Wars and Rumors of War
Sermon by Steve Edington
November 11, 2001
Two months is not a terribly long time. When you think of the average human life-span, or the span of our country's history, or the span of human history itself, two months is not long at all. Even drawing a sixty day jail sentence is considered short, or easy, time; although its still time I wouldn't want to draw. Be that as it may, two months is not a terribly long time. But the immediate past two months--two months to this day in fact--have, in a number of ways, covered a life-time. September 11 was the first day in the rest of our collective lives as Americans as our own vulnerability to some of the horrible realities of the world in which we live, but from which we had been largely sheltered, was exposed in a terrifying manner. The rubble in lower Manhattan continues to smoulder, even after sixty days; and the bodies continue to be recovered. Over the past six weeks the New York Times has devoted one page to short, three or four paragraph, profiles about each person whose life was lost at the World Trade Center on 9/11. They'll have to run that feature for well over a year in order to cover all the lost lives. Two months has indeed been a life-time, and how that life will continue to unfold remains to be seen.
The marking of these two months happens to directly coincide with the day we as a nation have set aside to honor the veterans of past wars in which this nation has fought. It is right and proper that we do this. Whatever our various opinions may be as to the rightness, or not, of World War II, Korea, Vietnam, or the Gulf War of ten years ago, those who went forth, or who were sent forth, to take part in these conflicts deserve our respect for the dangers they faced and the sacrifices they and their families made. In addition, those who felt they could not, in good conscience, take part in military conflict in any of those wars are also deserving of our honor and respect on this day.
To consider how this day even came to be called Veterans Day is, by itself, quite sobering. As I'm sure most of you know, its original designation was that of "Armistice Day," marking the end of World War One at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year 1918. Armistice: The end of a war. It was a war so devastating, and so horrifying, by the standards of that day, that further conflicts of such a magnitude were well nigh unimaginable. In retrospect we see that the designation of Armistice Day was given with a kind of innocence; an innocence not entirely unlike the innocence we as a nation knew back in a previous life-time...like on September 10. Now November 11 is the day in this country when we honor the lives, living and dead, of those who have taken part in the wars this nations has fought since the "war to end all wars." I guess that Middle-Eastern Jewish teacher and prophet from a couple of millennia ago was, tragically, not that far off the mark when he said that there will be "wars and rumors of war" so long as humankind remains on this earth.
On a more personal note, this is a day on which I think of my now deceased father; and when I hold for a moment the pair of pants to his Navy uniform that still hangs in a closet in our home. They're part of uniform he wore after enlisting for service to his country in the Second World War in 1942. Its also a day when I muse over the idea that I, in a very real sense, owe my life on this planet to his putting on that uniform, in that my mother was a British war bride. I guess it was those Navy blues, and the blue eyes of the man who wore them, that won her eighteen year old British heart.
Wars and rumors of war; in this year 2001 we celebrate another Veterans Day in the midst of yet another war. Its a war like no other in that it is in response to the first direct attack by outside powers on this country's soil since the War of 1812, when British forces burned down the newly constructed White House in the still newly established city of Washington, D.C. When you consider for a moment all of the nations of the world who have experienced, up close and personal, the terrible realities of war between 1812 and the present day; that should give us some idea as to the kind of protective bubble (with the horrible exception of our own Civil War) that we as a country have been living in for nearly the past two centuries. That bubble has been broken by four passenger planes, by those who commandeered them, and by the malevolent, hidden-and-seen, forces and powers behind those who did the commandeering.
We as a nation, are now in full response mode, as we must be. But to whom should our response be; and how should it be made, especially when we have been attacked not by another country, but by a shadowy presence that is spread out over, and concealed within, any number of countries? Even as we now engage in our own acts of war, I am not convinced that these questions have been fully and adequately deal with.
It is not, in my mind, the fact that we must respond, but the nature of that response that I hope remains open to critical examination and critical consideration. This is a day when we pay rightful tribute to those who helped preserve our freedom. It is a day when we pay respectful tribute to the symbols of that freedom; a day when we hear songs that celebrate that freedom. I also hope ours is a freedom broad enough to encompass the freedom to question certain actions that are taken in the name of preserving freedom. For if not, then ours has become a dangerously constricted freedom. It is this kind of freedom, with a nod of appreciation to our veterans, that I would like to exercise for the next several minutes.
When our President, Mr. George Bush, advocates and defends the military actions we are now taking in Afghanistan, his ultimate rationale, in his own words, is that we are "fighting evil." As I listen to the President's oft-repeated references to "fighting evil" I find that I can both agree with someone and also be disturbed by what they are saying, while still possessing only one mind (call me crazy). Yes, if the 9/11 attacks were not evil deeds, then the term evil itself has no functional meaning. This past week I listened to a CNN interview with Professor Edward Said, a faculty member at New York's Columbia University. Dr. Said is a leading spokesperson for the Palestinian cause; and he's probably as knowledgeable as anyone in America when it comes to understanding the dynamics and forces at play in the Arab/Islamic world today. Mr. Said, in this interview, referred to Osama bin Laden as "the embodiment of evil," and I have no reason to take issue with him. I don't believe Dr. Said meant that bin Laden was the embodiment of all evil in the universe, by the way. There are probably other players on the world stage right now upon whom Professor Said would render a similar judgment; but he does regard bin Laden as the progenitor of an evil deed, which indeed he is.
What I am troubled by, however, is what I'll call the "Evil Trap" or the "Evil Catch-22." Its a thought-and-action trap in which those who go forth to fight evil, or the perpetrators of evil, come to feel that they are clothed in pure and unquestioned virtue. Its a trap in which the phrase "we are fighting evil" becomes a means of avoiding any kind of critical scrutiny of just what that "fighting evil" consists of. The best explanation of this trap that I've heard comes from a World War II veteran, a survivor of a German prisoner-of-war camp, and a self-identified Unitarian Universalist to boot, Mr. Kurt Vonnegut. Mr. Vonnegut is alive and well and writing (and doing commercials for an investment firm, I've noticed) at age 80. In referring to the aftermath of World War II, Mr. Vonnegut observed: "It was (in one sense) very bad for us ... Our enemies were so awful, so evil, that we, by contrast, must be remarkably pure. That illusion of purity became our curse..." Vonnegut was referring to the national mood immediately following World War II, in which, by our confronting the evils of Nazism, we came to see ourselves as inviolate, and any criticism of any domestic or foreign policy actions of the United States was characterized as un-American. It was this "illusion of purity" as Vonnegut calls it that helped make possible--among other things--the McCarthy era.
To move to the present, we as a nation have been sickeningly and grievously wronged, and we have responded to that wrong in some truly heroic ways, as the firefighters and police officers of New York City have shown. But one of our many challenges, as our responses to that horrific wrong continue, is to avoid this illusion of purity. I am thinking of this particularly in reference to our current bombing campaign in Afghanistan. I'm not a military strategist--far from it; but I like to think that I can form reasonably well considered opinions about military action. To back up a couple of steps, I was heartened when, in his speech to Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the President said our response would be "patient and focused." Those were his words: "patient and focused."
I'm afraid I'm not seeing much patience or focus in the way the bombs have been falling over the past few weeks. What does appear to be taking place is increasing frustration on the part of our military planners that displacing the Taliban rulers, and flushing out Osama bin Laden, is not happening in the manner in which they hoped it would. So, let's just keep dropping more and bigger bombs. I don't doubt but that the Taliban rulers are exaggerating the nature and extent of civilian casualties; but for us to think that increasing numbers of civilian causalities and refugees are not being generated by this bombing campaign is naive on our part.
Our President was correct in initially portraying this conflict as an effort on the part of many nations against those who perpetuate terror; but the longer the bombing goes on the more this conflict will be perceived as the United States versus the people of Afghanistan; people who are no more responsible for the Taliban being in power than they are for the actions of those who sent the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. This kind of perception can take on a reality of its own, and will prove to be to our great peril if we are going to maintain our already fragile alliances and agreements with the nations of the Islamic world.
Beyond matters of strategic concern, the moral question is how far will we allow an illusion of purity to take us with the use of our bombs. This issue was pointedly raised in a piece in last week's Boston Globe by James Carroll titled "Bombing with Blindfolds On." Here's a few lines: "What are the purposes and effects of the bombing? That straightforward question has hardly ever been answered truthfully by our government. The air war in Afghanistan is being conducted behind a veil of secrecy--but a veil of secrecy shielding Americans, not the Afghans on whom the bombs explode... However much we long to be consoled by a distinction between military and civilian targets the history of bombing suggests that that distinction itself is a lie." Carroll concludes: "How does the motto 'Peace is our profession' translate into Arabic? These contractions suggest that a kind of moral blindness has accompanied the phenomenon of bombing from the start. Indeed, moral blindness is necessary for it, blocking our view, for example, of the way U.S. bombing, at the very least, is creating conditions of humanitarian catastrophe this winter. I believe bin Laden is counting on such blindness and with our bombing we have not disappointed him." Point well taken, I feel.
Again, I am not a military strategist, but I am--like each and all of you--capable of thought. So, I offer a just a few more thoughts for your consideration along this line; you may make of them what you will. (Which I know is what you do with all of my thoughts anyway). I want to see Osama bin Laden brought to justice; and I'm quite aware that he's not going to call his lawyer and turn himself in. There are certain types of covert military action that I feel I could support to bring him to justice. But let's consider the larger picture for a moment. Bin Laden is only as deadly effective as his access to money, and his contacts around the globe allow him to be. Shutting off his sources of funding is a significant step in the right direction. If, as our President and his advisors have told us, Al Queda and other such affinity groups have operatives in some 60 nations, then it makes infinite sense to bring the powerful kinds of diplomatic pressure to bear that we are capable of bringing upon the leaders of those countries, to shut those operatives and operations down. If bin Laden can be reduced to, quite literally, a general without an army, or to a general with a severely weakened army, then he becomes little more than a deluded radical holed up in an Afghan cave. To get to that point would, of course, take a lot patience and a lot of focus; but wasn't that what we were promised two months ago?
Maybe these thoughts are ill-informed or misguided on my part. Maybe. But no more misguided, I would suggest, than the idea that ever bigger, and more frequently dispatched, bombs will give us the outcome to this conflict that we desire. We don't even know for sure that replacing the Taliban forces with the Northern Alliance war lords will bring us any closer to bringing the perpetrators of evil to justice. Each side in this conflict is supported by warring factions and ethnic groups that have been going at each other for centuries, and who in many cases have changed allegiances whenever it suits them to do so. As Thomas Freidman, in his New York Times column this past Friday wryly observed: "For (the United States) this is good versus evil; for (the Pakistanis and the Afghans) its the Hatfields versus the McCoys--Round 50." In the past couple of days an Afghan city, apparently, has fallen to those who are on "our side." The question I cannot get out of my mind, however, is did all the lives that were lost or displaced in that effort bring us any closer to apprehending the one individual and his followers whom we say are our real targets? The jury is still very much out on that one.
To address this the many dimensions of topic in the time I have here, is to leave any number of aspects of it unaddressed; unadressed at least for today. There is the matter as to how this conflict in which we as a nation are now engaged both is not and is about Islam. There is the question as to why, even as he appears to be marginalizing himself, Osama bin Laden continues to be something of a folk hero in certain parts of the Isalmic world. Two weeks ago a New York Times Magazine article reported on how mothers in such places as Gaza and Cairo are proud to see their sons grow up to become what we would call "suicide bombers," but what those mothers call holy martyrs. Why is this so? We are citizens of a country that has been, and continues to be, a powerful force for good in the world; and that over a half-century ago took center stage in saving much of the world from the evils of Nazism. How and why have we also become an object--justified or not--of suspicion, mistrust, if not hatred now in various parts of the world? These are all elements of a conversation we in this country need to have, and that for the most part is not taking place.
On a day that celebrates patriotism, I would submit that we have a patriotic duty to examine these and similar kinds of issues (albeit not in a single Sunday service). If we truly love our country, as I trust we do, then we much also care about its place in the world, and the role it plays, and can play, within the community of nations. We must keep working to assure that our nation's role in the world community is a constructive and life-enhancing one; and one that finds us on the side of those whom that Middle-Eastern Jewish teacher and prophet I earlier referred to called "The least of these, my brethren."
On this note, then, I would like to conclude for today with some thoughts about the nature of patriotism; and I take a back seat to no one when it comes to being a patriotic American. Patriotism is love of country. Its not a blind love, however; in fact, sometimes it is a tough love; a love that engages some of the issues and concerns I've just stated. To be patriotic is to honor, respect, and salute the symbols of our nation, without allowing those symbols to become a shield against critical thought. To be patriotic is to understand that if there is such a Being as a just, loving, and merciful God, then the blessings of such a God do not rest solely on any one country, but upon this precious and fragile world in which we must all find ways to live with one another; and with each country doing its part to make that possible.
On this day especially to be patriotic is to honor our nation's past, even as we remain aware of its tragic flaws. On this day I salute the role our veterans played in helping to maintain a nation in which I can freely deliver a sermon like the one I've just offered. Finally, on this day, may we as citizens of this country, or of whatever country we are a citizen, commit our energies to the making of humanity itself "a loftier race than 'ere the world has known shall rise."
