War is not the answer, even after winning

Spectrum

by Howard Bess

I am in awe of the United States military power. The technology at our disposal is incredible. No armed force has ever been so well equipped and trained. Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Marines were sent into a difficult environment, and they performed magnificently. They did what our national leaders asked them to do. They won a war with efficiency unknown in military history.

The approval rating for President George W. Bush and his policies is high. It is consistently over 70 percent. If the president were running for reelection now, he would win by a landslide. As an American, it is difficult to question the judgment of our president.

I love America. America has been good to me, and I have tried to be a good American. I served in the U.S. Army. I believe a strong military is a necessity for our nation to be a world leader. However, as a Christian I am called upon to love the world with the same love with which I love America. I cannot imagine Jesus sanctioning (declaring holy) the Iraqi war or any other war. The Greek word that is translated into English as "bless" in most cases can better be translated "to make happy." In good conscience, I could not and will not pray "God bless (make happy) America" when we choose to go to war.

In my Christian understanding, war is the celebration of failure. Wars are a blood celebration of the failure of human beings to treat one another as worthy members of the human race. Wars take place when disagreeing parties run out of love, kindness, and patience. In case the reader does not recognize these virtues, they are from the Bible list of "fruits of the Spirit."

World War II took place because of two major failures in which the United States was a full partner. First, the United States and its allies chose to punish Germany after World War I with reparations rather than rebuilding the defeated enemy. Second, an isolationist America rejected participation in the League of Nations.

World War III has not taken place because the United States rebuilt our defeated enemies under the Marshall Plan and fostered the formation of the United Nations.

The United States has not learned the lessons of World War II. The Iraqi war has taken place because America has fallen back into its old patterns of depending on war rather than working for peace.

The Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, one of the great American preachers of the 20th century, said "There are worse things than war, and war brings them all." I agree with Fosdick wholeheartedly.

When I was a young man I actually thought World War II was a good war. I thought it was a war that was worth the hundreds of thousands of lives lost and maimed. I started to rethink my understandings while in seminary when I met a young German immigrant woman and heard her story. She was a teen-ager in rural Germany during the war. She did not get caught up in the Hitler youth movement. She at first welcomed the American troops that pushed through her rural community. Then she was exposed to the realities. Many American GIs were vicious animals. They shot everything that moved and raped every German woman on whom they could lay their hands. War had made kids from America into nothing more than a bunch of animals.

The destruction of Germany and the killing of German people knew no barriers. Cities were leveled, and civilian populations were decimated. Widows, orphans, homelessness, hunger. It is a part of what comes with war. How can any war be called a good war?

Vietnam brought new levels of inhumanity. Day after day Americans were reassured that we were winning the war. How did we know? The body count of dead enemies was reported daily. The number of Vietnamese casualties was unimaginable. On our side, the Vietnam War produced casualties in the tens of thousands, a horrendous number of drug addicts, and thousands of ex-GIs who still need our help with a multiplicity of mental illnesses.

For the past four months my nephew, an Air Force Academy honor graduate, has been launching missiles on Iraq from an F-15 jet. How many people has he killed? We have no idea. In the kind of war we have just fought in Iraq, seldom do our fighters see the people they kill. In spite of all the rhetoric about smart weapons that are very selective of their targets, we have no idea how many children, women and non-combatants we have killed.

These examples are only the beginning of the realities about which Harry Emerson Fosdick was speaking. War reduces all of us to something less than human beings.

One of the laments of Jesus of Nazareth was, "O that they might know the ways of peace."

The United States is very good at war. However, except for a few instances, we have been lousy at making peace. I pray that my beloved America would spend the same energy, money and resources on peace making that it is presently spending on war.

Rev. Howard H. Bess is pastor of the Church of the Covenant, an American Baptist Church in Palmer.