By Peter Carey

I was recently at a gathering of church leaders and the question arose, “what has the church had to say about the ongoing Iraq War?” While I realize that there may be churches that have taken on the issue of the war, for the most part, I believe we (and I include myself) have done a poor job to take on the issue of war in any kind of a helpful or constructive way. (If your church has engaged the question that is awesome; let me know what you’re doing!)

Of course, there are a variety of perspectives about war that emerge from the Christian tradition, and preachers and church leaders would do well to recognize that pacifists, veterans, active duty officers, as well as victims of war sit in our pews. But still, couldn’t we have the courage to examine the tradition of just war and the various forms of pacifism and do this in a way that could raise the tenor of discussion? Why haven’t our churches taken up the subject of the war in a more direct way? Are we fearful that any criticism of foreign policy will lead us to an I.R.S. audit (such as happened at All Saints Episcopal Church, Pasadena)? Or, are we worried that if we try to be prophetic someone might post it on Youtube and we would be labeled as “anti-American”?

Fear may be at the root of our reluctance, but there may also be deeper reasons for the church’s reluctance to take on war and violence. I believe that Western Christianity would receive a mixed verdict in terms of how it has addressed global issues of violence. All too often, the Church has become enmeshed in the power structures of society and has not offered alternatives to the dominant world-view.

In studying these questions in seminary last year, my thesis advisor, Rev. Dr. Michael Battle, helped me to see that one area on which to focus attention in order to address global issues of violence is on the virtues within Christian spirituality. Fear often leads to violence. This fear may be loss of possessions, of our way of life, or of our sense of security. If those of us in the church focused on the virtues of the monastic life such as poverty, chastity, obedience, work, study and worship, then a more grounded, nonviolent way of life may result. The bumper sticker, “Live Simply So that Others May Simply Live” is a secular outgrowth of these same virtues.

What if we worked to understand that one’s possessions, one’s family and friends, one’s nation and one’s very self are all gifts from God? If we truly see that this is all gift, that we deserve none of it, would we still be so willing to act violently to cling to it?

As one of my heroes, the preacher and activist William Sloane Coffin said, “People say, ‘I just want what I deserve; what is coming to me!’ but they don’t! We’re all in deep trouble if we were to get what we truly deserve.” Is it our fear of loss, ultimately our fear of death that leads us to choose the wrong path and exclude and dehumanize others rather than embrace and love them?

Ideally, our corporate worship is a corrective to an overly individualized spirituality. Our corporate worship ideally brings us together across those divides of class, of race, of politics, of theology. In Christ we are persons who are tied up with one another as parts of a body, and not as mere individuals. We need our neighbors and our neighbors need us. In thinking we can reach God on our own, without any need for either corporate fellowship, or love for others, we are no longer worshiping the God who calls us to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” We become islands unto ourselves, and our own dehumanization and violence runs amok. You may remember those lines of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle who sang of the dehumanizing consequences of a individualized world view:

I am a rock, I am an island.
I’ve built walls, A fortress deep and mighty, That none may penetrate.
I have no need of friendship; friendship causes pain. It’s laughter and it’s loving I disdain.

A recapturing of the early Western Christian spirituality is needed in order to encourage people to look beyond themselves, to see that who they are is bound up with others.

I began by asking “Why haven’t our churches taken up the subject of the war in a more direct way?” What’s stopping us from even engaging in discourse? Perhaps we are afraid of what might happen to our institution if we took on such a controversial issue. Perhaps people would leave the church. On the other hand, maybe people would see that the church is actually engaging with some of the key ethical and political questions of our time. Perhaps people would begin to see the church actually living out the gospel and come knocking in droves. Who knows?

From our biblical and theological tradition, the church has a unique understanding of humanity as being deeply relational. In addition, we have a rich biblical and theological tradition to draw upon when it comes to issues of violence and war. Of course, the church is not blameless or without fault when it comes to violence and war. However, from the prophets to Jesus, and from St. Augustine to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Church has had something to say and proclaim about violence and war. What if we were more willing to draw upon this tradition? Cultivating a robust corporate spirituality might give us the courage to lift up helpful and hopeful voices within the church on these important issues of violence and war. Isn’t it time to make our voices heard?

The Rev. Peter M. Carey is the school chaplain at St. Catherine's School for girls in Richmond, Virginia and is also on the clergy staff at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Richmond. He blogs at Santos Woodcarving Popsicles.

By Donald Schell

The Easter Gospels (like the Christmas Gospels) are shot through with fear. Why do angels keep telling us not to be afraid? Don’t they know there’s danger out there?

In the early darkness after San Francisco’s 1989 earthquake, my wife and I stood on the roof of our house looking out over the Marina district. Our son and daughter huddled against us. We were very quiet, and the city was in blackness. The power had failed. In the darkness we watched a five storey apartment building explode and collapse in on itself. Huge flames from the fire lit the dark evening. Just as in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake, where wildfire destroyed much more of the city than the earthquake had, broken water lines rendered fire hydrants useless. Old photos of San Francisco’s ashes after 1906 haunted me.

We sighed our relief when an arc of water shot up from a fire truck. High-arching plumes sparkled red in the firelight. Generator-driven searchlights lit the building and the water. From our battery-powered emergency radio we heard that firefighters had run hoses from a fireboat ashore to a pumper truck. The newsman said this was what they’d done in 1906, but confidently claimed that this time the seawater would make it easy for the firefighters to beat the fire. We watched and listened. As the newscaster’s calm voice assured us the Marina fire was under control, the arc of water faltered and stopped. The searchlights went dark. Flames surged higher. For a few minutes the newsman talked on of other disaster response areas.

Abruptly he stopped what he was reporting; perhaps someone had handed him a note. We heard his tight, measured voice say, “The Marina fire appears to be out of control again.” Twice, then three times, we heard the same premature announcement and each time the resurgent fire’s threat felt bigger.

Our nine-year old son, until that moment the bravest and most stubbornly independent kid I’d ever known, leaned into me for safety and took my hand. “Dad, is the fire going to come this way?”

“I don’t know.” I answered. I didn’t know. It was a still evening, a moment of dead calm in our windy city. But the weather could change quickly. What else could I say? “We’ll watch after you’re in bed. If the fire stays out of control, mom and I will take turns, and if we even think it might spread and come this way, we’ll get us out of here.”

“Will the house burn down?”

“It could.”

We watched quietly for an hour as firefighters got the fireboat to truck connection working. Gradually with plenty of water, they really did contain the fire. We couldn’t see flames any longer, just a glow from where the building had been. It finally seemed safe enough to kiss the children good-night, to hope for another day, to sleep in the stillness and listen for the Spirit telling us that we were not alone.

In the long nightmare after 9/11 we didn’t know how to stand together as leaders’ voices told us how very alone we were, that our lives and homes and way of life were all in danger, that we could lose everything and needed to be afraid. To hold fear at bay, our country needed to unleash carpet bombing on Afghan and Iraqi villages, we sent over thousands of American troops and have now lost more Americans fighting the war than were killed in the terrorist attacks, and we’re not counting Iraqi dead. Our safety has been the rationale for using torture to gather intelligence of coming terror threats from all those frightening places outside our borders where people hate us and want to destroy our way of life.

By 2008 Franklin Roosevelt starts to sound like a theologian or a prophet, ‘We have nothing to fear except fear itself.’ In fact Roosevelt’s words make a decent summary of the Resurrection Gospel. The resurrected Jesus returns to deliver us from our double addiction to fear and to safety.

A day or so after 9/11, an Israeli friend who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area said several people asked him how he managed to make his commute across the Bay Bridge – didn’t he know that it might be the next target? My friend’s simple answer? “I grew up in Jerusalem.”

My friend had it right. After 9/11, I heard familiar Bible texts challenging us in a new way. They were inviting us all to grow up in Jerusalem. Jerusalem of two millennia ago, like today’s Jerusalem, was a loved holy place with constant threats, fears, and frequent experience of death. After 9/11, bald, brazen voices of the prophets assured the people that life was more than death, pillage and famine. The prophets spoke their hard comfort to people who had lost everything and wondered where God was, to frightened people who had survived imperial armies’ raping and murdering rage, to survivors who had seen their homes and fields burned, their livestock slaughtered and left to rot -- people who had lost everything and wondered where God was.

The prophets’ message was beyond politics. They saw the threat to their nation and called the people and rulers to justice, to care for the poor, to loving mercy and to walking humbly with God. Our leaders (like the royal leaders of ancient Israel) caution us that safety comes at an inevitable cost: in extraordinary times our historic commitments to freedom and human dignity demand holding prisoners indefinitely without charges and torturing suspects to protect us from terrorist threats. Then they assure us that without their leadership terrible things would have happened. It’s no stretch to hear biblical prophets (who rejected the power of chariots to keep people safe) jeering at metal detectors and border walls, just as they would have ridiculed President Clinton for insisting after the Oklahoma City bombing that we should, ‘tell the children of America that this will never happen again.’

Denial and wishful thinking aren’t what we need to hear. Angels and Jesus don’t tell us “Do not be afraid because nothing bad will ever happen again.” Our Easter Jesus appears to disciples hiding in a locked room in fear for their lives. After he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit,’ the world was still dangerous, but Jesus sent his friends into that dangerous world to preach and share forgiveness. Like the prophets, like my friend who grew up in Jerusalem, like the disciples, can we listen for a simpler promise? God stands by people, unwaveringly faithful, still blessing life. Jesus says to his disciples, “I am with you always, to the end of the ages.”

The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is Creative Director of All Saints Company, working for community development in congregational life focusing on sharing leadership, welcoming creativity, building community through music, and making liturgical architecture a win/win for building and congregation. He wrote My Father, My Daughter: Pilgrims on the Road to Santiago.

By Roger Ferlo

I once produced a student performance of an old play of the crucifixion. It was part of the great York Mystery Cycle, a play that used to be performed every year on the feast of Corpus Christi in the streets surrounding York Minster in the late middle ages. Each play in the mystery cycle, ranging from Creation to Revelation, was assigned by tradition to a particular trade guild. The Crucifixion play was assigned, as I recall, appropriately enough, to the Pinners, stout Yorkshiremen whose trade was nail-making. It is a brilliant script, with the four pinners, dressed as Roman soldiers, carrying on a spirited, even comical dialogue in thick and racy Yorkshire dialect all the while they are nailing Jesus to the cross. The actor playing Jesus remains silent through almost the whole proceeding. The script sounds scandalous, characters cracking jokes as they go about their sordid business. (There is an odd, uncomfortable resonance with the way some of American soldiers at Abu Ghraib used their silent and abused prisoners as the butt of their obscene jokes.) The contrast between the profanity of the torturers and the solemn silence of Jesus was not as disgusting as the scene at Abu Ghraib, but nonetheless disturbing enough.

My students performed the play with no sets, under a naked light-bulb in a college basement. The walls were painted black, the only prop a broomstick that the student playing Jesus carried across his shoulders, his arms stretched out to each end. There were no seats for the audience; we gathered around the action in an uneasy circle, our silence matching the silence of the central figure. No one wanted to appear complicit in the action, but standing there watching it and not intervening seemed to imply we were somehow involved. We knew it was just a play after all, but it left us profoundly troubled. When the action ended, the Jesus figure was left standing there, his arms outstretched on the broomstick, bare feet on the floor, still maintaining silence. You have to understand that there was no attempt at realism here, no stage blood, no simulated groaning. Just the dignity of silence underscoring the enormity of the act. When the student actor finally broke his pose and walked out of the circle we had formed, we all saw the imprint of his sweaty feet on the floor, and for the longest time, not one of us moved or spoke a word. And when we finally did move, no one dared to enter the circle, or to step on the place where the sweat stains had by then disappeared.

I have another story about Jesus’ silence to share with you, this one far removed from a student workshop production performed in the safety of an Ivy League college.

Over ten years ago now a news article appeared in The New York Times that became for me a Good Friday Parable of the Unspeakable. It’s also a parable that forces us to explore—as this gospel does—what you might call the geography of evil. For years now the story has occupied a silent place in my skull, like a dispatch from Golgotha.

In spring of 1996 a reporter named Mike O’Connor gained access to a field outside the Bosnian town of Srbrenica. A lot has happened since 1996, but memory runs long in that part of the world. You still might remember the disastrous story of that sad town. During the ugly, bloody wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, the UN had tried to protect Srbrenica as a “safe town,” a place where people could escape from the so-called ethnic cleansing by which Christian Serbs were trying to wipe out Muslim Bosnians from the area. The UN policy was a disaster. UN forces did almost nothing to stop the slaughter—they more or less looked on in horror, like bystanders at Golgotha. An international war crimes tribunal had determined that anywhere from 3,000 to 8,000 Muslim men had been driven from their homes and executed in this field by Christian Serb militia. The Times ran a photograph of the site. It looked terribly ordinary, nothing like a Golgotha. The land was flat, plain, with a small copse of trees visible in the background. But reports that had trickled in from survivors said that the landscape had recently been altered. You could see in the photograph that the ground was broken and rutted in spots, as if it had been dug up, moved and replaced by heavy equipment. O’Connor describes the scene with an eye for detail that is almost as vivid as Dante’s, who knew something about killing grounds:

Clinging to chunks of dirt, some piled in mounds three feet high, are pieces of sod and delicate yellow flowers growing at unnatural angles, suggesting that the dirt was broken and piled up after it was covered by new spring plants….Near the larger field was a pile of what first appeared to be rubbish, but tangled among the bits of garbage were strips of multicolored cloth, about three feet long. These matched the published descriptions of blindfolds that survivors say were put on the victims by the killing squads. Also in the pile were berets like those frequently used by older Muslim men. On one beret was a set of Muslim prayer beads, and near them was a cane nicely carved from a tree branch.

Clearly, there had been bodies buried there, and someone had ordered them moved—covering the evidence of this deepest crime by digging it up. The whole story has a Dantesque ring to it. Even the names of the commanders involved have an allegorical resonance. Here in the killing field, where hate-filled Christians betrayed and murdered terrorized Muslims, the spokesman for the war crimes investigation bore the name of Christian Chartier, a name that translates into English as Christian the Mapmaker, as if he had been assigned to map the geography of evil. And the colonel in command of the American forces who were patrolling the area was named, of all things, John Baptiste. As they say, you can’t make this kind of thing up. It would all be high comedy if it weren’t so horrific. The headline to the Times' story said it all: Disturbed Dirt in Bosnia Refuels Talk of Graves.

Why resurrect a story like this? Why refuel talk of graves, this close to Easter?

Recall the words of Jesus’ companion on the cross. Remember me. In a world with a minimum attention span, where one atrocity replaces the next in public memory with alarming regularity, it’s important to remember the anonymous and silent dead of Bosnia, Cambodia, Rwanda, or Darfur. It seems to me that if we are going to make sense out of Jesus’ silence, if we claim any right to play at the empty tomb on Easter morning, we need to remember his companions in suffering. We cannot in good faith re-encounter the silence of Jesus in these latter days without encountering the silence of the victims who came after him. You can hear in Jesus’ silence the silence of victims everywhere, victims of war and oppression and ethnic cleansing who are mostly nameless to us, silent skulls lined up in rows in a warehouse in Cambodia, silent bones in a mass grave in Bosnia or Rwanda or Darfur. Only their bones are at liberty to speak, and not just through DNA and other forensic tests. They bear mute testimony to the unspeakable. Their silence is Jesus’ silence, His silence theirs. Confronted with such pain, for us to keep silence would condemn us. Remember me. Remember me.

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By Joel L. Merchant

Countries, like people, make friends with others one at a time. This is a story of one failure. In fairness to an unknown visitor to our country, imagine yourself in his place. The scene is on a recent Amtrak trip between New York City and Boston. The conductor collects tickets, requests identification, folds destination stubs into seatbacks, moves on to other cars. An older man across the aisle, traveling alone, shows his passport. It is clear from their conversation he doesn’t know English.

After decades as a frequent traveler, I have thousands of pictures -- scenery, buildings, people, architecture, from around the world. Today the train passes a lovely stretch of Connecticut shore, tidal marshes, nesting ospreys, the Long Island Sound. What little attention I pay as the visitor takes pictures, is that I’m impressed with his equipment. He and I, unknown to each other, are members of a picture-taking culture, fellow citizens of a show-and-tell world. I wonder if his will join the thousands on YouTube. I imagine, after his return home, how many friends he will impress with stories and pictures of this mild, early autumn, Saturday morning journey along the New England shoreline.

The train is a half hour west of New Haven when the conductor, having finished her original rounds, reappears. She moves down the aisle, looks, stops between our seats, faces the person taking pictures. “Sir, in the interest of national security, we do not allow pictures to be taken of or from this train.” He starts, “I…….” but, without English, his response trails off into silence. The conductor, speaking louder, forcefully: “Sir, I will confiscate that camera if you don’t put it away.” Again, little response. “Sir, this is a security matter! We cannot allow pictures.” She turns away abruptly and, as she moves down the aisle, calls over her shoulder, in a very loud voice, “Put. It. Away!” He packs his camera.

Within a minute after our arrival in New Haven, two armed police officers entered the car, approached my neighbor’s seat. “Sir, we're removing you from this train.” “I….;” “I……” “Sir, you have breached security regulations. We must remove you from this train.” “I…,” “I…..” “Sir, we are not going to delay this train because of you. You will get off, or we will remove you physically.” “I…..”

Nearby passengers stir. One says, “It’s obvious he doesn’t speak English. There are people here who speak more than one language. Perhaps we can help.” Different ones ask about the traveler’s language; learn he speaks Japanese. For me, a sudden flash of memory -- a student at International Christian University in Japan, I took countless pictures without arousing suspicion.

The police speak through the interpreter, with the impatience of authority. “The conductor asked this man three times to discontinue. We must remove him from the train.” The traveler hears the translation, is befuddled. Hidden beneath the commotion is a cross-cultural drama. With the appearance of police officers, this quiet visitor is embarrassed to find he is the center of attention. The officers explain, “After we remove him from the train, when we are through our investigation, we will put him on the next train.” The woman translates. The passenger replies, “I’m meeting relatives in Boston. They cannot be reached by phone. They expect me and will be worried when I do not arrive on schedule.” “Our task,” the police repeat, "is to remove you from this train. If necessary, we will do so by force. After we have finished the investigation, we’ll put you on another train.” The woman translates. The traveler gathers his belongings and departs.

My earlier suggestion that you imagine being in his place leaves you free to respond and draw your conclusions. Remember: you’ve been removed from the train, are being interrogated, perhaps having your equipment confiscated; while I continue to do what I take for granted – traveling unimpeded, on to Providence.

The more I replay the scene, the more troublesome it is. It is the stuff of nightmares. Relations between people and countries lie at the heart of the issue. The abstract terms that inform political and social debate appear, as if in person, unexpectedly, near enough to hear, touch, feel. Taking no position is not an option. As an educator, I would prepare and deliver a lecture on how others perceive America in the world community, then seek an audience. I'll spare you. But -- I just watched armed police officers remove a visitor from the train for taking pictures. I don't understand this. I’m disturbed – no, shaken – to bear witness to these events. Other passengers react with surprise and anger. “Since when is it illegal to take pictures?” “Nobody’s ever bothered me about it.” “Is the only photography allowed from the space station and Google Earth? These people take pictures of everything, including my house, without my permission, and they’re instantly available on the internet.” An older traveler reflected, “I witnessed this personally in police states during the war in Europe.”

In The Terror Presidency, Jack Goldsmith says it is right for a country to meet a threat in a way that keeps us safe, but must also “minimize unnecessary intrusion on …life, liberty and property.... and all those who are enjoying them with us.” One passenger asked, “Would someone please explain the threat posed by taking pictures from the train?”

In Matt Stoller’s review of A Tragic Legacy, he says the current administration has “transformed the way (people) speak about our country and its role in the world.” The good-versus-evil mentality has “altered the political system of our country” and our relationship with the rest of the world – in ways which are “inappropriate for a modern power in a time of global turmoil.”

It doesn't take more than five minutes, in any airport in this country, before I hear the loudspeaker, "The current terror threat is elevated." We hear “terror” endlessly – traveling, at home, on television, in the news. Recent political campaigns have reminded – no, badgered – us, to be very afraid. What did Franklin Roosevelt say, that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Terror. Paranoia. We can no longer differentiate between terrors. Is this our generation’s enlightened contribution to American culture?

Watching police escort a visitor off the train, I felt anger, not comfort. This action was beyond irritating. It is intolerable, unacceptable. If it bothered me, it paled in comparison to the way it inconvenienced, and will long trouble, this visitor to our country. We disrupted his travel plans and family reunion. Even greater than the psychological damage we inflicted is the harm we’ve done to ourselves. We missed an opportunity to show kindness, to be ambassadors of goodwill. The visitor will return home. He will indeed impress many people – not with pleasant memories and pictures of a quiet morning trip along the New England coast, but with a story of being removed and detained by American police for taking pictures. Do we imagine we’ve gained anything because a single visitor returns home with stories of mistreatment?

We engage in diplomacy whenever we have contact with visitors or travel abroad ourselves. If we conduct ourselves poorly as daily ambassadors, it is no wonder our country suffers a tarnished relationship with the world.

Joel Merchant is a teacher, business consultant, and essayist. He is currently working on "The Other Side of Time; Letters to My Daughter" at a-reminiscence.

“The more things change, the more they remain the same.”
Alphonse Karr, 19th century French journalist and novelist

By George Clifford

Months of anticipatory debate culminated two weeks ago in the anti-climatic reports to Congress by General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Leaks revealed most of the content prior to the actual Congressional testimony. The GAO report, released at the beginning of September was even more negative. President Bush in his speech to the nation announced troop reductions in line with General Petraeus’ recommendations. The drawdown will commence when a Marine Expeditionary Unit with about 2200 personnel departs Iraq in December with no replacement.

Non-pacifist Christians who do not rely upon a direct word from God to tell them when to wage war have historically relied upon the Just War Theory paradigm for help with warfighting decisions. One Just War Theory criterion is proportionality, i.e., the prospective gain must exceed the projected cost. Without using that language, commentators and others have repeatedly emphasized this issue in recent weeks. Are whatever political and security gains the troop surge produced in Iraq sustainable as the U.S. reduces the number of personnel in Iraq? If not, how will returning to pre-surge troop levels sustain political and security progress in Iraq? If the answers to both questions are in the negative, as I believe, then the substantial cost in treasure and lives, Iraqi and American, of continuing to occupy Iraq exceeds any hope of progress toward justice and peace.

In northern Iraq, the Kurds have established a de facto state within a state, Kurdistan within Iraq. Symbolic of this move, only the Kurdish flag flies in Kurdish provinces because the Kurds have banned the Iraqi flag. Tensions between Shiites and Sunnis, from all reports, seem undiminished. Violence has diminished, in substantial measure, because of ethnic cleansing as Shiites and Sunnis move to homogenous neighborhoods. The Iraqi national government has limited effectiveness and does not have its own reliable armed force. Iranian arms and Al Qaeda terrorists continue disrupting progress towards a stable, unified Iraq. According to the U.S. Army’s Counterinsurgency Manual, prepared under General Petraeus’ leadership, the U.S. would require approximately three times the number of troops currently in Iraq to quell the violence and set the stage for political stability to develop. In other words, continued U.S. operations in Iraq also fail to satisfy the Just War Theory criterion of a reasonable chance of success.

What is the obligation of the United States to the people of Iraq? Just War Theory answers that question for Christians: to minimize death and harm while expeditiously trying to create a stable situation and then promptly exiting. American presence in Iraq remains a lightning rod for anti-Americanism feelings and terrorism. Fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq certainly does not eliminate or even diminish the concurrent need to fight Al Qaeda elsewhere. Some of the non-Iraqi Al Qaeda volunteers in Iraq only want the U.S. to leave Arab soil; these individuals are unlikely to come to the U.S. to continue their terrorist activities.

Iran would like to expand its sphere of influence to include all of Iraq, or at least the Shiite portions of Iraq, which happen to have most of Iraq’s oil resources. The U.S. should set aside its own predilection for secular democracy and support imposition of Islamic law (Sharia) in the Shiite portion of Iraq, if that is what the people want. Many Iraqi Shiites do not want to fall under Iranian hegemony because the Iranians are non-Arabs. Current U.S. policies have had the unintended consequence of pushing Iraqi Shiites toward Iran, which the Iraqi Shiites see as the lesser of two bad choices.

The Sunni minority in Iraq does not want to live under Sharia or to form any alliance with Iran. The Sunnis, with good cause, fear Shiite retribution for the decades of abuse and worse that the Shiites suffered under Sunni rule (Saddam Hussein was only the last and worst of these rulers). The Sunnis are more secular than the Shiites, more attracted to democracy, and more closely linked to the Saudis and other Sunni Arabs. Unfortunately, Iraq’s oil reserves are inequitably distributed, predominantly lying in Shiite and Kurdish areas and not in Sunni ones. Iraq’s government remains stuck, unable for over two years to find an agreement by which to share Iraq’s oil wealth acceptable to the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds.

In sum, the future of Iraq, the nation whose boundaries Winston Churchill famously drew following WWI, looks very bleak. Western style democracy has proven a non-starter. “Staying the course” is immoral because doing so has no reasonable chance of success. No reason exists to believe that policies that have not worked for the last three and a half years will suddenly become effective. Conversely, simply demanding immediate U.S. withdrawal of its armed forces is also immoral. Such a withdrawal will create a power vacuum unlikely to benefit most Iraqis and likely to precipitate further U.S. military action. Instead, Christians in this nation must push for new ideas and new policies.

Three ethnically homogenous, largely independent provinces of a loosely federated Iraq may represent one option. Each province could choose its own form of government and decide whether to implement Sharia. Alternatively, Iraq might dissolve into three mostly ethnically homogenous nations, each with its own government and laws. In either case, the United States should withdraw its forces from any of the three in which a majority of residents opposes a continuing presence. The U.S. should follow the lead of Arab and Muslim nations in safeguarding this political settlement. This task does not require a military presence in what is now Iraq. U.S. support for Israel has helped to assure Israeli independence without garrisoning troops in Israel. Iraqis, like the Israelis, value their independence. Iraqis do not want to live in a de facto U.S. colony, a nation whose government, finances, security, etc., depend upon U.S. decisions, troops, and funds.

The Rev. George Clifford, Diocese of North Carolina, served as a Navy chaplain for twenty-four years, with tours at sea, with the Marine Corps, on the staff of the Chief of Chaplains, on exchange with the Royal Navy in London, as the senior Protestant chaplain at the Naval Academy, and as the senior chaplain at the Naval Postgraduate School. He taught philosophy at the Academy and ethics at the Postgraduate School.