Monday, December 13, 2004

Fw: [wvns] James Carroll: The Moral Abyss

Message

Your ways, O LORD, make known to me;
teach me Your paths,
Guide me in Your truth and teach me,
for You are God my savior.
Psalm 25: 4-5
Let us not be misled by the self-righteousness of the false Christians who put Bush into office.  Let us rather pray that God will show us His ways and teach us His paths.   Let us pray for faith that He will help us to pull our country out of the moral abyss of the Pharisees. 
 
In the name of the Prince of Peace,  Carol Wolman
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, December 13, 2004 3:52 AM
Subject: FW: [wvns] James Carroll: The Moral Abyss

The main horror of what the "coalition" is doing is not a matter of
the occasional soldier who, in the heat of battle, commits a war
crime, but the steady destruction rained on cities, villages, the
Iraqi people. This violence is wreaked calmly, from a distance,
within the rules of engagement.

The war itself is the American war crime. But that is lost in
the "normalcy" of the news.


Afraid To Look in the Moral Abyss
by James Carroll
http://207.44.245.159/article7436.htm


12/07/04 "Boston Globe" -- Why don't we Americans look directly at
the war? We avert our gaze, knowing that the situation in Iraq grows
more desperate by the day. Vaunted "coalition" efforts to "break the
back" of the "insurgency" have only strengthened it. The violence
among Iraqis would surely qualify as civil war -- except that only
one side is fighting. The structures of relief and repair are gone.
Whole cities are destroyed, populations displaced. The hope of Iraqi
elections is mortally compromised. "Coalition" members are dropping
out. The mission of American force is to secure the country, but it
can't secure itself. The performance of US intelligence has been
consistent: Its strategic failures caused the war, and its tactical
ignorance of the enemy is losing the war.

Meanwhile, in America, this, the gravest foreign policy crisis in a
generation, source of a crisis of conscience for tens of millions of
citizens, is not a subject of political debate. For many months,
overt opposition to the war was sublimated in the effort to defeat
George W. Bush in the November election. John Kerry's fatal
ambivalence about Iraq sealed the war off from the great quadrennial
decision, with the result that the voices of those who hated the war
were muted, and the uneasiness of those who were troubled by it was
never addressed.

Astoundingly, the Democrats cooperated with the Republicans in
assuring that the war in Iraq -- the one thing that might have
defeated Bush -- was not an issue. That marginalization of the anti-
war impulse continues in the suspended animation of a period after
the American election and before the Iraqi election.

The new Bush administration has moved to reconfigure itself in most
ways but one. The president's affirmation of Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, in combination with his naming of Condoleezza Rice
as secretary of state, reflects a blind determination to "stay the
course" in Iraq, never mind that the course is heading off a cliff.

The main US news media treat the "story" of Iraq as if it is a
morality tale about 20-year-old Americans -- a few of whom are shown
making bad choices, but most of whom are lionized as heroes. When
their deaths are mourned on television each night -- that
heartbreaking silence under those smiling commissary snapshots --
the effect is to deepen the paralysis of the American public, which
can only look away.

The barbarity of the Iraqi insurgency has been a particular source
of repugnance. First it was hostage-taking, and beheading -- low-
tech "shock and awe" assaults aimed at "foreigners," precisely to
terrorize their sponsoring populations. The apparent murder of the
admirable Margaret Hassan, war-opponent and humanitarian worker, was
especially deplorable.

Then it was systematic attacks on Iraqis themselves, anyone daring
to cooperate with the "coalition" occupiers. The execution-style
murders of Iraqi police recruits and soldiers in recent weeks has
been chilling, and now workers on a bus are massacred. What makes
these tactics so appalling is their intensely personal character.

But it takes a disciplined imagination to acknowledge that the less
personal savageries of bombs, missiles, artillery, and heavy weapons
are, to those blown to smithereens, also barbaric. The main horror
of what the "coalition" is doing is not a matter of the occasional
soldier who, in the heat of battle, commits a war crime, but the
steady destruction rained on cities, villages, the Iraqi people.
This violence is wreaked calmly, from a distance, within the rules
of engagement.

The war itself is the American war crime. But that is lost in
the "normalcy" of the news.

On the other side, it is the proliferation of suicide-bombing that
has come to seem normal. Soldiers commonly risk their lives for
nation, honor, or buddy -- but they will not kill themselves with
forethought, in large numbers, except for the most transcendent of
reasons. The United States has given itself an enemy that shows by
its central tactic that it is fighting for God.

Americans, meanwhile, are so confused about religion that we have
just been through an election in which "religious values" were
defined as key, but precisely in ways that kept the war out of the
discussion. America's purpose in Iraq is a compound of such
deflection, self-deception, half-measures, and shallow thinking. The
opposition, meanwhile, is absolute and unblinking. That difference
partly answers the question with which this column began, but mainly
we avert our eyes because the war is a moral abyss. If we dare to
look, as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back.

James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe. His most
recent book is "Crusade: Chronicles of an Unjust War."

© 2004 Boston Globe

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posted by carol wolman @ 12:37 AM   0 comments

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