of fair play, would drive their balls far down the fairway toward the flag, only to watch the occasional monkey drop from the trees, scamper across their civilized lawns, recover the ball, and redeposit it in the rough. To protect their game from such heathen interference, the Calcutta Golf Club first erected a fence between the jungle and the course, thereby proving only how little Englishmen understood the aptitude of monkeys. Next, they attempted to entice the monkeys peaceably back to their habitat. When this gambit failed, they tried trapping the golf-loving monkeys and repatriating them deep within the jungle. This didn’t work either. Reinforcements took their place. However superior these proper English gentlemen may have fashioned themselves, the monkeys continued to outwit them.

Following the Darwinian principle of adapt or perish, the golfers finally accepted reality and changed the rules of the game. Should a monkey move one’s ball, one had to play it from the spot the monkey dropped it. Given that monkeys were indifferent as to whether they improved the golfer’s lie by their mischief or not, one gained roughly as many strokes as one lost by this expedient and the game went on.

Later the British gave up India. But they never gave up golf.

This story is too light to be of much utility right now, but I couldn’t help but think of it while watching our forces in Iraq having to adapt their plans according to unanticipated changes–and indeed rule changes–in the military game plan. To the bewilderment of some and the frustration of most Americans, the war in Iraq is not going as well as we had anticipated. Iraqi soldiers are actually resisting our advances through their country. And many are not playing by the rules. We now know how the British must have felt when American minutemen camouflaged as civilians hid behind trees and rocks to challenge the might of England as row by row of lobster backed soldiers marched in columns according to the etiquette of civilized war.

It is too soon to tell how this war is going militarily. Our leaders insist that things are going as expected and on schedule. If this is true, we have even more reason to question their original judgment. Americans may be spoiled by their penchant for instant gratification (as Secretary Rumsfeld lectures), but at least one reason we should hope that a swift campaign was intended, expected, and still possible is that every day this war continues, international hatred for our nation grows.

Eighteen months ago, as my symbol of hope, I introduced the Chinese ideogram for crisis: two word pictures, danger coupled with opportunity. We were different people immediately following the terrorist attack, kinder, humbled by life’s fragility, hallowed and inspired by sacrifice. Internationally as well, despite the manifest danger, opportunity was ours to seize. "We are all Americans now," proclaimed Jacques Chirac, the president of France. The entire civilized world joined as one to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan. This was a just war. Not only were the Taliban oppressing their people–witness the widespread jubilation upon their overthrow–they were also harboring Osama Bin Laden and al Qaeda, legitimate targets for a defensive military campaign.

Meeting this crisis with forceful determination began the process of subduing a common enemy. It also ushered in new day of international collaboration, with the United Nations finally promising to fulfill its original mandate. Governments throughout the world cooperated in the painstaking but essential work of tracking down bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership. Everyone seemed to recognize that, given the democratization and miniaturization of weapons of mass destruction, to tolerate terrorism today is no longer an option. Governments that, for short-term expedience, choose to look the other way, will eventually reap the whirlwind of forces they are abetting. If ever there had been a case, not of good versus evil so much as survival over destruction, this was it.

The word crisis has a second etymology, however. Tracing back to ancient drama, the Greek word, crisis, means "decision." In a tragedy, the crisis doesn’t take place when something terrible happens; the moment of crisis is the moment of decision, when the protagonist responds. This decision drives the subsequent plot. Fatefully determining to avenge his wounded pride, as the hero marches blindly forward fate takes over the unfolding script. In the diction of tragedy, hubris leads to nemesis.

As today’s events unfold, they do seem to be following the Greek understanding of crisis, not the Chinese one, in which crisis balances danger and opportunity in equal measure. Sometime following 9/11, an avoidable decision (to sharpen the focus of our anti-terrorist response on Iraq) gradually yet inexorably divided the international coalition we had almost effortlessly mustered against a common danger. This decision was not made without moral logic. Iraq is not incidental to the terrorist threat. U. S. attempts to link Saddam to al Qaeda may have proved unpersuasive and distracting, but Iraq has almost surely stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. Even after our obsession with Iraq began, by raising the danger of these stockpiles for a time we managed to hold the coalition together, securing a unanimous Security Council vote for renewed inspections.

The subsequent collapse of this broad-based alliance was not our nation’s fault alone. By foreswearing any military action that would give teeth to the UN sanctions should Saddam continue to play cat and mouse with the inspectors, the French and others were as intractable as we were impatient. Nonetheless, our apparent decision some ten months ago to unseat Saddam no matter what the cost abroad or at home has since driven the unfolding drama. It may yet turn out well. Iraqis may rejoice, terrorists quiver at our might, the world be chastened and grateful that we acted on its behalf. Thus far however, this story appears to be haunted by the inexorable logic of Greek tragedy.

The Greek protagonist is no less a hero for being tragic. Our leaders too are high minded, filled with moral purpose and sacrificial resolve–not all, of course, but many of them are. We can disagree over policy without stripping its advocates of moral agency. Yet, as Iraqi civilians fall, especially women and children (inevitable casualties of the most prudent war plan) each day of war exponentially compounds the drama of individual tragedy. At the same time, it drives the plot of a developing American tragedy, reducing our nation’s moral suasion, American safety, and the better future our leaders dreamt to usher in by their uncompromising actions. However noble our ends, in clouds rising from war’s devastation the means necessary to implement them are casting an increasingly impenetrable shadow.

So where, in these clouds is that promised silver lining? Where is the good news? To find it, I must return from Greek fatalism to Chinese hope, looking first to history’s horizon, and, then–with eternal not temporal promise–to the horizon of the human heart.

Hope is to optimism what faith is to confidence. Hope in history dwells within its unfolding, divined from the cumulative record not from any isolated act or cluster of events. The promise of American history, for instance– liberty and justice for all–is spelled out in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. At no moment in our history has that promise been fulfilled. Yet it nonetheless advances our moral progress as a nation, leading us from limited popular suzerainty through the gradual, hard won, expansion of rights: from white alone to the entire human palette; from male alone to male and female; from straight alone to straight and Gay. This unfolding record, ever interrupted by actions of bigotry and violence, extends from the founding to this very day.

The national chapter we began on 9/11 is far from being history’s darkest. In contrast, 600,000 American soldiers died during the Civil War. In both North and South, many citizens lost all hope. Yet, with the abolition of slavery, the only future that today we consider imaginable was assured. Then, as today, the ideal of E pluribus unum ("out of many, one") held us under judgment while spelling out hope for future generations faithful to the founders’ vision.

With the establishment of the United Nations in 1945, this hope became the world’s hope too, its promise clearly engraved in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. When World War II ended, in all the world there were only six full democracies. The world dream of E pluribus unum is today as young as our national dream was thirty years before the Civil War. Yet, since the founding of that vision, save significantly in isolated pockets such as Cambodia and Rawanda, nothing matching the human degradation of the crematoria and gulags has occurred. A growing international intolerance of state sponsored violence marks the emergence of a world community gathered according to at least a saving few shared human values.

The principle danger facing the world today remains what it has been for more than half a century, murder suicide by nuclear holocaust. This danger demands far greater vigilance than we demonstrate. Yet, the opportunity rising from beneath the shadow of that danger–an informed and engaged international community, who see common interest where their leaders before saw only competing might–may actually rise to meet it. If the international rejection of our war in Iraq is witness to this growing coalition, let us not forget that we ourselves in America gave birth to the vision that inspires them. Should the war linger on without resolution, to honor voices that will call for an end to violence and a negotiated settlement would not be an unpatriotic act.

History may conclude that our leaders have chosen wisely in embarking on war in Iraq. Even if completely victorious, however, we must and should be humbled by the cost of that victory. If today’s leaders cannot find such humility in their hearts, tomorrow’s leaders will rise to power because of it. As we have done before, surely we will again catch up with our national ideals and help lead the world through the 21^st century. That is my hope.

As for hope on the heart’s horizon, it too is what it always has been. Every day we live, the choices we make either redeem or diminish the world. Living at a time when one feels a part of history, which we certainly now do, can present a daunting challenge. On this field, there are no sidelines. To be saved is first to save. Yet, in meeting this challenge, we cannot help but become more engaged, committed, mindful, and alive. No power but our own can relock a heart that we, by the grace of God, have dared to open.

That, of course, is not the end of a sermon on war but the beginning of an Easter sermon. Fortunately (as it always is), Easter is right around the corner.