Anti-liberation Theology

The Weekly Standard ^ | May 5, 2003 | Joseph Loconte

[ultima ratio]

Anti-Liberation Theology The clerics got it wrong on Iraq. by Joseph Loconte 05/05/2003, Volume 008, Issue 33

RELIGIOUS FIGURES who opposed the liberation of Iraq have a lot of explaining to do. Fashioning themselves prophets of peace, they caustically denounced the "rush to war." Having granted the United Nations an almost transcendent moral authority, they declared Operation Iraqi Freedom an "immoral" act of aggression. In the months leading up to the conflict, they made a litany of brash claims and gloomy predictions--all proven to be utterly false.

Take their suggestion that Saddam Hussein was not the devil many made him out to be. Some religious leaders even denied that he ever used chemical weapons against the Kurds. George Hunsinger, professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, cited approvingly the Nation's dismissal of the charge as "a catchy slogan to demonize Saddam in the popular American imagination." Meanwhile, Frank Griswold, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, derided prowar Christians for holding "simplistic views of good and evil."

Yet "evil" is the word that most often passes from the lips of newly liberated Iraqis to describe Saddam's regime. "If you only knew what this man did to Iraq," said an elderly man in Baghdad beating Saddam's portrait with his shoe. "He killed our youth. He killed millions." Day by day we learn more about the arbitrary arrests, tortures, and executions; the special prisons for children of dissidents; the diversion of food and medicine intended for needy Iraqis. None of it should surprise anyone: For years, the same facts had been uncovered by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the U.N. special rapporteur. Not since Cambodia's killing fields had a government terrorized so many of its own people.

Antiwar clerics remained silent about these facts, apparently in order to keep the faith about containing the Butcher of Baghdad: He had no serious interest, they said, in weapons of mass destruction. Seeing little evidence that Saddam was rearming, editors at the Christian Century rejected arguments for war as "extreme and unfounded." Jim Winkler, of the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society, complained of "an astonishing lack of evidence" to justify military intervention.

What's truly astonishing, however, was the clerics' willful neglect of Saddam's deception and defiance of U.N. weapons inspectors. Kenneth Pollack, a former Iraq specialist with the National Security Council and a scholar at the Brookings Institute, doubted that any inspections regime could prevent Iraq from developing the most deadly weapons. "Saddam is working to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction programs," Pollack wrote on the eve of war, "and the more time he has, the more lethal that arsenal will become." Even German intelligence services concluded in a December 2000 report that Iraq was close to producing a nuclear bomb. Yet church leaders said nothing when Secretary of State Colin Powell exposed Baghdad's "web of lies" with chilling clarity before the U.N. Security Council.

As to the conduct of the war, opponents were certain that a U.S. strike would devastate Iraq's infrastructure and foment a humanitarian crisis. The Church World Service, an association of faith-based relief agencies, expected "horrendous humanitarian consequences." Jonathan Frerichs of Lutheran World Relief complained bitterly that "we're attacking the government who's running the food distribution system for two-thirds of the country." The reality, of course, was that Saddam built lavish palaces and hijacked the country's oil-for-food program while 400,000 Iraqi children under the age of five died of malnutrition.

In fact, Pentagon planners engineered a brilliant military campaign that minimized the war's effects on daily life. Five months prior to the invasion, the State Department assembled emergency relief organizations at Iraq's border. Thousands of tons of food, water, and medical supplies were delivered within days after the conflict began. By quickly putting troops on the ground, coalition forces secured the nation's 600 oil fields, preventing an ecological disaster. Bombing raids, which focused intently on military targets, left bridges and power grids mostly untouched.

Indeed, the most shameful accusation made by religious liberals was that American troops would blithely ignore the rules of warfare and kill "massive" numbers of non-combatants. Joseph Sprague, a bishop of the United Methodist Church, said innocent civilians "will not be protected." Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, insisted that U.S. forces wouldn't hesitate to kill women and children. Rose Marie Berger, an editor of Sojourners, agreed: "Imagine our 200,000 troops . . . bringing home pictures of kids they helped save, rather than images of children they were trained to kill."

Innocents have died in this conflict, as they do in every war, which is one of the reasons war should be a last resort. But considering the tactics of the Iraqi military--using human shields, dressing in civilian clothes, hiding in schools and mosques--civilian deaths could have been much higher. Indeed, in an extraordinary effort, the U.S. military linked moral principle to modern combat. Satellite-guided bombs were carried by almost all navy and air force fighters, giving them unrivaled accuracy. Cities were bypassed to avoid bloody urban campaigns. Coalition troops put their own lives at risk to get civilians out of harm's way. When all is said and done, military historians will identify Operation Iraqi Freedom as the most justly fought war in the history of modern warfare.

What of the wailing prophets? Susan Thistlethwaite, president of Chicago Theological Seminary, warned that if America attacked Iraq, "then it is Americans who have become the barbarians." Catholic Bishop John Michael Botean called the war an "objectively grave evil." Any killing associated with the conflict, he intoned, is "unequivocally murder." Even Pope John Paul II, no pacifist, declared it "a defeat for humanity." Compare all this with the cries of joy from Iraqis after Saddam's 40-foot statue was toppled in Baghdad: "We are still scared but we are happy," said Maysoun Raheem. "Thank God this has happened and the Americans have come." For them, this was indeed a war of liberation. "I am 50 years old," said Kareem Mohammad Kareem, "but my life just started today."

The victims of tyranny always seem to understand the implacable nature of its evil better than anyone--better than those who safely hurl jeremiads at the world's injustices as their bread and butter. The clerics were wrong about this war, wrong about the despicable regime it toppled, wrong about nearly everything. And yet they remain unrepentant: "Prophetic voices are always way out ahead of the congregation," boasted the NCC's Bob Edgar. "None of the Old Testament prophets had a majority."

Perhaps, but at least their predictions conformed to reality. That's a lot more than can be said of the prognosticators of our own day.

Joseph Loconte is the William E. Simon Fellow in Religion and a Free Society at the Heritage Foundation and a commentator for National Public Radio.

[ultima ratio]

The author goes easy on the Pope who was the most publicized offender of all. And the question naturally comes to mind: what else are these liberal churchmen consistently wrong about?

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[St.Chuck]

No matter the issue, you are influenced by the most insidious propaganda. The Weekly Standard reads like a one-dimensional comic book, rarely vering from extolling the virtues of it's hero, the War Party. While it would be safe to assume that you chose to post this because it criticized the pope you are so proud to pray for, one would be safe to assume that you believe every lie contained in this self-congratulatory, mocking garbage.

I'll start here:

Yet church leaders said nothing when Secretary of State Colin Powell exposed Baghdad's "web of lies" with chilling clarity before the U.N. Security Council.

Sure they did. The world heard that Powell's clarity was based on intelligence that was plagiarized from a college term paper, that the evidence citing a nuclear arms program was forged, that terrorist camps in Iraq were actually located in Kurdish contolled northern Iraq. If church leaders said nothing it was because they couldn't close their mouths, so frozen agape they were from the shock and awe of the U.S. governments mendacity. None of the world bought it, and that is why the causa belli suddenly shifted to the barbarity of Saddam's regime. That's when we began to hear about the plastic shredders, tonguerectomies, and inverted menstruations. If well thought out lies are unconvincing, then give 'em the tried and true torture tales. Who does the author attribute his millions of people slain by Saddam....the man with the shoe caught on TV beating a poster.

Another made for TV image is the staged toppling of the Saddam statue, for wasn't liberation and the democracy the final substitute cause for war? The Weekly Standard will remind us of the picture, but not the details, all the Clintonesque symbolism, the tank recovery vehicle that happened to be on hand, the marine from New York City, draping the flag from the pentagon, in the nearly empty square that had been blocked off by U.S. tanks, across from the hotel that housed the world's camera's. All coincidences? There are no concidences in propaganda. The author asks for a comparision. Compare all this with the cries of joy from Iraqis after Saddam's 40-foot statue was toppled in Baghdad... I ask for a comparison of that near empty square to the the tens of thousands of Iraqi Shiites marching to Najaf.

The whole piece is a gloat about how successful they think their endeavor is while simutaneously trashing religious leaders. A cheer and smear campaign to be sure. But what do they cheer about? How many civilians they didn't kill. How many ecological disasters they avoided. I think they could add to their litany of accomplishments by citing how many spotted owls they avoided killing, such is the absurdity of boasting about what might have happened when in reality, thousands, yes, thousands of innocent people, and that is not including the conscripts tomahawk missiled by those courageous men on a ship hundreds of miles away, have been martyred for the great and noble quest for the Holy Grail.....er....I mean discovering weapons of mass destruction.

The Weekly Standard is garbage dude.

[ultima ratio]

You need to start living in the real world. The Vatican got it wrong, the National Council of Churches got it wrong--and you got it wrong. The war was not unjust as they said it was. It was not unjust to free Iraqi citizens from thirty years of oppression under a vicious tyrant. By claiming it was, the churchmen, including the Pope, have undermined their own credibility. They did so because they believed the anti-American propaganda put out by the left and churned up by France and Germany; they exalted the wisdom and moral superiority of the UN even as it was skimming off billions in a phony Iraqi oil-for-food program, working hand-in-glove with Saddam. Pope JnPII in particular did all he could to undermine the Bush diplomatic effort and to give Saddam moral standing and credibility by inviting his minister, Tariq Aziz to the Vatican to "discuss peace". All in all, it is a shameful page in religious--and Catholic Church--history--and the Weekly Standard did well to heap scorn on it. It is richly deserved.

[ultima ratio]

By the way, you are confusing Powell with the Brits. It was a backbench minister of the Labor Party who concocted a paper from academic sources. If you are going to pose an argument, get your facts straight. Powell's speech used valid CIA intelligence.

[St.Chuck]

Powell used precisely what I said to make his failed case to the U.N. The Weekly Standard is merely a mouthpiece for an administration infested by War Party appartchiks anxious to claim victory and write the history years before the consequences of this invasion will be known. My favorite is the claim that this military engagement will be studied for years to come. As if the races in Baja California have never been written about.

[Citizen of the United States]

It is nothing short of argumentum ad hominem to claim that the Holy Father's opposition to invasion undermines his credibility. The Holy Father's fears for the welfare of the innocent led him to seek a pacific alternative to military action. How is this relevant to his qualifications to speak on Faith and morals?

And it should be remembered that, per the teachings of the Holy Church, the Holy Father exhorted all competent authorities to seek diplomatic, pacific resolution -- and that the Holy Father's exhortation was not solely addressed to President George Walker Bush, but also to President Saddam Husayn al-Tikriti.

Furthermore, it is clearly and unambiguously stated in the Catechism of the Catholic Church that "[t]he evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy [of a war] belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good" (CCC 2309).

Although the Holy Father expressed his desires that military action be avoided, that does not change the fact that the determination of the morality of the act is the responsibility of President Bush and his relevant deputies. That is the position of the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

[Citizen of the United States]

Can you provide documentation for your claim that Secretary Powell used plagiarised, unsubstantiated data in his report to the U.N. Security Council?

Is everyone who speaks in favour of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, or who writes of its success, a "War Party" apparatchik in your estimation? Would Mr Gephardt, who voted for the Congressional authorisation to use military force, be among these jingoistic myrmidons?

[ultima ratio]

Look, these churchmen--including the Pope--are supposed to be moral leaders. If they leap to false conclusions, they are culpable of misleading millions of others who depend on what they say for guidance. The Pope, in particular, has a special responsibility. His influence on world affairs is considerable, and in this instance he was flat-out wrong, more interested in following the leftwing mantra of European anti-American propaganda than sorting out the truth about what was best for the Iraqi people. It was a gaffe of major proportion and there's no way to make amends for it after the fact.

The Pope did more than just call for a diplomatic solution, as you say. He UNDERMINED any possibility of a diplomatic solution by siding with the French and Germans and Russians who were deliberately undercutting our efforts in the UN. It was the Pontiff's own Secretary of State who charged us with waging a war of aggression and his own Vatican publications which claimed we were going to war because we coveted Iraqi oil. Apparently it never dawned on anybody at the Vatican that a war waged against an evil tyrant who had been butchering hundreds of thousands of his own citizens for thirty years might have been a just one.

[Citizen of the United States]

As I already wrote, the Catechism of the Catholic Church specifically says that the responsibility for making the determination of what is and what is not a just war does not belong to the Holy See, it belongs to the prudential judgement of the competent authorities.

The Holy Father spoke against military action, but that does not at all invalidate or undermine his credibility to speak on Faith and morals. The responsibility for the evaluation of the conditions of a just war does not belong to the Holy Father, but to the prudential judgement of President Bush. Obviously, President Bush determined that Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was a just action.

The Holy Father has lived under the shadow of both pagan National-Socialism and godless Bolshevism; I am reasonably sure that he is aware of what is is like to live under the oppression of totalitarianism. In this case, he believed, rightly or wrongly, that military action would cause still greater suffering to the innocents of Iraq.

One has the moral obligation to obey one's conscience, and it seems that the Holy Father's conscience demanded that he call for a pacific resolution. It would appear that the Holy Father was mistaken in his judgement on the matter. But one must not presume to judge the Supreme Pontiff.

[ultima ratio]

Absolutely incorrect. It was the Brits, not the US, who concocted a paper lifted from academic sources. Get your facts straight before you unfairly impugn US methods and motives.

____________________________________________________________
UK war dossier a sham, say experts

British 'intelligence' lifted from academic articles

Michael White and Brian Whitaker
Friday February 7, 2003
The Guardian

Downing Street was last night plunged into acute international embarrassment after it emerged that large parts of the British government's latest dossier on Iraq - allegedly based on "intelligence material" - were taken from published academic articles, some of them several years old.
Amid charges of "scandalous" plagiarism on the night when Tony Blair attempted to rally support for the US-led campaign against Saddam Hussein, Whitehall's dismay was compounded by the knowledge that the disputed document was singled out for praise by the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, in his speech to the UN security council on Wednesday.

Citing the British dossier, entitled Iraq - its infrastructure of concealment, deception and intimidation in front of a worldwide television audience Mr Powell said: "I would call my colleagues' attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed... which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities."

But on Channel 4 News last night it was revealed that four of the report's 19 pages had been copied - with only minor editing and a few insertions - from the internet version of an article by Ibrahim al-Marashi which appeared in the Middle East Review of International Affairs last September.

Though that was not the only textual embarrassment No 10 seemed determined to tough it out last night.

Dismissing the gathering controversy as the latest example of media obsession with spin, officials insisted it in no way undermines the underlying truth of the dossier, whose contents had been re-checked with British intelligence sources. "The important thing is that it is accurate," said one source.

What Whitehall may not grasp is the horror with which unacknowledged borrowing of material - the crime of plagiarism - is regarded in American academic and media circles, even though successive US governments have a poor record of misleading their own citizens on foreign policy issues at least since the Vietnam war. On a special edi tion of BBC Newsnight, filmed before a critical audience last night, Mr Blair stressed that he was willing to forgo popularity to warn voters of the dangers of weapons of mass destruction: "I may be wrong, but I do believe it."

With trust a critical element in the battle to woo a sceptical public the first sentence of the No 10 document merely states, somewhat cryptically, that it "draws upon a number of sources, including intelligence material".

But Glen Rangwala, a lecturer in politics at Cambridge University, told Channel 4: "I found it quite startling when I realised that I'd read most of it before."

The content of six more pages relies heavily on articles by Sean Boyne and Ken Gause that appeared in Jane's Intelligence Review in 1997 and last November. None of these sources is acknowledged.

The document, as posted on Downing Street's website at the end of January, also acci dentally named four Whitehall officials who had worked on it: P Hamill, J Pratt, A Blackshaw and M Khan. It was reposted on February 3 with the first three names deleted.

"Apart from passing this off as the work of its intelligence services," Dr Rangwala said, "it indicates that the UK really does not have any independent sources of information on Iraq's internal policies. It just draws upon publicly available data."

Evidence of an electronic cut-and-paste operation by Whitehall officials can be found in the way the dossier preserves textual quirks from its original sources. One sentence in Dr Marashi's article includes a misplaced comma in referring to Iraq's head of military intelligence during the 1991 Gulf war. The same sentence in Downing Street's report contains the same misplaced comma.

A Downing Street spokesman declined to say why the report's public sources had not been acknowledged. "We said that it draws on a number of sources, including intelligence. It speaks for itself."

Dr Marashi, a research associate at the Centre for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California, said no one had contacted him before lifting the material.

But on the regular edition of Newsnight he later gave some comfort to No 10. "In my opinion, the UK document overall is accurate even though there are a few minor cosmetic changes. The only inaccuracies in the UK document were that they maybe inflated some of the numbers of these intelligence agencies," he said.

Explaining the more journalistic changes inserted into his work by Whitehall he added: "Being an academic paper, I tried to soften the language.

"For example, in one of my documents, I said that they support organisations in what Iraq considers hostile regimes, whereas the UK document refers to it as 'supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes'.

"The primary documents I used for this article are a collection of two sets of documents, one taken from Kurdish rebels in the north of Iraq - around 4m documents - as well as 300,000 documents left by Iraqi security services in Kuwait. After that, I have been following events in the Iraqi security services for the last 10 years."

Iraq's decision last night to let weapons inspectors interview one of its scientists for the first time without government "minders" signalled that Baghdad may be bending under international pressure.

But diplomats will be trying to determine over the next few days whether it is a token gesture or a real shift away from what they describe as Iraq's "catch us if you can" approach to inspections. Hours before the announcement, a Foreign Office source in London signalled that this was the kind of change of heart that Iraq would have to make to avoid war.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

[Citizen of the United States]

Thank you for clarifying that particular matter.

[ultima ratio]

Your unwillingness to credit the President with good motives is pretty baffling to me. You mention a British dossier which turned out to be a sham, as if that proved Blair and Bush were themselves phonies--but the cheering Iraqi crowds surely must have convinced even you that the two leaders acted wisely. I don't get it. Why this reluctance to believe they acted from the highest motives to protect their countries from wmd and to free Iraqis from the thirty-year grip of a tyrant?

[Citizen of the United States]

Although it is clear that ultima ratio and I disagree on certain particulars, I must express my agreement with him regarding President Bush.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church invests President Bush with the responsibility to determine the moral legitimacy of military action. I believe that President Bush did indeed make use of his prudential judgement, with the best of intentions; I believe likewise that he made the correct decision.

However, your vitriolic accusations of jingoism mystify me. Opposition to military intervention is one thing, but your criticism of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM appears to go beyond that. Why are you so insistent that the decision to employ military force was defectively and incorrectly made?

[St.Chuck]

Can you provide documentation for your claim that Secretary Powell used plagiarised, unsubstantiated data in his report to the U.N. Security Council?

Yes I'd be happy to: Here's one article

Here's another

Is everyone who speaks in favour of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, or who writes of its success, a "War Party" apparatchik in your estimation? Would Mr Gephardt, who voted for the Congressional authorisation to use military force, be among these jingoistic myrmidons?

No; In Mr. Gebhardt's case, I think he would just be weighing the chances of success, and climbing on board for purely political reasons. By apparatchik, I am referring to a certain wing of the conservative party that believes that this time in history is one in which American military and economic power should be used unilaterally to achieve world domination, particularly in regions of economic importance such as the Middle East. Use of force in this area has been advocated well before 9/11 by conservatives who happen to be neatly ensconsed in the defense department, the National Security Agency, and their literati at the Rupert Murdoch owned media outlets, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Times, and Fox News. (The saber rattling at Syria was entirely predictable) One can support this war for many different reasons without actually being aware of, or supportive of the foreign policy goals of those who control our government. There is a difference between apparatchik and myrmidon, though the degree to which they have merited disgust is fairly equal.

[St.Chuck]

I never mentioned the president. I never said the dossier was unsubstantiated, just plagiarized, and that that was one of the reasons that the U.N. didn't support the use of force. I was detailed in my opinion about the liberation scene, but I never discussed the president's motives and I don't doubt his motives. When his government decided to convince the world that Saddam's regime was a threat, he posed it as a continuation of the war on terrorism because of Saddam's desire for and ability to produce wdm's. ...oh, and it's ties to terrorists. I guess one terrorist went to see the dentist in Baghdad and that was pretty incriminating. Well, the world didn't care, the world didn't feel threatened, just El Salvadore and the Solomon Islands (you know, part of the world's largest coalition ever assembled). It was only becuase of the inability to garner support throughout the world that the liberation and democracy domino game were even brought up. It was basicly plan two, and it sold well here, which is all you need. I don't know why you are surprised. I am in good company siding with the pope. I don't believe he was buying into leftist crap; it's pretty common for the pope to oppose any kind of hostility. My vitriole was reserved for the rag that I don't think prints the objective truth.

[ultima ratio]

Look, the sham was NOT IN THE FACTS but in the claim they were written by British intelligence whereas they were lifted from academic studies on terrorism. The studies themselves were accurate. Of course, Powell had no idea British intelligence had plagiarized the data. He certainly cannot be blamed for the dishonesty of others. Nor can he be charged with falsifying facts. The facts, in fact, were on target--though they were gotten dishonestly.

[ultima ratio]

It's late--I wrote my last post without digesting your own. I see you do, in fact, make the distinction I thought you didn't make.