07 July 2010
By Jacob G. Hornberger Ever since the invasion of Iraq, I have been
absolutely amazed by the position taken by many
American Christians. Needless to say, I’m no
theologian but it just seems to me that it would be
difficult to find a clearer example of a violation of
God’s prohibition against murder than what the U.S.
government has done to the Iraqi people, with the full
support of many American Christians. You’ll recall that initially, the Bush
administration justified its planned invasion of Iraq
based on its infamous WMD scare. Bush and other U.S.
officials strongly suggested that Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein was planning to attack the United
States with the WMDs, weapons that, ironically, the
United States and other Western actions had furnished
him several years before so that he could use them
against the Iranian people. (That’s why Bush and his
people were so certain that U.S. troops would find
WMDs in Iraq — they had the receipts!) Prior to his invasion of Iraq, Bush’s goal was to
implant a tremendous post-9/11 fear into the American
people, a fear that would motivate Americans into
supporting an invasion of the country without asking
too many challenging questions. And it worked. The vast majority of Americans
supported the invasion of Iraq under the concept of
self-defense. That is, people convinced themselves or
permitted themselves to be convinced that because Iraq
was about to attack the United States, the U.S
government was justified in initiating a preemptive
strike on Iraq. I recall many Americans saying, “The
president has access to information that we don’t
have. We have to trust him on this. He’s our
president.” Yet, after the invasion occurred there came a point
where it was obvious that the fear of a WMD attack by
Saddam was baseless and that all the evidence and
insinuations by the Bush administration that a WMD
attack was imminent were false and groundless. At that point, one would ordinarily think that U.S.
officials would have apologized for having invaded a
country under false or baseless premises and quickly
exited the country. One would also have thought that
Americans would have expressed remorse and contrition
over the killing, maiming, and torture of the Iraqi
people up to that point. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the U.S.
government announced that it intended to continue
occupying Iraq and quickly shifted its primary
justification for its invasion and occupation from
WMDs to the benefits of bringing democracy to Iraq and
the Middle East. Many Americans, including Christians, embraced this
new justification without skipping a beat. Since the
day the WMD scare evaporated, countless Iraqis have
been killed, maimed, and tortured, notwithstanding the
fact that not one single one of them had anything
whatsoever to do with 9/11. This new justification that American Christians
have relied on for supporting the killing of people in
Iraq turns on an arithmetical calculation. The idea is
that Iraqis who survive the invasion and occupation
are better off today with democracy than they were
under dictatorship and, therefore, the killing of
countless Iraqis to accomplish that goal is morally
and theologically justified. Again, I’m no religious scholar, but I have a very
difficult time believing that God approves of that
sort of utilitarian approach to killing people. If God
approved of such an approach, it seems to me that He
would have said, “Thou shalt not kill unless the
killing will bring democracy to everyone else.” That’s not what He said. He said, “Thou shalt not
kill.” Now I can understand how one could arrive at a
concept of self-defense from God’s commandment against
killing. But for the life of me, I cannot understand
how one can arrive at a conclusion that God supports
the killing of some people (or even just one person)
for the sake of bringing democracy to everyone else.
We saw this same utilitarian mindset prior to the
invasion of Iraq, during the 11 years of brutal
economic sanctions that the U.S. government and the UN
were enforcing against Iraq. During that sanctions,
Iraqi children were dying from illnesses from such
things as sewage-infested waters. The attitude among
U.S. officials, and the American Christians who
supported the sanctions, was that the deaths were
worth the effort to oust Saddam from power and replace
him with a U.S.-supported ruler. That mindset was reflected by U.S. official
Madeleine Albright. She was asked by “Sixty Minutes”
whether the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children
from the sanctions had been worth it, and she
responded that they had in fact been “worth it.” Again, the mindset was: It is okay to kill people —
in this case, children — for the greater, long-term
good of the American and Iraqi people. Is such a utilitarian calculation really consistent
with Christian principles? I can’t see how. What’s even more amazing to me is that there has
never been an upward limit placed on the number of
Iraqis who could be killed (or maimed or tortured) in
order to achieve democracy in Iraq. In fact, we don’t know even know how many Iraqis
have been killed because early on U.S. officials
announced that they would keep track only of the
American dead, not Iraqi dead. That seems to me to be
an unusual policy, especially when the U.S. government
is supposedly doing all this for the benefit of the
Iraqi people, or at least those who survive the
invasion and occupation. Doesn’t the failure to keep count of the Iraqi dead
imply that the number of Iraqi dead doesn’t really
matter? If it takes 10,000, or 100,000, or a million
dead, it’s considered a regrettable but necessary step
to achieving democracy. And if democracy is achieved,
the deaths are to be considered “worth it,” just as
the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children
were considered “worth it.” Many American Christians claim that Muslims are
inherently violent people. But it seems to me that
such a description could easily be applied to those
American Christians who see nothing wrong with killing
an unlimited number of people for the sake of
achieving such political goals as democracy and regime
change. Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The
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