Articles on War and Peace "Without a direct action expression of it, nonviolence, to my mind, is meaningless."  -- Mahatma Gandhi "We who work for peace must not falter. We must continue to pray for peace and to act for peace in whatever way we can, we must continue to speak for peace and to live the way of peace;  to inspire others, we must continue to think of peace and to know that peace is possible." -- Peace Pilgrim

ARTICLES ~   January 20, 2005

• Iraq Air War: Where's the Coverage?
  By Tom Engelhardt
  COMMENTARY: Don't expect to find it in the US media.
  Comparisons of Vietnam and Iraq are constantly being disputed and discredited and yet, given the Bush administration's actions, all sorts of strange parallels can't help but continually pop to mind.

• Iraq and the Laws of War: US as Belligerent Occupant
  (December 22, 2005) In this article, University of Illinois Law Professor Francis Boyle rigorously analyses the legal aspects of the US occupation of Iraq. On several counts, he concludes, the war is illegal. In addition to violating the customary international laws of war, as set forth by the 1907 Hague Convention, the Nuremburg Charter, and the Geneva Conventions, the Bush administration has also repeatedly violated the US Army Field Manual in its conduct of the Iraq war. (CounterPunch)

• 96 bishops decry 'unjust and immoral' situation in Iraq By United Methodist News Service, November 11, 2005 Ninety-six United Methodist bishops have signed a statement repenting "of our complicity in what we believe to be the unjust and immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq." The signers include more than half of the denomination's active and retired bishops, both within the United States and in the Central Conferences outside the United States. Bishop Kenneth Carder, one of the signers, told United Methodist News Service on Nov. 11 that the statement had been nearly six weeks in the making. The statement confesses "our preoccupation with institutional enhancement and limited agendas while American men and women are sent to Iraq to kill and be killed, while thousands of Iraqi people needlessly suffer and die, while poverty increases and preventable diseases go untreated." While the sacrifices of military personnel are valued, true security does not lie in the weapons of war, the bishops pointed out. The bishops committed to praying daily for the end of war in Iraq and all wars in general, reclaiming the idea of living "faithfully in the light of God's new creation" and pledging to peacemaking as an "integral component of our own Christian discipleship." They also called upon United Methodists to object to "solutions of war that conflict with the gospel message of self-emptying love" and work toward "unity in a world of diversity." On Nov. 4, the Council of Bishops adopted a resolution calling on President George Bush to draw up a plan and timeline for withdrawing all U.S. forces from Iraq. Another statement on Iraq had been issued by the council a year and a half earlier. In the "Resolution on the War in Iraq," the bishops noted that "peacemaking is a sacred calling of the Lord Jesus Christ," and that the denomination's Book of Discipline declares war "incompatible with the teachings and example of Christ." The resolution stated that "the continuing loss of Iraqi civilian lives, especially children, and the increasing death toll among United States and coalition military, grieves the heart of God." The bishops said the U.S. government's reasons for war - "the presumption of weapons of mass destruction and alleged connection between al-Qaida and Iraq" - have not been verified, and that the violence in Iraq has created a context for "gross violations of human rights of prisoners of war." In October, the United Methodist Board of Church and Society passed a resolution calling on the United States to withdraw its troops from Iraq. "As people of faith, we raise our voice in protest against the tragedy of the unjust war in Iraq," the resolution stated. "We urge the United States government to develop and implement a plan for the withdrawal of its troops. The U.S. invasion has set in motion a sequence of events which may plunge Iraq into civil war." News media contact: Linda Bloom, New York, (646) 369-3759 or newsdesk@umcom.org .

• Now they see us as we are By Joan Chittister, OSB, National Catholic Reporter - September 30, 2005 Whatever we like to think, the whole world does not really want to be American. They want to be themselves.... There is no such thing as exporting democracy at the end of gun, no matter how much it is "for their own good." 

• Poll: Majority Of Americans Unhappy With Iraq War Hank Plante. CBS5. San Francison. August 8, 2005 A new poll from Newsweek shows an overwhelming 61% of the public disapproves of Mr. Bush's handling of the war. Only 34% approve. It's the first time Bush's numbers have dropped below 40....Then there's the question: has the war made us any safer here at home? No, say 64% of those in the Newsweek survey. Twenty-eight percent say yes. If there is one bright spot in the poll for Bush, it's over his handing of homeland security. Fifty-one percent of Americans say there are happy with that

• Finding Our Way in Iraq Editorial by Robert Parham. Baptist Center for Ethics A new policy would necessitate a new leadership team, one in which hubris would be seen as a vice and humility would be accepted as a virtue. Bush’s current team has failed the nation. They no longer deserve the public’s trust....A new policy is unlikely unless Washington politicians hear clearly and repeatedly that local leaders expect real changes in the administration and a new policy in Iraq. Christians of all stripes need to speak quickly and insistently from a moral vantage point to congressmen and senators about the need for change. Clergy, in particular, need to offer moral direction to our elected officials. Like the prophet Amos, clergy need to call for a mighty river of change and let politicians work out the irrigation system. A good time for these conversations is in August, while our elected leaders are on recess.

• Bush's oilmen got it all wrong in Iraq Marie Cocco. Newday. August 9, 2005 Remember the bold promises? "Iraq has oil," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told Fortune magazine in 2002, discussing the potential cost of an Iraq invasion and how it would be met. "They have financial resources.".... How did an administration overflowing with oilmen get it all so wrong? The story line is tiresome. It parallels the warnings about weapons of mass destruction. It tracks with the delusional prediction about being greeted as liberators, and the fantasy about how only a few "dead-enders" continued to fight after our troops took Baghdad. The president's men saw what they wished to see - the 115 billion barrels of oil reserves beneath the desert. They were blind to what was really there: an oil industry decimated by more than a decade of economic sanctions, with technological decay and even geological deterioration of the fields already gnawing at it.

• A Call to Speak Out From the National Council of Churches We acknowledge that the freedom promised in the toppling of a dictator has been replaced by the humiliation of occupation and the violence of a civil war.  The sacrifice of brave men and women has been used to serve policies that have diminished our nation’s prestige and our capacity to be agents of justice in the world.

• Religious Leaders 4th of July message to Bush: Don't let Iraq become another historic quagmire From the National Council of Churches June 30, 2005, New York – Three religious leaders representing the Governing Board of the National Council of Churches USA announced today that about 630 religious leaders and nearly 16,000 people of faith in 44 states have endorsed a Fourth of July declaration that urges President Bush to develop an "early fixed timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops," to listen to a wider range of religious advisers and to re-evaluate his policy on Iraq.

• Sent to War... Into Honor or Infamy By Carl Hitchens Everyday, I see the contradictions that we all engage in, even as we have our own idealism about the life we wish to live.... Our duty, therefore, is too idealize what we come to accept as the purest and the truest, within ourselves and the world, and put that into action, into self-actualization. We put that before the world in deed, speech, thought, and creativity. And we love the world despite itself.

• In Search of True Nonviolence By Chris Haw. Jail was a place to consider my heart and pray for true nonviolence. [Jim]Douglas would insist that you promote peace not by your ambiguous relation to the “state,” but by how we make friends with our opponents and enemies, in the midst of prayerful civil disobedience. 

• What the Mounting Costs of War Have Bought Costs to the U.S. military, costs to the Iraqis, and economic costs.

• NCC Weighs In, Again, on Due Process for National Security Detainees The National Council of Churches USA Feb. 15 heard a concern expressed by the NCC's Interfaith Relations Commission on the effects of the USA PATRIOT Act on civil rights and due process for Muslim people.

• Voices in Wartime: The Movie Voices in Wartime is a feature-length documentary that delves into the experience of war through powerful images and the words of poets – unknown and world-famous. Poets around the world, from the United States and Colombia to Britain and Nigeria to Iraq and India, share their poetry and experiences of war. Soldiers, journalists, historians and experts on combat interviewed in Voices in Wartime add diverse perspectives on war’s effects on soldiers, civilians and society. Release Date: April 2005

• Voices in Wartime: Network Voices in Wartime Network is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing a platform for all who have suffered as a result of war, conflict, and violence. We invite you to join us.

• War: When a single word becomes a lie If the "just war theory" were called the "justifiable slaughter theory" or "the justifiable violence theory," it would at least be honest. Maybe the slaughter and the human and ecological destruction and violence we are contemplating are justifiable, but at least we would be honest in admitting what it is we are justifying.

• USA: Freedom to dissent denied According to the administration of the United States, "moral clarity" was central to the reasons for going to war with Iraq....Unfortunately for some, the right to stand up for your moral beliefs and act upon them only extended in one direction. While it showed "moral clarity" to take part in the war; two US soldiers learnt that dissenting was a punishable offence. Dissenting from the official view of the morality or otherwise of this war led to imprisonment for Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejía Castillo and Sergeant Abdullah William Webster. 

• What Happened to Hearts? By Jonathan Schell, the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at the Nation Institute. Some 200,000 people -- the great majority of Falluja's population of some 300,000 -- were driven out of their city....And what stories are the expelled 200,000 telling the millions of Iraqis among whom they are now mixing? We don't know. No one seems to be interested....Meanwhile, the insurgency, failing so far to learn its lesson, has opened fronts in other cities, which may soon get the same treatment as Falluja. "They made a wasteland and called it peace," Tacitus famously said. It was left to the United States, champion of freedom, to update the formula: They made a wasteland and called it democracy. [This article will appear in the December 6 issue of The Nation magazine]

• Iraq: the unthinkable becomes normal by John Pilger, visiting professor at Cornell University. Nov 15, 2004. Mainstream media speak as if Fallujah were populated only by foreign "insurgents". In fact, women and children are being slaughtered in our name....Normalising colonial crimes like the attack on Fallujah requires such racism, linking our imagination to "the other". The thrust of the reporting is that the "insurgents" are led by sinister foreigners of the kind that behead people: for example, by Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian said to be al-Qaeda's "top operative" in Iraq. This is what the Americans say; it is also Blair's latest lie to parliament. Count the times it is parroted at a camera, at us. No irony is noted that the foreigners in Iraq are overwhelmingly American and, by all indications, loathed. These indications come from apparently credible polling organisations, one of which estimates that of 2,700 attacks every month by the resistance, six can be credited to the infamous al-Zarqawi.

• Four Times Falluja Equals? by Mark Levine. Nov 14, 2004. As American forces penetrate ever deeper and more destructively into the city of Falluja, each of the major players in this violent drama is engaged in a complex, constantly shifting calculus involving ways of turning events to their advantage. Of the many possible outcomes to the battle of Falluja, the four which seem most plausible follow, starting with the one that might be viewed most positively by the Bush administration.

• 'We’re Committing Genocide in Iraq' by Jeff Riedel. Former Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey, a 12-year Marine veteran....is one of a growing number of American soldiers returning from Iraq who have become outspoken opponents of the war. Massey entered Iraq as part of the initial US invasion in March 2003. He witnessed—and in some cases participated in—the killing of innocent civilians. During a single 48-hour period, he says, he saw as many as 30 civilians killed by US gunfire at highway checkpoints. Also see Ex-U.S. Marine: I Killed Civilians in Iraq May 24, 2004. Ex-Marine Staff Sergeant Jimmy Massey talks about his time in Iraq where he admitted the U.S. treatment of Iraqi civilians is fueling the Iraqi resistance.

• Iraq: What Went Wrong? by Stephen Soldz. July 22, 2004. ....imagine yourself an Iraqi. You've suffered terribly under a ruthless dictator. The Americans invade your country under false pretenses. They promise democracy but don't organize elections. They appoint exiles to rule you, exiles who spend most of their time out of the country and the rest in a few highly protected areas. The occupiers break into your homes in the middle of the night and arrest your men, who then disappear, with no accountability. They shoot Iraqis at roadblocks and from convoys. They declare war on the second most popular man in the country, announcing his death in advance. They open the economy to US corporations and give them sweetheart contracts, ignoring local business. Then they write hundreds of laws and establish commissions limiting any future government. They build permanent military bases on your soil. Then they turn your country over to a former associate of Saddam Hussein, also a former CIA agent, known for his ruthless brutality. Imagine that was your country.  What would you do?

• On the Third Anniversary of September 11, 2001: A Special Report on How the NCC Is Working to Save Fragile 'Bridges of Understanding' Imperiled by the War on Terror.   At a time when they are more needed than ever, bridges of understanding and cooperation among diverse peoples, faiths and nations have been severely undermined in the course of the war on terror.

• Iraq One Year Later By J. Daryl Byler, director of the Mennonite Central Committee Washington OfficeIf some positive things came out of the war, then was it a good thing?  Was it justified?  Even a quick scan of the facts a year after the war suggests that the negative consequences far outweigh whatever gains may have been made.

• A Call to Deeper Faith, Understanding of Others By Robert Rhodes, an editor at the Mennonite Weekly Review, based in Newton, Kansas. We all must change inwardly, starting with the views we espouse and our actions in the marketplace. Otherwise, the moral desolation of this war will doom us to live through even more years like the one just passed, a year we would prefer to repent of.

• Reflection: A year later March 17, 2004. MCC’s (Mennonite Central Committee) post-war response has focused on institutional support, removing explosive remnants of war, sponsoring stress and trauma recovery workshops, and communicating the stories and perspective of Iraqi people.

• Our Wartime Spiritual Practices

  A moment of compassion was the start of our wartime spiritual practices…. shifting. Spiritual Literacy in Wartime is an ongoing weekly e-course being led by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, authors of Spiritual Literacy and Spiritual Rx. By reading excerpts revealing the wisdom of the world's religions and by working with spiritual practices, we are exploring how to live a spiritual life in times of heightened separation.

• Poets Against the War   In the coming months, Poets Against the War will encourage its members to collaborate, wherever possible, with other groups working to achieve a change of regime in the United States, to establish an administration that is prepared to join the community of nations rather than dictating to it. As long as this administration’s war-making includes attacks on our civil rights, threats against other nations, and its continued assault on labor and environmental laws, it is our duty as citizens of the world to resist. Whitman himself advised us to “resist much, obey little.”
• Is there anything left that matters? By Joan Chittister,OSBThis is what I don't understand: All of a sudden nothing seems to matter....Except that it does matter. I know we're not supposed to say that. I know it's called "unpatriotic." But it's also called honesty. And dishonesty matters.... It may be time for us to realize that in a country that prides itself on being democratic, we are our government. And the rest of the world is figuring that out very quickly. From where I stand, that matters.
• Muslim, Christian, & Jewish Leaders Release Joint Declaration Issuing Guidelines to Peace   The Domestic Interfaith summit addressed the humanitarian, spiritual and civil costs of war and its ramifications here at home.
• AN URGENT CALL FOR REFLECTION, HOPE AND ACTION by the Domestic Interfaith Summit was co-called by the National Council of Churches USA, Islamic Society of North America and Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.  
• WORDS of REFLECTION by the Domestic Interfaith Summit was co-called by the National Council of Churches USA, Islamic Society of North America and Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.  
• A Vision of Peace in a Time of War: The Need for a  Peace-Centered Foreign Policy  by the Rev. Dr. Bob Edgar, General Secretary, National Council of Churches. A policy paper prepared in conjunction with Dr. Edgar's April 15, 2003, address "The Role of the Church in U.S. Foreign Policy Today."
• Just War Principles The Just War tradition's criteria for entering into war and criteria governing how to wage war, along with links to related articles.

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