A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
February 23, 2003
These words are offered and dedicated to the people of Iraq, so cruelly brutalized, abandoned, and threatened again. My we hold them in love and grief.
I can only promise you that this sermon will be way shorter than Theodore Parker's sermons against the Mexican War.
War — in all its terrors and sorrows — I am sure is sometimes necessary. I will never be convinced that America were right to look the other way while Hitler decimated Europe and carried out his Final Solution. We wonder how America stood aside while the bombs rained on London. And I will never be convinced that the Civil War did not have to be fought, that the Southern Slavocracy would ever give up its privilege and power voluntarily, or repent from its fundamentalist reading of the Bible to justify living high on the backs of four millions of enslaved people, and probably as many more poor whites whom they intimidated with their terrifying predictions of what the slaves would do if they were ever freed.
I supported the campaign to liberate Kosovo, though not the way it was carried out. It should have occurred much sooner, with ground troops who could actually rescue the Kosovars from the genocide, and not safely from 15,000 feet up, which allowed Milosevic's troops to move freely among the civilians and do their worst, while the bombing produced horrendous errors on the ground.
And then I agreed, after September 11, that it was right and necessary to remove the Taliban from Afghanistan, though to do so would mean to engage in "nation-building," something our government hasn't felt important enough a task to take seriously.
But then came the crusade against Iraq.
In 1651, Thomas Hobbes brought out a book about the mutual threat and fear that exists within nations and between them. He called his book Leviathan because he believed that both individuals and nations would always tend to strike at each other because they're afraid of each other and want to get the other before the other gets them — and that, therefore, there had to be one overwhelming power that could keep all the others in line, could be an authority strong enough to impose peace and police it, like the biblical Leviathan in Isaiah, the twisting serpent, the dragon that is in the sea.
That is why so many people want so badly for the United Nations to succeed, and to have the authority it needs: an international Leviathan, not just one nation with overwhelming power. In Bosnia, in Rwanda, in so many places — it would seem that what was so sorely needed was a truly representative and truly strong United Nations that had both a strong and properly funded military force, and, with clear criteria for intervention, an international court of justice to authorize it.
The United Nations has rarely succeeded in this role. Maybe you remember Srebrenica. If you don't: when Serb forces under Milosovic and Karadzic were terrorizing Bosnia in 1992, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees managed to save 100,000 lives with emergency supplies, especially in the city of Sarajevo. But they didn't have any real authority. So when the United Nations declared six "safe areas" which they promised to protect, the UN Protection Force was allowed to use their weapons only to protect themselves, not to protect Bosnians. The Serbian forces deliberately bombarded the so-called "safe areas" and captured two of them in 1995, Zepa — and Srebrenica.
Those implementing UN policy sometimes felt shamed by its passivity. One UN general defied the rules. The French General Morillon led a convoy of food, medicine, and a few soldiers into Srebrenica, which the Serbs were shelling and were about to capture. Morillon raised the UN flag and declared: "I have now decided to stay in order to calm your anguish and try to save you. I am here, and here to stay." The Serb attack stopped and supplies were allowed in. For his act, the UN removed General Morillon, and he left, and the infamous Serb General Mladic marched in and terrorized the women and children while he exterminated the male population. General Morillon said: "My first thought as for the commander who gave the order to attack. I hope he burns in the hottest corner of hell. My second thought was for the soldiers who . . . fired the guns. I hope their sleep is forever punctuated by the screams of the children and the cries of their mothers."1 There as elsewhere, the UN was held back from fulfilling its promise.
But this is what I think gets to the heart of what is happening today. More important than the question of Iraq's possession or nonpossession of weapons of mass destruction is the question of Leviathan. And here is where our present American government is at war, not so much with Iraq, but with the world community and its representative body, the United Nations.
The plain and imperial fact is that the current government of the United States, and most of the ruling political party, demand that the United States itself be that Leviathan, seem to believe the United States has some divine manifest destiny to govern the world. For any single nation to seize this role is a damningly dangerous idea, but it is the prevailing vision controlling both America government and media. It's got to be confronted, and fast.
The United States has fought this war against the world community on the pretense that it's a beneficent empire we mean to run, for your own good.
And so our nation has done everything it could to undermine the United Nations — like withholding dues, and seeking to defy and destroy the International Court of Justice. In 1999, the Republican majority in the Senate voted down the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. America's contemptuous opposition to the Kyoto Protocol is another sign of its Leviathan Complex.
International law has credibility only if it is applied fairly, universally, and consistently. While Secretary Powell excoriated Iraq for defying the international community, the UN's world court ruled unanimously that the US should stay the execution of three Mexicans on death row in Texas and Oklahoma. The US has disregarded the court in the past and you can bet it will do so in this case. At the beginning of the month the International Criminal Court got its real start with the election of judges. It's meant to deal with offenses like those of which Saddam stands accused. But the 139 nations that signed the agreement no longer include the United States, since Mr. Bush "unsigned" that treaty early in his term.
All this reminds me of a story about the prophet Jeremiah. His country is at war, and other prophets are declaring that God is on their side and they are going to win. Jeremiah has the melancholy task of prophesying the opposite: that God is not on their side and they should not win. As a consequence, terrible things happen to Jeremiah and he never gets invited on Charlie Rose. He is a better patriot than his enemies because he calls his nation to its highest possibility, but nobody is listening.
Right now, what the world community overwhelmingly wants is to rely on heightened inspections, strengthened with air surveillance and perhaps some military support. It doesn't want to launch a war.
Why? Who's right?
The government of Iraq is a brutal dictatorship run by a maniacal street thug recruited years ago by the Baath Party because they were, at the time, a bunch of intellectuals who needed somebody who could mobilize the people on the streets. In this, Saddam exceeded their expectations. Within Iraq, he is the Leviathan that you don't dare defy. To his foes, he's done the unspeakable. Who would not be glad to see a decent government in Iraq?
But it must also be said that, during his rule, Iraq invested heavily in health, education, and social programs for two decades prior to the Persian Gulf War. Yes, ethnic minorities and political enemies were treated abominably. Yet before the Gulf War, Iraq boasted free education, ample electricity, modernized agriculture, and a robust middle class. The World Health Organization noted that 93 percent of the population had access to health care.2
But then Mr. Hussein went to war with Kuwait. The case for first-strike preventive war rests on the claim that Mr. Hussein is a reckless expansionist bent on dominating the Middle East. He's often compared to Adolf Hitler.
The Persian Gulf War reduced Iraq to a place of desperation, hunger, disease, and bitterness. At the end of the war, the United Nations and our own Defense Department agreed that Iraq was facing a crisis in food, water, sanitation, and health; and they predicted imminent catastrophe, epidemics and famine; and cited degraded medical conditions because of the breakdown of public services like water purification and distribution, preventive medicine, water disposal, health-care services, electricity, and transportation. The Defense Department said "Hospital care is degraded by lack of running water and electricity." Cancer increased, maybe tenfold, maybe from the depleted uranium in the Gulf War, who knows.
Officials at the Pentagon didn't mind saying that that was the intention. In the Washington Post3, those officials said Iraq's electrical grid had been targeted by bombing strikes in order to undermine the civilian economy. Here's what a planning officer at the Pentagon said: "People say, `You didn't recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or sewage.' Well, what were we trying to do with sanctions — help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of the sanctions."
Now, it seems to me that some kind of sanctions are in order to keep some kinds of materials out of Iraq, but the United States has so manipulated the UN sanctions program, grossly and shamelessly, and so distorted the truth about it, that the program has become deeply shameful.
But shouldn't we ask the prior question, Is Saddam a threat to other nations?
So let me quote John Mearsheimer, political science professor at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, Dean of the Kennedy School of Government, who co-authored an op-ed piece in the New York Times.
During the 30 years that Mr. Hussein has dominated Iraq, he has initiated two wars. Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, but only after Iran's revolutionary government tried to assassinate Iraqi officials, conducted repeated border raids and tried to topple Mr. Hussein by fomenting unrest within Iraq. His decision to attack was not reckless, because Iran was isolated and widely seen as militarily weak. The war proved costly, but it ended Iran's regional ambitions and kept Mr. Hussein in power.Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 arose from a serious dispute over oil prices and war debts and occurred only after efforts to court Mr. Hussein led the first Bush administration unwittingly to signal that Washington would not oppose an attack. Containment did not fail the first time around — it was never tried.
Thus, Mr. Hussein has gone to war when he was threatened and when he thought he had a window of opportunity. These considerations do not justify Iraq's actions, but they show that Mr. Hussein is hardly a reckless aggressor who cannot be contained. In fact, Iraq has never gone to war in the face of a clear deterrent threat.4
Is Saddam a threat? We must ask, Under what conditions would he be a threat?
And the answer is pretty clear. When he himself is threatened or under attack. And such an attack would ignite far more violence. So General Wesley Clark told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Sept. 23 that a war would "super-charge recruiting for Al Qaeda." War can only unleash new terror previously unthinkable, breed new minions of dehumanized people prepared to destroy themselves and others in ways we hadn't dreamed.
We have been presented with a series of vibrant arguments for why Iraq under Saddam is so dangerous we must overturn his government violently.
Awhile back, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair stood together and warned the world of an IAEA report, that is, International Atomic Energy Agency — showing that, by six months from then, Iraq would have usable nuclear weapons. This was big news for three weeks until somebody in the very complacent media bothered to call the IAEA about this. Ironically, it was the right-wing Washington Times. When they called, they found there was no such report. We'd been had again.
There have been a few intelligent and critical pieces in the American media, in the New York Times and NPR and the Globe and the Nation and Harper's. But if you want to follow these developments, you have to turn to European media, and especially, in English, the British. My best sources are The Guardian of London and its Sunday edition, The Observer, possibly the best newspaper in the world, and The Independent, and the very independent British Broadcasting Corporation. The BBC news is carried on cable on BBC America, and you can catch a half hour of it at 6 p.m. weekdays on WGBY, PBS in Springfield — and it's on the internet 24 hours a day — a dozen different services, but especially try the BBC World Service. There's no democracy without an informed public, and NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, and sadly now CNN can't help you there.
There are doubts about Colin Powell's presentation to the Security Council. I presume there was truth in it. Yet there were also those aluminum tubes that were supposed to be parts for nuclear weapons, only they weren't. A plant that was supposed to be a biological weapons factory, but reporters went there and found it didn't even have running water and it just didn't add up.
And then there is the argument that there are ties between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government.
Last year there was that joint FBI and CIA investigation into a meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. But the Czech Republic's own intelligence proved it didn't happen. Even though senior officials have put great pressure on American intelligence agencies to find some convincing evidence, an awful lot of people in our own CIA and FBI think it just isn't there.5 And what does it mean anyway if al-Qaeda has some kind of presence in Iraq? Al-Qaeda has a presence in the United States, and in at least sixty countries.
One of them is Pakistan. Meanwhile, there's North Korea — a far more brutal dictatorship even than Iraq.
North Korea already has nuclear weapons, good enough to strike the west coast of the United States. Do you know where they got the technology? No, not Iraq. From our fine friends in Pakistan.
North Korea — which defied the Bush policy of using force to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction by announcing that it has a perfect right to possess nuclear weapons, and that it was terminating the 1994 Framework, under which it had shut down reactors that produced plutonium. It ejected the UN inspectors and withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Suddenly the Administration reversed itself.Administration spokespersons soon declared that the North Korean situation was "not a crisis" and that its policy toward that country was to be one of "dialogue," leading to "a peaceful multilateral solution," including the possibility of renewed oil shipments.6
The message here is clear: If you really can't do us any damage, we might bomb you; but if you actually can hurt us, we won't; we'll negotiate. So you better hurry and get nuclear weapons so we won't threaten you.
In the strange way that things sometimes work out — I do believe that Mr. Bush has accomplished some good. The inspections program, which had been halted so the United States could conduct a bombing campaign against Iraq, oops, were aren't supposed to mention that, is back in operation and the eyes of the world are now turned intently on the Iraqi regime. It seems to me that a strong continuing inspection program can keep Saddam's missile and nuclear weapons program from getting any farther. The Franco-German plan, revealed at the last weekend, would triple the number of UN weapons inspectors and back them up with surveillance flights, and maybe even thousands of UN troops.
But the prospect of America as Leviathan, and Leviathan's War — should deeply trouble us all. Empire is not compatible with democracy. American democracy is being severely and dangerously compromised. And double standards and duplicity are the stuff of which empires are made.
A single nation that seizes the role of Leviathan soon surrenders that precious commodity, credibility. Consider previous American projects of, er, "regime change." Chile in 1973. There was Nicaragua. There was the overthrow of the elected Moussedeh government in Iran in 1953 and the installation of the Shah. Meanwhile, in media interviews, I keep seeing John Negroponte, Bush's man at the UN sent to warn us that Saddam is lying, but previously the ambassador to Honduras who falsified intelligence reports for years and, in defiance of Congress, supplied and supported the Contras in Nicaragua.
And tell me — how can an administration full of oil executives, with the most astonishingly anti-environmental record ever, credibly claim oil has nothing to do with this cry for war?
America seems both mystified and offended about how the world sees us now. The European edition of the New York Times asked its readers which nation posed the greatest threat to peace. Two hundred sixty-eight thousand people responded and here's what they said: 8 percent, North Korea. 9 percent, Iraq. 83 percent, the United States.
Something tragic and terrible has happened to the United States, and in the wake of the great sympathy we enjoyed following September 11, 2001, it appears to be a self-inflicted wound.
What must we do?
We must renounce our claim as Leviathan and join the world community.
And while recognizing that there are very dangerous, very deranged people out there like Osama bin Laden and Milosovic and Karadzic and Saddam Hussein, ready to manipulate the resentment and rage that exists among masses of dispossessed people, — we must have the courage to ask, Why are the dispossessed so full of resentment and rage? Why are they dispossessed?
These things take large stores of moral vision and strength to do. We must work and pray that leaders capable of that arise among us. And meanwhile, we must not cease to plead with such leaders as we have for a more wise, a more moral, course.
Do this mean that my hope now lies with the United Nations as global Leviathan?
It seems to me that we must strengthen this one global council and court of nations so that no single nation can ever again dictate the terms and conditions of life on this planet.
Inside my front door is the large UN flag I ordered awhile back to hang in front next time the Town of Westhampton festoons all those utility poles with American flags. But it hasn't gone up yet. I don't know what the United Nations is going to do. Its moral strength and its clarity of vision is no stronger than that of its constituent members. A week ago Friday I felt very much encouraged when the French ambassador's speech in favor of the French-German alternative to war was greeted with unprecedented applause, and when other nations declared their determination to pursue that course instead of war. But I know too that the leaders of these nations were thinking about the next election. Perhaps it's really Tony Blair who's the courageous and ethical player, doing what he believes is right in face of public opposistion — even if his conclusions are wrong, as I believe they are. I am not so sure that Chirac and Schroeder will not finally cave to American pressure, and the United Nations will endorse war after all. Yeh, the UN could just disappoint us again, too.
What have we really got going for us in this crisis? The answer is simply this: our humanity.
Now, we know we can lose our humanity. It happens subtly through downward steps, through stages. How we lose it, and how we regain it, are for another sermon. Suffice it to say:
You avoid looking at what you are doing, and you shut out the press.
You cultivate hardness against sympathy. You undermine whatever respect might exist for the humanity of your enemy.
You do what you can to undermine the normal restraints that come from the moral identity of the public.
We must regain and reassert our humanity, nurture its highest possibilities everywhere.
The only real hope for us in these times is the regaining of our humanity, and the conduct of our public affairs in such way that the humanity of others, too, is evoked and not stifled and twisted.
I suppose that Saddam will refuse to destroy by deadline his al-Samoud missiles which are perhaps his only defense against imminent attack, and that the US and UK and maybe the UN will go to war and a hundred thousand Iraqis will perish, and some American general will rule Iraq. America and Britain will face a series of terrorist attacks. Beneath the blood and fire, the big questions will remain unanswered.
But at the end of the day, pre-emptive military force will lead only to catastrophe; and deterrence and containment will prove mere stopgaps.
In 1945, Niels Bohr — the great Niels Bohr, Danish physicist, said simply:
We are in a completely new situation that cannot be resolved by war.
Two years after Bohr's statement — came this one from Einstein, about our reliance on nuclear weaponry:
This basic power of the universe cannot be fitted into the outdated concept of narrow nationalisms. For there is no secret and there is no defense; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world.
Who today remembers this from President Kennedy's inaugural address? "Now the trumpet summons us again — not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need, not as a call to battle, though embattled we are, but the call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out . . . a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself."
When our nation embraces the struggle against the common enemies of humankind — earnestly, transparently — it will then deserve the honour and trust of the world's peoples.
2 Joy Gordon. "Cool War: Economic sanctions as a weapon of mass destruction." Harper's Magazine, November 2002.
3 June 23, 1991.
4 "Keeping Saddam Hussein in a Box," Feb. 2, 2003.
5 James Risen and David Johnson. "Split at C.I.A. and F.B.I. on Iraqi Ties to Al Qaeda." New York Times, Feb. 2, 2003.
6 Jonathan Schell. "The Case Against the War." The Nation, March 3, 2003, p.12.
Jonathan Glover,
Director of the Center of Medical Law and Ethics at King's College London.
Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999, 2001, pp. 408f.
Most of all, the functioning of the human responses as a restraint requires the moral imagination. When Nixon and others planned the bombing of Cambodia, they sent death and suffering to people they hardly felt were real. . . . This is also true of some of the hawks in the Cuba crisis. On the other hand, the imagination of Kennedy and the doves had been stimulated by being taught about the human effects of nuclear war. Emotional responses to the possible victims came alive.
Central to the moral imagination is seeing what is humanly important. When it is stimulated, there is a breakthrough of the human responses, otherwise deadened by such things as distance, tribalism or ideology. It checks conformity and obedience, bringing to the fore what matters humanly . . . It makes vivid the victims and the human reality of what will be done to them.
Jonathan Schell
"The Case Against the War." The Nation, March 3, 2003, p.23
Let us try to imagine it: one human species on its one earth exercising one will to defeat forever a threat to its one colleactive existence. Could any nation stand against it? Without this commitment, the international community — if I may express it thus — is like a nuclear reactor from which the fuel rods have been withdrawn. Making the commitment would be to insert the rods, and start up the chain reaction. the chain reaction would be the democratic activity of peoples demanding action from the governments to secure their survival. True democracy is indispensable to disamarmament, and vice versa. This is the power — not the power of cruise missiles and B-52s — that can release humanity from its peril. The price demanded of us for freedom from the danger of weapons of mass destruction is to relinquish our own.
It has been a rough winter for many of us. Tomorrow David Bourbeau goes to the Leahy Clinic in Burlington where, on Tuesday, he will undergo some very promising, but extremely major surgery. He and Marie and Anja will need lots of love and support.
Let's be gathered in quietness. Quiet our minds, open our spirits.
We know ourselves today to be part and parcel of this great teeming universe of life, this world of promise and of threat, and all of this is a part of us, and we a part of it.
In this unceasing tide of affairs these lives of ours are passed, but never really as spectators alone. Let us be still and hear, and see, and know, somewhere deep beyond our confusion. Let us let go our defenses, tensions, protective numbness. Let us love this world of life. Why should we not enjoy an original relation to the Universe, Emerson asked. Why should we not? — fresh, and immediate, now, for it is our birthright, now, in this silence. Beyond our terrors, desperation, busyness, grievances, — everything: — there is, enveloping us, permeating everything, — the unfathomable and immeasurable currents of Life itself, Love itself, vision and truth and energies that seem always to surprise us — not far away, not to be sought for in some future time, but always, already here. Let every heart and mind be open, in this silence.