Peace Messenger

The Prophetic Word

Excerpts from Pastor Trevor Kinlock's sermon, "I'm Sick of It!", preached at Calvary Seventh-day Adventist Church in Newport News, Virginia, May 10, 2008:

A fiery preacher named Jeremiah…criticized the nation and its smooth-talking pastors and they threw him in jail and burned his sermon notes (Jer. 36:37)….

Beloved, they cannot handle the message of the prophet, they cannot handle the message of truth, when it challenges the structures of power….

[The prophets'] message is universal, and its speaks to nations, social conditions, and religious institutions and orthodoxy.  “Woe,” and “repent” are the two consistent words of the prophet.

And so, church, if we have a prophetic message, we ought to speak out against the nation when the nation contravenes a “thus saith the Lord.”  Help us God!

And so I declare this afternoon, “Woe unto you, George Bush, for lying about weapons of mass destruction.  Woe unto you for invading and destroying a nation, and arrogantly trading the blood of thousands of American soldiers for oil and strategic dominance.  Woe unto you. Shame on you.  There’s a problem with that....

Repent, America, for exploiting the poor and enlarging the rich.  God is not pleased with that….

Woe unto you, America, for glorifying violence, perverting sexuality, debasing the institution of marriage, and worshipping the “almighty dollar.”  Woe! Woe! Woe!  God is not happy with you.  God is not pleased with you.  God is going to deal.  Judgment day is coming….There’s a God that sits in heaven and He deals with those who oppress His people.  So you better repent!

Last day church, don’t be afraid to preach the prophetic word. Remnant church, Seventh-day Adventist church, don’t be afraid to speak truth to power....

Listen to the sermon at PraizeVision.com.

Metastatic Militarism

President Bush will leave to his successor not only "a world marred by war and battered by deprivation" but also "a Pentagon metastasized almost beyond recognition," writes Frida Berrigan at TomDispatch.com.  She identifies seven aspects of the Pentagon's stunning expansion both in size and influence during the past six years:

1. The Budget-busting Pentagon: The Pentagon's core budget -- already a staggering $300 billion when George W. Bush took the presidency -- has almost doubled while he's been parked behind the big desk in the Oval Office. For fiscal year 2009, the regular Pentagon budget will total roughly $541 billion (including work on nuclear warheads and naval reactors at the Department of Energy).

...And that's before we even count "war spending." If the direct costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Global War on Terror, are factored in, "defense" spending has essentially tripled.

2. The Pentagon as Diplomat: The Bush administration has repeatedly exhibited its disdain for discussion and compromise, treaties and agreements, and an equally deep admiration for what can be won by threat and force. No surprise, then, that the White House's foreign policy agenda has increasingly been directed through the military....

3. The Pentagon as Arms Dealer: In the Bush years, the Pentagon has aggressively increased its role as the planet's foremost arms dealer, pumping up its weapons sales everywhere it can -- and so seeding the future with war and conflict....

4. The Pentagon as Intelligence Analyst and Spy: In the area of "intelligence," the Pentagon's expansion -- the commandeering of information and analysis roles -- has been swift, clumsy, and catastrophic....

5. The Pentagon as Domestic Disaster Manager: ... in the Bush years, the Pentagon has become the official first responder of last resort in case of just about any disaster -- from tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods to civil unrest, potential outbreaks of disease, or possible biological or chemical attacks....

6. The Pentagon as Humanitarian Caregiver Abroad: ...The Center for Global Development finds that the Pentagon's share of "official development assistance" -- think "winning hearts and minds" or "nation-building" – has increased from 6% to 22% between 2002 and 2005. The Pentagon is fast taking over development from both the NGO-community and civilian agencies, slapping a smiley face on military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond....

7. The Pentagon as Global Viceroy and Ruler of the Heavens: In the Bush years, the Pentagon finished dividing the globe into military "commands," which are functionally viceroyalties....

Meanwhile, should the Earth not be enough, there are always the heavens to control. In August 2006...the Bush administration unveiled its "national space policy." It advocated establishing, defending, and enlarging U.S. control over space resources and argued for "unhindered" rights in space -- unhindered, that is, by international agreements preventing the weaponization of space....

America AWOL on Cluster Bombs

The U.S. is the world's largest producer, stockpiler, and user of cluster bombs, and is skipping the current negotiations in Dublin on a global treating to ban this particularly vicious type of munition. More than 100 governments, including all the major NATO allies, are participating in the talks.  The U.S. is not taking part, but is pressuring allies to weaken the treaty, claiming that a ban would undermine joint military operations with allies.  Lora Lumpe reports at Foreign Policy in Focus:

Cluster weapons open in mid-air dispersing dozens to hundreds of small submunitions over an area that can be as large as several football fields. According to the most comprehensive research to date, the vast majority of confirmed casualties from this type of weapon have been civilians. In the past 10 years, the United States has used cluster bombs in civilian-populated areas of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo. These weapons also have an established track record of killing and injuring U.S. soldiers. During Operation Desert Storm, U.S. cluster submunitions were responsible for more U.S. troop casualties (80) than any Iraqi weapons system.

“Cluster munitions do not know when the war has ended,” said Mark Engman, Director of Public Policy and Advocacy at the U.S. Fund for UNICEF. “Children stumble over them long after the conflict has ended or pick them up thinking that they are toys.”

The treaty will prohibit use, production, and export of cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians. It will also require the destruction of stockpiles and provide assistance to victims and affected communities....

Last year Congress passed a one-year moratorium on exports of cluster munitions. Congress can help move the United States closer toward the position of the world community and its major military allies by supporting the Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act. This draft law would prohibit the U.S. military from using cluster bombs in areas that are normally populated by civilians, and it would prohibit the use of weapons that leave behind an unacceptably large number of landmine-like submunitions....  more

More information on encouraging congressional action on cluster bombs from the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

The Myth of American Diplomacy

The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy
by Walter L. Hixson
Yale University Press / 2008

Review/Comment

In The Myth of American Diplomacy, Walter Hixson, a professor of history at the University of Akron, puts forth the disturbing thesis that we Americans are so violent because we presume ourselves to be virtuous. He argues that the roots of our current situation can be traced back to America's Puritan beginnings and are sustained through a national narrative that glorifies violence as an instrument of moral purification and divine providence. The potent and deadly mix of self-interest and religious rationalization has created an American citizenry that turns to violence quickly, naturally and with a deep sense of entitlement. Violence has become enmeshed in the very notion of who we are as a nation.

--Timothy Renick, Christian Century, May 6, 2008

Iran: Our Ticket Out of Iraq?

Maya Schenwar of truthout writes about her interview with Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah's Men and Overthrow:

"Every time I pick up my newspaper and read about what's coming out of Washington, my fears of an American attack on Iran intensify," Kinzer told me during an interview last week....

During our interview, Kinzer pointed to the hypocrisy of Bush admonishing Iran for intervening militarily in Iraq. Kinzer stressed that the US must recognize the legitimacy of Iran's integral role.

"The fact is, Iran does have influence in Iraq, and Iran always will have influence in Iraq," he said.

The two countries are tied religiously, politically, historically and geographically, and the US is in no position to sever those ties, according to Kinzer. Rather, he suggested, we might use them to our advantage, viewing Iran as "our ticket out of Iraq."...

"All the Shah's Men" reminds us that, when it comes to Iran, the backseat is probably where we should be sitting. The US was responsible for the 1953 coup that toppled Iran's democratic government, replacing it with the repressive Shah regime, which hastened the Islamic Revolution of 1970s, inspiring the rise of radical groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda....

Kinzer's most recent book, "Overthrow," shows how the "regime change" model has developed over the past 110 years. In our interview, he discussed the motivations behind that empire-driven mentality - and why, ultimately, it's doomed to fail.

"As long as the US arrogates to itself the right to decide which governments may live, and which must die, these interventions are never going to work out," Kinzer said.

Click here to view the interview

What Have We Learned?

“What Have We Learned, If Anything?” Tony Judt, in the May 1 issue of the New York Review of Books, asks this question about the twentieth century, with its massive-scale brutalities of total war, concentration camps and genocide.  “We have,” he notes, “memorialized it everywhere: shrines, inscriptions, ‘heritage sites,’ even historical theme parks are all public reminders of ‘the Past.’”

But when many respectable and influential Americans – he quotes a Supreme Court justice, a constitutional law expert, a liberal Democratic Senator, and a divinity school ethicist – “favor torture – under the appropriate circumstances and when applied to those who merit it” and thereby erode that “which until very recently distinguished democracies from dictatorships,” what have we learned?

We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and "exceptional" circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and "terrorists," between "us" and "them" —are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur "never again." So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there?

Far from escaping the twentieth century, we need, I think, to go back and look a bit more carefully. We need to learn again—or perhaps for the first time—how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance.

The Military-Entertainment Complex

The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives
by Nick Turse
Metropolitan Books/2008

Hollywood and the Pentagon have been in an intricate dance of support and cross-promotion for almost a century, from a time when the Department of Defense was still quaintly -- if more accurately -- known as the War Department. Today, however, without leaving Hollywood behind, the Pentagon has branched out into the larger universe of entertainment. Video games, TV, NASCAR racing, social networking, professional bull riding, toys, professional wrestling, you name it and the military-entertainment complex has a hand in it -- and don't forget about the Pentagon's links to Starbucks, Apple Computer, Oakley sunglasses, and well, gosh… in one way or another, directly or indirectly, just about everything that looks civilian in (or out of) your house.

In fact, there's a remarkable new book that looks into all of this, while doing the best job around of updating the old military-industrial complex, a term whose hard-edged simplicity an ever-expanding Pentagon long ago left in the dust. Whatever you do, don't miss Nick Turse's The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. It's an eye-opener on the degree to which we are, without realizing it, a militarized society; it is, as well, the latest spin-off book from Tomdispatch.com, where some of its parts were initially tested out. But let me just quote Chalmers Johnson on The Complex: "Americans who still think they can free themselves from the clutches of the military-industrial complex need to read this book. The gimmicks the Pentagon uses to deceive, entrap, and enlist gullible 18 to 24 year olds make signing up anything but voluntary. Nick Turse has produced a brilliant exposé of the Pentagon's pervasive influence in our lives."

--Tom Englehardt, "Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Pentagon Goes Hollywood," March 20, 2008.

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"They Create Desolation and Call it Peace"

A rich enemy excites their cupidity; a poor one, their lust for power. East and West alike have failed to satisfy them.... To robbery, butchery, and rapine, they give the lying name of "government"; they create a desolation and call it peace.

David Bromwich opens his essay "Euphemism and American Violence" (New York Review of Books, April 3, 2008) with this second-century critique of Rome in Tacitus' Agricola. "Euphemism has been the leading quality of American discussions of the war in Iraq," Bromwich contends.  An excerpt:

"Baghdad is calmer now; the surge is working." The temporary partial peace is an effect of accomplished desolation, a state of things in which the Shiite "cleansing" of the city has achieved the dignity of the status quo, and been ratified by the walls and checkpoints of General Petraeus. "The surge is working" is a fiction that blends several facts indistinguishably. For example: that Iraq is a land of militias and (as Nir Rosen has put it) the US Army is the largest militia; that in 2007 we paid 80,000 "Sunni extremists" to switch sides and then call themselves The Awakening. Americans have suggested that the members of this militia make up neighborhood watch groups, and have assigned them euphemistic cover-names such as Concerned Local Citizens and Critical Infrastructure Security. In fact, many of them are "increasingly frustrated with the American military," according to Sudarsan Raghavan and Amit R. Paley in a Washington Post story that ran on February 28.

Daydream Believers

Michiko Kakutani's review of a new book by Fred Kaplan, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, provides a succinct retrospective on the consequences of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, launched five years ago today.  Joseph Tobing, computer science professor at Columbia Union College, forwarded this review, "Global Strategy or Grand Illusion?" (New York Times, March 18, 2008).

American troops bogged down in Iraq, a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, an overstretched military and National Guard, simmering tensions with Iran and North Korea, and growing hostility toward the United States around the world: these are just some of the consequences of Bush administration foreign policy over the last seven years. To the Slate columnist Fred Kaplan, these woes all stem from two grand misconceptions held by the White House and its top advisers: that the world fundamentally changed after 9/11, when in fact “the way the world works — the nature of power, warfare and politics among nations — remained essentially the same”; and that in a post-cold-war era, the United States “had the power to set the terms of the new world order” and could therefore act unilaterally, without entangling alliances and without compromising “with competing concepts or interests.” ...

[Kaplan] underscores the crucial role the speechwriter Michael Gerson, a self-described evangelical, played in linking the president’s religious and moral imperatives with his expansionist foreign policy. And he argues that Elliott Abrams, a member of Mr. Bush’s National Security Council (and a former Reagan administration official who was involved in the Iran-contra scandal), “embodied both factions behind the administration’s new policies — the moral crusaders and the power-centric nationalists.” ...

President Bush’s strategies, Mr. Kaplan writes near the end of this incisive book, failed “because they did not fit the realities of his era”: “They were based not on a grasp of technology, history or foreign cultures but rather on fantasy, faith and willful indifference toward those affected by their consequences.”

Failing to acknowledge the limits of American power, he writes, President Bush and his aides ended up trumpeting the country’s “reduced powers — and, as a result, they weakened their nation further.” They “set forth a new way of fighting battles — but withheld the tools for winning wars. They aimed to topple rogue regimes — with scant knowledge of the local culture and no plan for what to do after the tyrant fell. They dreamed of spreading democracy around the world — but did nothing to help build the democratic institutions without which mere elections were moot or worse. In their best-intentioned moments, they put forth ideas without strategies, policies without process, wishes without means.”

Inscription for a War

Stranger, go tell the Spartans
we died here obedient to their commands.
Inscription at Thermopylae

Linger not, stranger, shed no tear;

Go back to those who sent us here.

We are the young they drafted out

To wars their folly brought about.

Go tell those old men, safe in bed,

We took their orders and are dead.

--A.D. Hope

Charles Scriven, who forwarded this poem, writes that A.D. Hope (b. 1907) was an Australian author, and that the poem takes off from the famous battle of 480 B.C. in which the Greeks, led by the Spartans, failed to stave off the invading Persians under Xerxes.