 Can the U.S. Claim a Moral Victory in its War on Terror?
By Vicki Brown (UMCom) - Most American servicemen and women in Iraq believe it was a "holy, righteous thing," to rid the country of Saddam Hussein’s oppressive regime, says Capt. Jack S. Stanley, a United Methodist chaplain in the U.S. Air Force who recently served in Iraq. But he makes no excuses for American mistreatment of Iraqi war prisoners.  "Americans were appalled at the idea that prisoners were mistreated, but what Iraq has done and continued to do to their own people - to compare what we did to that is nothing short of horrendous," says Stanley, now serving in Avino, Italy. "That said, none of that excuses the inappropriate treatment of prisoners."
As the third anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington approaches, some Americans are beginning to ask themselves whether their country is seeking justice or revenge in Iraq. And they are asking whether their country still will claim a moral victory in its ongoing war on terror. "The fact that we get so enraged proves that we do have a higher moral standard than some," Stanley argues. But others disagree. When news broke that U.S. soldiers abused war prisoners, Americans cringed, and protesters grew more confident in their argument that the war in Iraq is immoral, unjust and diverts the country from its real mission of capturing Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders.  "We exploited the attacks to make war on a country that had nothing to do with 9/11," says Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. "Now people consider us a threat to peace."
The mistreatment of war prisoners "shatters the theory that we’re there on the moral high ground," he says. "What this small group has done, they have in effect dehumanized the Iraqi people and defamed the Islamic faith." The abuse of Iraqi war prisoners came in response to a tough counterinsurgency that followed an easy victory in Afghanistan, says Dr. Charles Strozier, director of the Center on Terrorism at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. He points to the abuse and erroneous intelligence that Iraq stockpiled weapons of mass destruction and compares the war in Iraq to the Vietnam War. "What has proven to be true is that it’s a very unjust war. It’s a colossal mistake on the order of Vietnam," he says. "The rage and the fury (over the counterinsurgency) that I think led to the mistakes that unleashed torture are all part of the larger picture that the war itself is fundamentally wrong - wrong in a military sense and a strategic sense and therefore in a moral sense."  Bishop Melvin Talbert, interim director of the Black Methodists for Church Renewal, says the United States gave up too quickly on working with the United Nations. He believes the United States could have tried backing United Nations weapons inspectors with troops as an alternative to war.
"I have never been supportive of the war, the whole premise has been wrong," he says. "We take the position that all we need to do is flex our powerful muscles, and the world will respond. We’ve demonstrated once again that that doesn’t work." Talbert, who was among a delegation of 13 religious leaders to travel to Iraq before the war to try to stop it, notes that at one point President Bush commented that Hussein tried to have his father killed.  "I think it’s revenge. That’s what was deep in the psyche of the President," he says.
Like Talbert, Al-Marayati sees an element of revenge in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. "Muslims have been blamed for everything from our gas prices to anything violent going on in the world," he says, adding most of the world’s Muslims are peaceful and find terrorist acts such as beheadings to be abhorrent. But others believe there is justification for the war in Iraq - just cause, war declared by a legitimate authority and just objectives that outweigh the destruction likely to result from battle. Dr. David L. Perry, who teaches ethics at the U.S. Army War College, dismisses the possibility that the Bush administration lied about Iraq’s weapons. Perry, who cautions his comments are his own and do not represent the U.S. government, notes that others including Sandy Berger, national security director in the Clinton administration, also believed Hussein had such weapons.  Perry, like the University of Chicago’s Jean Bethke Elshtain, a political philosopher and divinity school professor whose latest book is Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World, points to the brutality of Hussein’s regime and says the war can be justified on humanitarian grounds. Elshtain says it’s hard for Christians to understand peace may not always be preferable to war.
She says a long tradition first spelled out in the writings of St. Augustine holds Christians in public office to a different standard. They are charged with doing what they must to preserve the lives their community, she says. "Here in the United States, before 9/11 … we had the luxury of thinking in another way. Now we realize we are vulnerable," she says. "I think the leaders of the Christian tradition should remember this tradition and acknowledge its arguments." Discuss this subject online with other UMC.org visitors. Vicki Brown is a free-lance writer in Nashville, Tenn. This feature was developed by UMC.org, the official online ministry of The United Methodist Church.
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