Reflections on the War in Iraq

Forrest Church

March 30, 2003

Our lives of late have taken a surreal turn. Courtesy of television, which can't help but present war as entertainment, the harshest of realities is rendered both intimate and distant, both essential and optional. We turn it on and off, alternating between our workaday lives and what looks at times like a trailer for Armageddon. This unsettling remove from a vicarious reality more vivid than our daily experience leaves us suspended between worlds. Day is literally night, and night, day. Watching a war—our very own war—on television is close to being an out of body experience.

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.

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.

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 the silver lining? To find it, we must look 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 and quickly 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 21st 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, empathetic, 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 meditation on war but the beginning of an Easter sermon. Fortunately (as it always is), Easter is right around the corner.

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