The end in Iraq?

Tonight President Obama will give a televised address to the nation which is billed as marking the end of combat operations in Iraq.  There is much that must be said before we hear that address.  The fact is that 50,000 American troops will remain in Iraq; and doubtless some of them will engage in fighting, and some of them will be wounded and die in that fighting.  The Republican leadership in Congress is already crowing about how President Bush's "surge," our latest euphemism for an escalation of violence, "worked."  Yet undeniable facts remain.  Iraq is still politically unstable, even chaotic.  Many months after the last elections they still have not been able to form a government.  Violent attacks continue, and people continue to die.  The press reports say that President Obama will not claim victory tonight, and indeed he cannot.  Iraq's future remains uncertain at best, with violent clashes between warring parties a certainty and stability a distant dream.

Yet there is one fact about the Iraq war that is more important than any of these, one that we must not forget as we mark the happy homecoming of at least some of our troops.  That fact is this:  The Iraq war was illegal and immoral in its inception, and nothing that has happened or will happen later can change that fact.  President George W. Bush began that war on false pretenses.  He claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that it did not have and that he had reason to know it did not have.  More importantly, he orchestrated a highly sophisticated campaign of innuendo and misdirection that gave the American public the idea that Saddam Hussein had something to do with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on our country.  A significant number of Americans still believe that falsehood.  Bush knew that Saddam and Iraq had nothing to do with those attacks, but through carefully constructed statements that associated Saddam and 9/11 without ever actually saying that Saddam was responsible for 9/11 the Bush administration created a false idea in the mind of the American public so that he could launch a war that President Bush had been planning even before he became President.  Launch that war he did, and in doing so he broke international law by starting a war of aggression against another sovereign state.  Of course Saddam Hussein was a bad guy.  We all know that.  No one is denying it.  But that's not why we attacked Iraq, and it is no excuse for having attacked Iraq.  There is no excuse for us having attacked Iraq.  So let us not be lulled into complacency by President Obama's claims that our combat mission in Iraq has ended.  It hasn't.  It may have changed its form and scale, but it hasn't ended.  And as we welcome home and support those Americans who chose to serve in the military and who served in Iraq, let us never forget that in starting the Iraq war our nation violated international law and our own most loudly proclaimed values of peace and justice.

And let us Christians never forget that war can never be justified from a Christian perspective.  Jesus taught nonviolence.  He didn't teach pacifism as is often thought.  He taught assertive, creative, nonviolent resistance to evil not passive acceptance of it; but he never condoned violence, not even to save his own life.  After Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire Christians abandoned Jesus' teaching of nonviolence.  St. Augustine and others developed the just war doctrine in its place.  Just war doctrine has a long history in Christianity, but it isn't authentically Christian.  Even if it were the Iraq war would not come close to meeting its requirements.

So even if our combat role in Iraq were truly ending we would have nothing to celebrate.  Rather, we have a lesson to learn.  We can never be too vigilant in the cause of peace.  As Christians we can never let the worldly value of power, we can never let what appears to be expediency, we can never let national arrogance or even true national interest deter us from the pursuit of peace.  The way of the world may be a kind of peace through the use of force.  The way of the Christian is the way of true peace through justice.  As we listen to President Obama tonight, let us not forget that truth.