The President`s Jihad?
By Robert L. Maddox
Note: Since 1992, Robert Maddox has served as pastor of Briggs Memorial Baptist Church, Bethesda, MD. From 1984 to 1992, he was Executive Director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Prior to 1984, he was a speechwriter and religious liaison at the White House during the Carter Administration. He also authors a regular email column, "Toward Millennium Faith," available at robtjr11@comcast.net.
In his latest book Plan of Attack, reporter Bob Woodward says he asked President Bush during their three hour interview if he had he talked with his father (President Bush I) about going to war with Iraq? The President replied, "He`s not the father to talk with about this war." Then, Woodward reports, the President made it plain he was talking to God about the war, and, according to Woodward, hardly anyone else.
In a nationally televised press conference this past spring dealing with the Irqi war, the President described the (holy) mission to which he feels called to bring freedom to the world.
Most Americans would find little discomfort at the superficial level of the President`s saying he looks to God for help on the war and his sense of calling to bring freedom to the world. Certainly Mr. Bush feels no discomfort. Indeed, from all indications he is completely comfortable with what he is doing about the war in Iraq. If you will recall, when a reporter at the April press conference asked the President to list any mistakes he had made so far in this war effort, Mr. Bush paused, looked surprised and said, "I cannot think of any I have made." If Americans want a leader who, while looking up, does not look back, we have surely found it in President Bush.
But when I push these presidential manifestations even a little bit, my anxieties just about go out the roof.
When Mr. Bush and God talked about the war, what did God tell him? Does the President want to tell the American people and the world that this is some sort of holy war? Is the President leading the American people of the 21st century into our own version of Jihad? Are we on a mission from Yahweh in Iraq? In Afghanistan?
The imams and their minions of Iraq feel the same divine sense of call from Allah as they blow up our civilians and troops and their own people. I hope there is a difference.
Some of the bloodiest wars in human history have been fought because one leader or another declared a call from god to obliterate the other side. We Americans have always run away from those who told us God was telling them to go to war, who looked to God for strategic battle planning.
Nothing that I know about God or Allah persuades me that the Holy One directs us to war. Sometimes our human need to defend against a takeover by a force inimical to our own way of life prompts us to take up arms. But to say this impulse is from God, from heaven, from paradise, flies in the face of everything I understand about the Divine. War is a survival tactic. There is nothing divine about war.
Maybe, in agony, with a profound sense of diplomatic failure, having earnestly tried every other known way to under gird the security of the American nation, Mr. Bush could say to himself and God and us, "I, George Bush, Commander in Chief, have determined that it is in our best national interest to take up arms up against the repressive Iraqi regime. To that end, I am praying for guidance, for a minimal loss of life on both sides, for a quick end to this terrible, human tragedy we call war."
I do not feel any of that introspection, any soul searching, even a modicum of "let this cup pass from me" from the President. Woodward`s book, by all accounts backed up by hours of taped interviews with the principals of American policy, indicates that the President and Vice-president decided on the war and, only then, got some folks involved to help work out the gritty details. If Woodward is only half right in his reporting, I am terribly uneasy.
And freedom to the world? Of course I cherish our freedoms. And of course, I would like for everyone on the planet to enjoy our measure of freedom. But is war the primary instrument for bringing about that grand and noble end? Is this war what we need to be about at this point in world history? It is apparent something has gone unbelievably wrong with our effort to bring freedom to Iraq. Instead of meeting us with flowers and candy, our troops have been met with hails of bullets from the very ones we have come to liberate. More Americans have died "since we won the war" than while we were still fighting the war. I know that some observers and politicians are saying the majority of the Iraqi people are glad we are in their country. I hope that is the case. But so far, we have not seen much indication of that welcoming by the Iraqi people from the world press-not just the "liberal" American press but the world press. And multiplied billions to build stuff in Iraq when we cannot find enough money to provide health care for working Americans?
And no mistakes? That has to be one of the most breath taking statements ever to come from the mouth of any mortal, much less an American President who is forced to make dozens of highly complicated, often morally competing decisions every day of his life in the White House.
It occurs to me that if God has told you to impose freedom on the world by force, then maybe you have made no mistakes. Who dares accuse God and God`s instrument of mistakes!
As you know, I am not the President. Still, I have made an earnest effort to walk in the ways of God for most of my life and my mistakes, sins, missteps, deliberate detours even in following that path, are legion. Maybe when one works out of the Oval Office rather than out of my cluttered church office, mistakes are a thing of the past.
Caveats:
In my many years of voting, I have voted for Democrats and Republicans.
I have had the good fortune to enjoy fairly extensive conversations with three Presidents for whom I have enormous respect-Jimmy Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. I never sensed in these men, all gifted and monumentally fallible, President Bush`s towering insensitivity, his seeming inability to get his arms and mind around these incredibly complex issues that are unsettling the entire world.
Don`t anyone accuse me of not supporting our troops in Iraq and around the world.
Don`t suggest because I have grave misgivings about our present policy in Iraq, as well as in many other areas of national life, that I am not a hopeless patriot. I can get tears in my eyes just looking at our flag whipping in the breeze over the U.S. Capitol. I revel in our greatness as a nation. At that same time, I am profoundly aware of our manifold shortcomings as a nation and as a people. As I love this country, I must do all I can to help it-us-continue to be the very best we can for all the human family. In laboring to be and do the best, we do the work of God in the world.
Millennium Faith for the 21st century must evoke from our leaders and us as individuals an ever more reflective understanding of the ways of the Spirit. We have to be willing to struggle with the conviction that God is not on our side any more than God is on the other side. In fact, we may have to come to see that God does not take sides in these brutal, convoluted messes we make of human relationships.
I can agree that God, Allah, the Source, the Cosmic Energy, the Ground of Being does penetrate human experience in ways I cannot begin to articulate. The "There That Is There" does become involved with bleeding, suffering soldiers, their families, and bleeding, suffering, Iraqi children and their families who get blown to smithereens by insane car bombers. I express grave misgivings when any President, any Nation decides the Holy One has somehow spoken, calling for, blessing war. If we believe that God as Creator of us all, loves all the human family, we cannot believe that the Deity condones the wholesale killing of one part of the human race for the benefit of another. That is Jihad. And I am scared.
