War and Peace April 11, 2010 First Unitarian Church South Bend, Indiana The Reverend Harold W. Beu Minister

Special note: During this service that I shared with Bob Shuman, we showed two videos: one of drones attacking Iraqis placing an improvised explosive device [IED] in a road most likely for the purpose of striking an American military vehicle; and the second was from the point of view of an American gunner in an Apache helicopter shooting at Iraqis, which in the process killed two Reuters journalists. These were disturbing videos. Some might have thought that they have no place in a Sunday Service. I can understand that, but I don’t believe that our liberal faith calls for us to always be comfortable, and it certainly calls forth to us to respond to the suffering in the world. One of the problems with the way our nation does war is that so few people are involved and that people like me who has had a relatively easy life and was fortunate not to have been in the military, are divorced from the horrors of war. Therefore, I believe that it is important that we who are comfortable understand what the Iraqis and our soldiers are experiencing and also how our government has created and enabled the horror. A fter the tragic events of September 11 of 2001, the people of the world felt a sympathy for the United States that was unprecedented since World War II. And it was not just our allies or the other democratic nations that expressed this good will towards us. Even Muslim nations did as well, for example, Iran, which was and is supposedly our enemy, where we witnessed thousands of Iranians who came out for a candlelight vigil as a spontaneous expression of their support for us, the American people. We had an opportunity then that we have never had since World War II and sadly probably will never have again. We could have harnessed all that sympathy and good will to enter into a conversation with the people of the world, including with Muslim nations, to attend the problem of terrorism. We could have tried to find common ground and agreement about the meaning of terrorism, of how best to attempt to bring it to an end, of when we should use military force, and of when it is permissible to kill innocent civilians. For you see, we could have treated the 9/11 tragedy as a criminal act and attempted to capture or destroy the perpetrators of that act. That would require police work, which can be difficult, long, arduous, requiring the cooperation of other nations, other police agencies, doing good police legwork, gathering information and intelligence and working within the strictures of the rule of law. In the final analysis, if we had done that, we might have captured or destroyed the perpetrators of that crime, but more importantly and certainly, we would not have created untoward tragedy of the killing of tens of thousands of innocent civilians, caused massive destruction of infrastructure and habitat, and invited the enmity bordering on irrational hatred of so many people in the world. Instead, our nation decided to use the war option. And now because of it, our world, I believe, is in a greater turmoil than it has been in a long time. There is now so much uncertainty, hatred and fear. People are hardening their ideologies, seeking scapegoats, threatening and tragically using violence to achieve dominance and control. If our past president and his administration had instead decided to treat the 9/11 tragedy as a crime, then they would have cooperated the law enforcement agencies of the governments of other nations. It could have been a long slog, with ambiguous results, but then if we were determined enough, wise enough and tough enough, we very well might have caught the perpetrators, but more than that, we could have created a new world consensus such that all nations would condemn terrorism and work towards its elimination. I am not a pacifist. I believe we need a military, but I also know that our government has used the military far too often and wrongly since World War II. For example, in my opinion, we did not need to go to war in Afghanistan or Iraq. There were better ways of achieving our goals, in those two countries but pride, vengeance and the temptation to power moved us in the wrong direction. And now, not only have so many civilians in those two sad countries suffered, we too have suffered, in particular our young men and women soldiers, but also because of its expense, our economy has been damaged. The war option should be used rarely, much like a man who has two gangrenous legs that need to be cut off. After the surgery, there is no joy. There will be years of healing, but it had to be done. Indeed, I think that the man’s surgery can be seen as a more of a positive result than any war. At least he is alive. In my mind, there is no such thing as a good war. As the anti-Nazi Lutheran theologian and World War I war hero Martin Niemöller said: War is no longer good or bad, just or unjust. However you look at it, war under these circumstances is madness. Madness cannot be characterized by “good” or “bad” or “just” or “unjust.” There is no “just madness” and no “unjust madness,” no “good madness” and no “bad madness.” Madness is simply madness. War has become an even more dubious ethical dilemma for us lately because of technology, in particular the use of drones or unmanned aerial vehicles [UAVs] called Predators that we witnessed in the first video. Jane Mayer in her New Yorker article of October 26, 2009 called “The Predator War: What are the risks of the CIA’s covert drone program” reported on the use of drones that can fire missiles with accuracy at specific coordinates. They have been used in particular by the CIA to strike at suspected Taliban terrorists around the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. But even though they may be accurate in the sense that can strike the right coordinates, given the nature of their explosive power, the proximity of innocent bystanders, and the inaccuracy of CIA intelligence, for every one bad guy who is taken out, 16 innocent civilians are killed. The military likes drones largely because they result in no causalities of our own soldiers. They are bloodless, almost antiseptic. The people who control these drones are sitting safely in their offices in front of a large screen monitor using a joy stick much like a pubescent boy playing a video game. Nevertheless, people are killed by them. Many people – and more innocent people than not. Jane Mayer pointed out that this targeting of suspected terrorists was once against U.S. policy. Indeed, our government had denounced Israel’s use of such a policy in its program of targeting suspected Palestinian terrorists. That changed after 9/11 and that is troubling. It makes me think that we moving in the direction of becoming more like the criminals who committed the 9/11 tragedy. The second video that we witnessed demonstrates a disturbing reality about war that I doubt many of us here know or understand. It concerns a video of incident in Baghdad, Iraq in July of 2007 of an American soldier in the helicopter killing innocent Iraqi civilians as well two Reuters journalists and even shooting a man trying to save a wounded man. What makes it even more chilling is the helicopter gunner acts as if he enjoys shooting Iraqis. He is quick to suspect any Iraqi as being the enemy. One then wonders, what is his mission: to kill any Iraqi who displays suspicious behavior? That, then begs the question, how can an Iraqi civilian act so as to not be suspected? But, truly, we cannot hold only our soldiers responsible for the killing. They are only carrying out orders. That is their job, their mission. Much like the Vietnam War, our soldiers are put in an impossible situation with imprecise mission, contradictory orders and a hostile population. Rather, it was the leaders of our government who were responsible for creating this immoral, illegal and intractable war as well as for the innocents who are wantonly killed. As much as my heart goes out to the victims of those shootings and their loved ones who grieve for them, I have sympathy for the soldier who did the shooting. For the odds are he is not a sociopath. He is like us. He was only doing what he was trained and ordered to do. Thus, he suffers too. His soul has been damaged. We are all involved in what he did for we are responsible for what our government does. As much as he opposed the Nazis and was imprisoned because of his opposition, Martin Niemöller still claimed that we are all guilty. Josh Steiber was an Iraq War vet who was deployed to Baghdad with Bravo Company 2-16, which was the unit involved that incident displayed in the video by WikiLeaks. Even though he was not there during this incident he knew the people involved. He said: A lot of my friends are in that video. After watching the video, I would definitely say that … nine times out of ten, [that is] the way things ended up. Killing was following military protocol. It was going along with the rules as they are. Stieber, who now works to promote peace and alternatives to war, is speaking publicly about his time in Iraq and the incident captured in this video. “If these videos shock and revolt you, they show the reality of what war is like,” he said. “If you don’t like what you see in them, it means we should be working harder towards alternatives to war.” I know these are hard things to hear. I know that many of my friends like to turn off the radio and stop reading the news because of the awfulness of it all, the hypocrisy, the duplicity, the violence, and ultimately, war. We may think that we don’t have much power to change things. But I ask you to think of it this way. If we don’t speak out, then who will? To end the madness of war will require the voices of many Americans to voice their opposition to our government’s use of the war option. Again Martin Niemöller voiced his criticism of the German intellectuals who did not speak out against the rise of the Nazis in this famous poem that is attributed to him: THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist. THEN THEY CAME for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade unionist. THEN THEY CAME for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. THEN THEY CAME for me and by that time no one was left to speak up. And as to the issue of our power, I invite you to think of this: if we do speak out, then we may move another to speak, who in his or her turn may move another, such that we may create a critical mass and a chain reaction of peace will happen. Imagine, good patriotic American citizens speaking truth to power. Truly, there can be no other way of creating peace. Thus, it is up to us. Let us therefore on this day say no to the war option. Let us on this day make one small step for peace and decency. Let us start a conversation that will create a world anew with the transformative power of love.

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