When it began eight years ago, the war in Afghanistan was the right war, the good war, the moral war.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the effort to capture Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders and to drive from power their Taliban protectors had the moral and ethical support of most Americans, as well as much of the international community. President George W. Bush laid out the rationale to Congress: “The leadership of al-Qaeda has great influence in Afghanistan and supports the Taliban regime in controlling most of that country. In Afghanistan, we see al-Qaeda’s vision for the world.”

It was a widely shared view. Michael Walzer, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, and one of the foremost experts on just and unjust wars, called Afghanistan a “classic” case of the just war. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral statement arguing for “the right and duty of a nation and the international community to use force if necessary to defend the common good by protecting the innocent against mass terrorism.”

“Afghanistan has been the West’s ‘good war’ until now,’’ wrote Michael Daxner, president emeritus of the University of Oldenburg in Germany, this summer in the World Policy Journal.  “In recent history, there has rarely been another intervention with so much institutional legitimacy and so little questioning of strategy and perspective as there has been with Operation Enduring Freedom and the International Security Assistance Force [ISAF].” Daxner also served as special counselor to the United Nations mission in Afghanistan.

The initial military campaign in Afghanistan appeared to be a resounding success. A small band of American forces overthrew the Taliban in less than three months, drove them out of Kabul, and apparently had both the Afghan Taliban force and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda on the run.

Photo: US Air Force

But somewhere along the way Afghanistan got lost, its moral rationale muddied as the Bush administration quickly turned its focus to the unnecessary war, the morally unjustifiable war, the war against Iraq. The Afghanistan effort went astray, starved of resources and attention. It became, first, America’s forgotten war, and then a conflict beset with its own strategic and policy complexities as well as moral ambiguities.

Over the years, “as the mission has changed and become larger and more complex, these initial judgments have been subject to further consideration,” David Cortright, director of policy studies at the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, told an audience there on Sept. 1.  As RAND Corporation political scientist Seth Jones has written in his recent book on the American experience in Afghanistan, In the Graveyard of Empires (Norton, 2009), “Despite the idealism of the initial campaign and the success of military operations, the United States squandered this extraordinary moment. … And by 2006, tensions in Afghanistan had “escalated dramatically and Afghanistan was leveled by a perfect storm of political upheaval in which several crises came together.”

Jones argues, and most experts seem to agree, that as US policy in Afghanistan drifted, Pakistan emerged as a sanctuary for the Taliban and al-Qaeda, allowing them to regroup and mount renewed and more widespread attacks. Afghan governance became “unhinged” with corruption, and “the international presence, hamstrung by the US focus on Iraq, was too small to deal with the escalating violence.”

Now US and coalition casualties continue to mount. The United States had lost more than 900 troops, and October was the deadliest month so far, with 59 American soldiers killed. British combat losses have crossed the 200 mark, and the battlefield situation is worsening as the Taliban and its insurgent allies are not only waging fierce resistance to the ISAF but also extending their control over increasingly large swaths of Afghanistan territory. The top US military officer, Navy Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Boston Globe in late August that the Taliban and its alliance with the al-Qaeda terrorist network are stronger than ever, and in other interviews he has characterized the military situation in Afghanistan as “deteriorating.”

Public opinion has also been turning against Obama’s “war we must win,” According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 52 percent of respondents see the war in Afghanistan as not worth its costs, although 55 percent say they have confidence the president will choose a strategy that will work. In a Quinnipiac University poll released on November 18, American voters say 48 – 41 percent that fighting the war in Afghanistan is the right thing to do, down from 52 – 37 percent last month.

British public opinion is more skeptical. A poll published in the Aug. 29 Daily Telegraph found that 62 percent oppose British troops staying in Afghanistan. Only 26 percent favor remaining, and this month the Catholic bishop who heads the military diocese of Great Britain, speaking in a homily at a requiem mass for the fallen, urged resolution in Afghanistan “as speedily as possible.”

While conservatives and Republicans generally continue to support the war and call for more US troops for the effort—the Quinnipiac poll found 68 percent of Republicans think the United States is doing the right thing fighting in Afghanistan—some conservative pundits are beginning to turn against the effort. The columnist George Will, in a widely circulated Sept. 1 column, called on the US to begin “rapidly reversing the trajectory of America’s involvement in Afghanistan” and fight the war in such a way as to end US combat fatalities, suggesting US lives have been “squandered.” Will faulted both the goals and the strategy being pursued.

On the other side of the political spectrum, the antiwar movement that mounted a large but ultimately futile effort against the US invasion of Iraq is regrouping to challenge Obama, somewhat reluctantly, on Afghanistan. A wide variety of groups, including veterans’ organizations and coalitions of grass roots groups, such as Win without War and United for Peace and Justice, plan teach-ins, demonstrations, and lobbying at aimed raising questions about the cost of the war.

Photo: U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Andrew Smith

Religious voices and ethical questions are also being raised. This month, a group of 77 United Methodist bishops signed a letter to the president calling for a timetable for the withdrawal of all forces and saying there is no path to military victory in Afghanistan. An open letter from a range of progressive religious leaders led by evangelical Christian activist and Sojourners magazine editor Jim Wallis called for a “humanitarian and development surge” in Afghanistan and exhorted the president to “let the nonmilitary strategies lead the way.” Last month, the US Catholic bishops sent a letter to the president’s national security advisor, General James. L. Jones, urging the administration to review its use of military force “to insure that it is proportionate and discriminate” and to “develop criteria for when it is appropriate to end military action in Afghanistan.”

In a recent issue of Commonweal, the independent and lay-edited Catholic review of religion, politics, and culture, Boston University history and international relations professor Andrew Bacevich wrote in a piece entitled “The War We Can’t Win: Afghanistan and the Limits of American Power” that “fixing Afghanistan is not only unnecessary, it’s also likely to prove impossible.” As for what the US should do, Bacevich suggests that “a sense of realism and a sense of proportion should oblige us to take a minimalist approach,” adding that “we can’t eliminate every last armed militant harboring a grudge against the West. Nor do we need to.”

The mainline Protestant journal Christian Century editorialized in its Sept. 8 issue that “it is time to ask: What is the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and how does it serve peace in the region and the American interests?” America, the national Catholic weekly magazine published by the Jesuits, asked earlier this month about Afghanistan, “What are we achieving there? Do we have the ruthlessness and patience to stay in this fight? With our nation printing money to pay its bills, can we really afford to maintain this long war?” “Nothing about the mission in Afghanistan is clear,” concluded a Sept. 25 Commonweal editorial, “least of all its connection to American security. All wars, including necessary wars, involve difficult choices. If President Obama chooses to keep us in Afghanistan, he must do a better job of explaining his reasons and expectations to the American people—especially to the families of soldiers serving there. He can no longer ask Americans to assume that saving Afghanistan from the Taliban is the same thing as saving American from Al Qaeda.”

The Rev. John Langan, SJ, a professor of philosophy and Catholic social thought at Georgetown University, first posed the question of “whether we’re making real progress toward morally important goals” eight years ago in a 2001 interview with Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, just one month after the US bombing of Afghanistan had begun. Today he says the answer to that question is no. Even when explicit consideration of just war ethics seems absent from current strategic debate, says Langan, “a lot of ethical issues are present in policy planning,” especially questions about whether our goals are attainable and worth pursuing. “I wish,” says Langan, “I was seeing a debate about what is worthwhile versus are we meeting the demands of the generals.” On this point, he says, he sees parallels with Vietnam and what he calls “a deeply ingrained tendency in the military that if a problem resists us, bring more resources to bear and we will prevail.” In Afghanistan, he observes, “we are forced to fight in cautious and disagreeable ways,” and “we never get very far from the possibility of tragedy.”

Howard Rhodes, a religious studies professor at the University of Iowa, teaches a course every fall on war and peace in Western religious thought. The lack of informed public debate about Afghanistan in just war terms, he suggests, is because “Christian churches and their representatives are largely incapable of articulating how those debates might look,” and “ordinary people in churches are not well prepared to be engaged” in them. Our weakened just war discourse, he adds, “reflects the pressure of pacifism” and an “erosion in ordinary citizens’ ability to engage in any discourse other than protest.”

Yet moral issues remain inextricably bound up with our broad strategic and political debates, says Rhodes. For him, the most disturbing characteristic of the current moment is that the US is “profoundly unclear” about the kind of world it is using its power to bring about and “extremely unclear about what war is for.”

DoD photo by Sgt. 1st Class Leonardo Torres, U.S. Army

Duke University ethicist Stanley Hauerwas, a Christian pacifist, has spoken about Afghanistan in similar terms. In an interview earlier this month, he told Religion News Service that “it’s still not clear what we’re fighting for. It’s so deeply ambiguous that it’s hard to fit into just war criteria. The very idea that you begin to assess the justness of a war after the war is already going to happen, I’m sorry, it’s already too late.”

Rhodes says he expects President Obama to go some distance to meet his military advisors’ requests. “All the options are bad,” says Rhodes, “and for the next year the least bad option” is to give General Stanley McChrystal, the top commander of US troops in Afghanistan, “as much of what he’s asking for as is tolerable.” McChrystal has made clear again and again that the United States and its allies, facing a serious and deteriorating military situation on the ground, must essentially start over. This will involve not only a new strategy but also a new effort to make the moral and political case for what President Obama has called “the necessary war’’ to the American people, the people of the allied nations in the NATO coalition and, not least, the Afghan civilian population.

“The situation in Afghanistan is serious, but success is achievable and demands a revised implementation strategy, commitment and resolve, and increased unity of effort,’’ McChrystal said in an Aug. 31 statement as he sent up the chain of command a confidential assessment of the nearly eight-year-old war asked for by Obama when he put McChrystal in charge of the faltering effort in Afghanistan. Three weeks later, the assessment was leaked to the Washington Post, including its warning that without more forces the conflict “will likely result in failure.” Throughout much of the fall, Obama has convened his national security and military advisors for a series of strategy sessions about means and ends and whether to add more US combat forces to the battle. At the end of this year there will be some 68,000 US forces in Afghanistan and another 40,000 NATO troops from US allies such as Great Britain, Germany, and Canada.

At the September event at Notre Dame (and again in the October 19 issue of America in an article reassessing US engagement in Afghanistan), David Cortright argued that as presently constituted the Afghanistan effort, even if originally a just cause, fails under the just war criteria of last resort and probability of success, and he made a two-point challenge to current policy, even as refined and redefined by Obama and McChrystal.

“I would argue, and many did even at the beginning of the US military mission, that war is an inappropriate means of countering al-Qaeda so that the fundamental strategic assumption [of U.S. policy] … is subject to debate,” he said. “War is not an instrument that can be used to counter non-state terrorist networks,” he suggested. “It also has many detrimental, unintended harmful consequences.” He cited as an example that war treats “mass murderers as if they were soldiers, thus inadvertently raising the credibility and moral stature of these criminals.”

In his second challenge, Cortright asked why we are at war with the Taliban and argued, as do others, that the strategic assumption lumping together the Taliban and al-Qaeda as inseparable and indistinguishable is wrong. Furthermore, al-Qaeda’s influence in Afghanistan is waning while the Taliban’s is gaining. He suggested, following the argument of Fotini Christia and Michael Semple in their article “Flipping the Taliban” in the July/August 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs, that US policy must have a “political ‘surge,’ a committed effort to persuade large groups of Taliban fighters to put down their arms and give up the fight.”

Christia and Semple say Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy, as announced in his March 27 speech and a six-page White House white paper,  acknowledged that integrating reconcilable insurgents will be a key component of US policy. “Yet US policy makers have not adequately developed a vision of how to achieve reconciliation,” they write. “Admitting their lack of knowledge about the precise character of the insurgency, they equate reconciliation with merely cajoling Taliban foot soldiers into crossing over to the US side.”

It is an argument that has won the support of the Christian Century, whose editors have concluded that “working to reconcile the Taliban with the broader interests of the Afghan nation calls for respecting the interests of local Taliban leaders. They are not a monolithic group.”

As the Obama administration seeks to devise a means to implement the McChrystal recommendations—or not, it comes under close scrutiny from politicians and other observers. Noting the failed efforts of past powers, from Alexander the Great to Great Britain and, most recently, the Soviet Union, to subdue Afghanistan, the Christian Century editorial put it bluntly: “To avoid another catastrophe, the president must be held to a clear strategy and a short timeline.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor at Religion News Service. He wrote last year for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on “God and Empire.”

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Before President Obama left for Asia he visited Fort Hood in Texas, where 13 members of the military were killed allegedly by an Army psychiatrist who is an American-born Muslim:

President Obama at Fort Hood memorial service: “No faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. For what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice—in this world and the next.”

The Fort Hood killings have raised questions about whether the accused shooter’s zeal about Islam could have played any role in the tragedy and about being Muslim in the US military.  Imam Yahya Hendi is the Muslim chaplain at both the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland and at Georgetown University in Washington. He had met Major Hasan.

Imam, welcome. Is there anything in what you’ve heard or read about Major Hasan that could explain to you what happened?

The Obamas at Fort Hood memorial service

AM YAHYA HENDI: Actually, no. It is a shock for me. I met Major Hasan a few times, and every time I met him I understood him to be a loyal American, loving of his country, and he wanted to join the military in support of America.

ABERNETHY: Is there anything about his being a very devout Muslim that could explain to you his shooting?

HENDI: For me it was….

ABERNETHY: …his alleged shooting.

HENDI: For me, what happened on that Thursday (November 5) has nothing to do with Islam. Islam does not stand in support of such shooting. Actually, according to Islamic law what he did was criminal, immoral, and unethical and against the teachings of Islam in every way, shape, and form.

ABERNETHY: When he apparently—when he began shooting he shouted out “Allahu akbar” in Arabic—God is great.

HENDI: Yeah. You know Muslims use that phrase, “Allahu akbar,” like “Oh, gosh” in English, “Oh, my Lord, Oh, my God.” It does not really have a religious motivation always and all the time.

ABERNETHY: You have counseled a lot of Muslim soldiers and sailors and marines. Is there any conflict for some of them, at least sometimes, between being Muslim and then having to go some place where they are fighting Muslims?

HENDI: You know, overall most of the soldiers we have, Muslim soldiers in the US military, are loyal Americans and have joined the military, again, to defeat terrorism, to defeat extremism. After all, on September 11 we were attacked, and Islam gives Muslims and America the right to defend itself against terrorism and, therefore, Muslims should be proud and are proud of their service in the US military.

ABERNETHY: There’s a concept, if I understand it correctly, within Islam called the ummah, which is a sense of intense brotherhood with all other Muslims. Now does that conflict with having to go into Afghanistan?

HENDI: Actually, no. If I love my brother and when my brother does something wrong, Islam requires me to stop him from his wrongdoing. You know, Prophet Muhammad—and in the Koran we are told that we have to enjoin good and forbid evil. What happened on September 11 and the aftermath of that terrorism, extremism, what is happening in Pakistan, suicide bombing, and in Afghanistan is against the teachings of Islam, and Muslims are required to join any military in self-defense and to defeat terrorism.

ABERNETHY: What about in the Muslim community in this country? What’s going on there since the shootings?

HENDI: You know, American Muslims feel proud of being American, but at the same time are suspected on daily basis. Their religion is under siege; the community is under siege because of suspects. What we want America to do is to understand that we are a part of the fabric of America. We love America, our country, and we want to fight with everyone in defense of America.

ABERNETHY: Imam Yahya Hendi, many thanks.

HENDI: Thank you.

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Originally published November 30, 2007

War is, in some ways, the ultimate spiritual crisis.

By its very nature, it requires participants to perform acts that would be considered legally and morally wrong in civilian life. “Your whole life, regardless of religion, you’re told, ‘Don’t kill, don’t kill, don’t kill.’ Then all of a sudden it’s, ‘Here’s a gun.’ It’s hard to reconcile that,” says Linda McClenahan, a Dominican nun, trauma counselor, and former Vietnam Army sergeant who lives in Racine, Wisconsin.

In a 1995 study, 51 percent of veterans in residential post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatment in a Veterans Affairs facility said they had abandoned their religious faith during the war in which they fought. In the same study, 74 percent of respondents said they had difficulty reconciling their religious beliefs with traumatic war-zone events. Battle creates moral confusion, and it can leave a soldier spiritually as well as physically wounded.

Unlike many other traumatic experiences, combat can cause “moral pain” arising from “the realization that one has committed acts with real and terrible consequences,” according to a seminal 1981 article in PSYCHOLOGY TODAY by Peter Marin. He was writing about Vietnam, but his overarching thesis could be applied to any military conflict. Profound moral distress is the “real horror” of war, yet its effect on those who fight is rarely discussed.

The difficulty of talking about the spiritual wounds of war was apparent in October when the Episcopal Society of St. John the Evangelist in Cambridge, Mass., announced a four-day retreat at its monastery called “Binding Up Our Wounds,” for men and women returning from places of war. Nobody showed up.

A November report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association underscores the magnitude of the problem. After they return from combat in Iraq, one-in-five active-duty soldiers need mental health care. For reservists, the numbers were even higher: Two out of five need treatment. And one 2004 study concluded that veterans who avail themselves of mental health services appear to be driven more by guilt and the weakening of their religious faith than by the severity of their PTSD symptoms.

“In a war, in a firefight, you’re both victim and perpetrator at the same time,” says the Rev. Alan Cutter, general presbyter of southern Louisiana for the Presbyterian Church (USA) and a former Navy officer who served in Vietnam. “At its heart, a trauma, and especially a war trauma, leaves a wound to the human spirit. When I came back, my spirit was pretty well shredded and ripped.”

Marin wrote that moral pain or guilt erroneously remained a form of psychological neurosis or pathological symptom, “something to escape rather than learn from,” and he alleged that therapy failed to take moral experience into account. More than a quarter-century later, many experts feel little has changed.

“Once the category of PTSD was established in the early ’80s, that swallowed the veteran whole,” says William Mahedy, an Episcopal priest and former Army chaplain who has spent 33 years working with veterans in southern California. “Combat creates far more wide-ranging problems than stress.”

It’s not just the act of taking a life that raises the kinds of questions Mahedy says can only be addressed spiritually and philosophically. Witnessing death and suffering also goes to the heart of life’s meaning: Why did God, if there is a God, allow this? Why is killing the enemy not a sin? How can I be forgiven? Why couldn’t I save my comrade? Why am I alive when I don’t deserve to be? Psychology isn’t always equipped to answer such questions.

“Trauma can be characterized as a sense of betrayal of one’s experiences: life wasn’t supposed to be this way,” says the Rev. Jackson Day, an Army chaplain in the central highlands of Vietnam from 1968 to 1969 and now the pastor of Grace United Methodist Church in Upperco, Maryland. “The faith parallel to that would be the statement, ‘God has let me down. I did my part, and God didn’t do his.’”

In his book ACHILLES IN VIETNAM (1995), clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay explored combat trauma through a close reading of the ancient text of the Iliad and his own experiences treating Vietnam veterans with chronic PTSD. Those with lifelong psychological injury, he argued, had suffered a betrayal of “what’s right” — of leadership, trust, the dead, the social and moral order — above and beyond war’s “usual” horror and grief. Those whose belief in God’s love was shattered by war suffered another betrayal: their worldview and sense of virtue were obliterated.

In Shay’s follow-up book, ODYSSEUS IN AMERICA (2002), he used Homer’s Odyssey to look at returning troops whose spiritual wounds incurred on the battlefield can fester and worsen at home. The conviction that virtue is no longer possible, given God’s abandonment, can result in a withdrawal from moral commitment.

Medical-psychological therapies, Shay wrote, “are not, and should not be, the only therapies available for moral pain. Religious and cultural therapies are not only possible, but may well be superior to what mental health professionals conventionally offer.”

In an interview, Shay, whose work at the Boston VA outpatient clinic has been primarily with Roman Catholic patients, elaborated. “My sense is that this is a fundamentally religious issue. It’s possible to package it as a mental health issue, but I think we lose out. Even people who have had good secular treatments for their trauma still feel a need for the religious dimension of it. I don’t think as a society we’re offering it.”

VA research suggests that veterans who have suffered a greater loss of meaning to their lives are more likely to seek help from both clergy and mental health professionals. Therapists, however, may hit a roadblock with treatment when they feel out of their depth on spiritual or religious matters, and most clergy are not trained in trauma response.

But all faith traditions offer resources to respond to trauma, such as the Catholic sacrament of penance and reconciliation, of which confession is a part.

One of Shay’s patients was ordered by his lieutenant to “take care of” 17 Viet Cong prisoners, an order he interpreted as “kill them.” His squad was reluctant, and so he began firing first, even egging the others on. What weighed most heavily on his conscience years later was not his crime, but his belief that he had led others into mortal sin. “My response was that we knew a number of priests who had been chaplains in war and who knew what this was about,” Shay says. “This is about the real stuff, not the sins you confessed to in parochial school, but murder, cruelty, rape. [Your faith] has the resources to respond to that in a way that will matter to you.”

What matters to one won’t always matter to another. It depends on what faith, ritual, sacrament, or person you have invested authority in, says Rabbi Harold Robinson, a retired Navy rear admiral and the current director of the JWB [Jewish Welfare Board] Jewish Chaplains Council. As a chaplain, Robinson found that the study of Jewish texts on war and self-defense served as a powerful resource in addressing spiritual injury. “I think you invest more of yourself when you try to study and understand something,” he says. “By grappling with the text you’re also grappling with yourself. It’s an interactive process, not one that’s just imposed.”

Other chaplains have used Psalm 23, which famously portrays God as a patient shepherd, or Psalm 31, whose speaker calls himself a “broken vessel,” and they ask where veterans see themselves in the psalm. Even people who are not religious might be open to the psalms, according to Major Samuel Godfrey, an ordained minister in the Pentecostal Holiness Church and a chaplain in Iraq for the Combat Aviation Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. Shareda Hosein, an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and the Muslim chaplain at Tufts University, lists several passages from the Qur’an dealing with Allah’s forgiveness and guidance that she says she might use in counseling a Muslim soldier — from Sura 39, for example, which promises mercy for those who repent: “Say: ‘My servants who have transgressed against themselves! Despair not of the Mercy of Allah, verily Allah forgives all sins. Truly, He is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.’”

In early medieval Europe, warriors returning from battle were expected to feel shame, even when their killing was technically licit. A 9th-century penitential, according to THE MORAL TREATMENT OF WARRIORS IN EARLY MEDIEVAL AND MODERN TIMES by Bernard Verkamp, “stipulates that the man who is blameless in committing homicide in war should nonetheless seek purification, because of the shedding of blood, and stay away from the church for one or two weeks, and abstain from meat and drink during the period.”

For the ancient Hebrews, too, the shedding of blood was considered a source of contamination. The Book of Numbers dictated a seven-day period of segregation outside the camp for returning warriors and mandated the purification of fighters and their garments.

As founder of the International Conference of War Veteran Ministers, Father Phil Salois, a Catholic priest and chief of chaplain services for the VA Boston Healthcare System, has developed ecumenical liturgies incorporating verse by World War I poet and soldier Wilfred Owen, Bible readings, and prayers written specifically for services of reconciliation and healing. “I think it’s about redemption, to bring back meaning in their lives,” says Salois, who served as an infantry soldier in Vietnam. “We try to teach them God loves them no matter what happened to them. There is nothing that is unredeemable.”

Some Jewish veterans use the mikveh, or ritual bath, in their search for a rite of purification and rebirth. The Birkat Hagomel, a public prayer of thanksgiving (”Praised art thou O eternal God ruler of the universe, who has redeemed with kindnesses those who are guilty, and who has redeemed me with all manner of goodness”), can also be recited before a Jewish congregation by someone who has survived a life-threatening situation. The prayer requires a communal response affirming redemption. “Afterwards, it entitles everybody in the congregation to go up to you and say what happened to you? Are you OK? And to make human contact out of that moment,” says Rabbi Robinson.

But Robinson questions whether a truly communal purification ritual is possible, suggesting that the separation between those who serve in the military and those who don’t is too wide to bridge meaningfully, and there is no consensus about where purification finally resides. Is it with the doctor and the psychiatrist, or with the priest and the rabbi?

Yet community involvement is something Shay feels is crucial to the whole notion of a purification ritual. “It’s not a matter of pointing a finger at the returning vet,” he says. “It’s that we all need purification after battle. You have gone into danger and done some things that perhaps were truly terrible, but you’ve done them in our name, and it’s we who sent you to do those things.”

Some returning veterans experience great feelings of isolation, and communal rituals can offset their sense of aloneness and provide them with an opportunity to talk about their experiences. As Captain Jeffrey Cox, a Massachusetts National Guard social worker who returned from a tour of duty in Iraq in 2006, puts it, “Does anyone…know my story outside of the people I’ve served with?”

As the recent experience of the Episcopal monastery in Cambridge demonstrates, for those who have served — and will serve — in Iraq and Afghanistan, it may be a long time before anyone hears their stories. Salois recalls a Chicago retreat where four couples canceled the day it began. That was the first retreat a young Iraq veteran had attended. “He was very focused on what we said about our experiences [in Vietnam] and how we journeyed throughout the years. When it came time for him to speak, he said, ‘I appreciate everything you’ve said, but I’m not ready to talk about it.’ And I thought, well, it was 13 years before I started talking about this.”

“One can hope that the rest of us will accompany them when we can and follow them when we should,” Peter Marin wrote of the nation’s war veterans. Their recovery, we may need to learn again, is a collective responsibility.

Benedicta Cipolla, a writer in New York City, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Iraq, the ethics of torture, and Reinhold Niebuhr.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: This past week in Washington, the administration’s top political, military, and diplomatic leaders gathered to think through US options in Afghanistan. On October 7, the US will have been involved militarily in Afghanistan for eight years. What’s our mission there? Can it be achieved, and what are the moral dimensions of the debate? William Galston is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He brings to the discussion a strong grounding in the just war tradition. Bill, welcome.

WILLIAM GALSTON (Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution): Good to be here.

ABERNETHY: What can we say about what the mission in Afghanistan should be?

GALSTON: Well, we have to understand the mission in light of 9/11. The attack on the United States, which killed thousands of civilians, was conceived and launched by Al-Quaeda using Afghanistan as a base, with the Taliban government sheltering them, and the piece of the mission on which everyone agrees is the importance, the urgency, and the moral justification, the defensive justification, of making sure that Afghanistan cannot again serve as a base for terrorist attacks on the United States.

ABERNETHY: Okay, so what are the means to that end? How do we do it?

GALSTON: That’s one of the questions that’s being debated in Washington right now, and there are two basic options. Option number one is to try to create an Afghan government that is legitimate, enjoys the consent of the people, and has the capacity to prevent Al-Quaeda and other terrorist groups from acting on its territory. The other possibility is to abandon the hope of creating such a government on the grounds that we don’t have the capacity to do it, and focus instead on direct attacks on Al-Quaeda and other terrorists, using drones, using bombs…

ABERNETHY: In Pakistan as well as …

GALSTON: …and special forces, in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan, absolutely.

ABERNETHY: And so can we do either of those?

GALSTON: That is a very important question, as we learned so painfully decades ago in Vietnam. It is wrong not to ask the question at the threshold, can we do what we want to do? It is immoral to send young people, young American men and women, to die in pursuit of an end that cannot be attained, and it is even worse if political leaders have good reason in advance to believe that the end that they are publicly declaring is unobtainable, and the worst of all is to use American troops for the immediate political advantage of the party of the administration in power.

ABERNETHY: One of the issues here is whether we can create the trust of the Afghan people in our ability to stay and do what’s necessary. Can they trust us to see it through?

GALSTON: That is a critical question, because by having anything to do with us in these remote villages they are risking their lives, and it would be wrong of us to send a signal that we’re in for the long haul and then leave our local allies in the lurch. Unfortunately, we have done that from time to time since the Second World War, and the results are never pretty, and the policy is never justified. If we tell people that they can depend on us, we’ve given a solemn promise on which they are wagering their lives, and we better honor that promise.

ABERNETHY: And so how do you come out, quickly? How do you come out on it?

GALSTON: I think that we have to go forward, and I have reluctantly concluded that an investment of additional troops represents the best way forward. Others that I respect differ with that conclusion.

ABERNETHY: William Galston of the Brookings Institution, many thanks.

GALSTON: My pleasure.

BOB ABERNETHY, host: There were controversial developments this week in the debate over how the CIA interrogated terrorism suspects after 9/11. The Justice Department released details of a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report detailing chilling interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. The attorney general ordered an investigation of what happened and appointed a veteran prosecutor to find out.

Did CIA interrogators go beyond the guidance they had? If so, should they be punished, and should Bush administration officials who authorized the techniques also be punished? We explore the moral issues with Shaun Casey, professor of ethics at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington. Shaun, welcome. Let me take you back to the atmosphere right after 9/11. There was tremendous pressure on the administration to prevent another attack, to do whatever was necessary, to find out whatever they could about whether there was going to be another attack. Didn’t that justify the interrogation techniques that were put into place?

SHAUN CASEY (Professor Ethics, Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington, DC): I would argue that it’s precisely at those moments of crisis that we need to rely on our moral and legal tradition and resist giving up things like respect for the dignity of the human person, and I think that moral tradition argues that no matter who the person is, as a result of that dignity, they shouldn’t be subjected to the kinds of torture we suspect went on.

ABERNETHY: And even if you’re pretty sure you might be able to save several thousand more innocent lives, that would not trump the dignity of the individual prisoner?

PROFESSOR CASEY: What’s interesting even at the time, and now we know for sure, such information did not exist. We did not extract through torture any information that directly led to preventing another similar sort of tragic event. So in essence no, I think we should resist, because we don’t possess that kind of advance knowledge.

ABERNETHY: Apparently the CIA tried hard to keep what was done within the guidelines that existed but that in some cases people did exceed those guidelines. Should they be punished?

PROFESSOR CASEY: Absolutely. I think if in fact we gave guidance to those interrogators, and they still violated those guidelines, there needs to be a moral accountability in order to reinforce this notion that we do respect the dignity of human beings.

ABERNETHY: And what about up the chain of command? If the investigations reveal that high officials, maybe up to the vice president and the president, authorized things that shouldn’t have been done should they be punished?

PROFESSOR CASEY: I think they should be held morally accountable, and that doesn’t necessarily mean criminalization or actual legal punishment, but I think in a democracy that espouses certain moral values we need to have accountability, not only of what has happened, but it also prepares us morally to face the future when we may find ourselves in a similar sort of situation when we’re facing a crisis and we face pressure to abandon legal and moral precedents that we’ve observed.

ABERNETHY: But if a new administration can have a criminal investigation of it’s predecessor and put people perhaps on trial, that creates an enormous partisan gridlock and nothing else would be done.

PROFESSOR CASEY: Well, that’s right, and I think that’s what the president is struggling with right now. We’re looking at simply about 10 cases where he is, actually where the attorney general has asked the prosecutor to investigate. At this point I’m not aware of any attempt for a comprehensive criminal prosecution. On the other hand, I would argue it might be better to think about a bipartisan commission that in a sense grants amnesty legally to all the participants so we can learn what really happened from the top of the system to the bottom, as a way not only of holding them accountable morally but also preparing us to face the future when we may find ourselves under similar circumstances, and I think that’s a way to in a sense take some of the air out of the partisanship which seems to be growing at this time.

ABERNETHY: You have read what you could of the CIA inspector general’s report in 2004. Quickly, can you sum it up? What did you find? What did they conclude?

PROFESSOR CASEY: They concluded that there weren’t a lot of rules in place, and they had to move very quickly to give guidelines, which they did. Secondly, they confessed that some of their own employees violated those guidelines. But perhaps most importantly of all they concluded they cannot say these enhanced interrogation techniques led to unique knowledge that could not have been gotten by other means, and so that really casts a light of doubt on the effectiveness of these techniques.

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to Shaun Casey of Wesley Theological Seminary.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: In Jerusalem’s Old City, the Spafford Children’s Center is a welcome oasis from the turbulence that is all too present here. Both Israelis and Palestinians claim Jerusalem as their capital, and the ongoing conflict can take a heavy toll on the city’s children. Located in the Arab section of Jerusalem, the Spafford Children’s Center tries to help Muslim and Christian Palestinian kids deal with the trauma.

DR. JANTIEN DAJANI (Spafford Children’s Center CEO): I always say there is hardly anyone in the Palestinian society that is not traumatized.

LAWTON: The center is run by Dr. Jantien Dajani, a Dutch pediatrician who came here 35 years ago. Back then, the center provided medical services for East Jerusalem’s children, as it had since the 1920’s. But center leaders realized they were dealing with problems that went beyond the physical. David duPlantier, dean of Christ Church Episcopal Cathedral in New Orleans, is on the Spafford Children’s Center board.

REV. DAVID DUPLANTIER (Spafford Children’s Center Board Member): So it was a chance to really strengthen the health of the children, not just in the medical sense, but in the psychological and social sense.

LAWTON: About 400 children up to age 18 come through the center every week for after-school activities and Friday sessions. The center also sponsors summer camps and special cultural programs. The children learn skills to help them in future jobs, things like computer and English. Everything has an educational component, even the most uproarious game. There’s play therapy, art therapy, and drama therapy, all designed to help the children deal with trauma and stress they may not even realize they have. A psychologist comes in several times a week for one-on-one sessions, and there is also group counseling.

Dr. DAJANI: And what we try to do is to create in the center several safe areas, safe rooms where they can say anything, and it will not come back to them.

LAWTON: Dajani’s philosophy is to keep the kids busy with positive activities so they won’t get pulled into drug abuse or violence, common problems among Palestinian youths. She tries to teach them to make the best of their circumstances, no matter how difficult those circumstances are.

Dr. DAJANI: I always say I cannot change for you the situation we are living in. That’s impossible. That needs political solutions from high up. But at least what I can try is to change a bit your perception of the situation.

LAWTON: The center itself has a colorful past, tracing its roots to Horatio and Anna Spafford, an evangelical couple from Chicago. After suffering heavy losses in that city’s Great Fire of 1871, Horatio sent Anna and their four daughters to Europe. While en route their steamship, the Ville du Havre, sank after colliding with another ship.

Rev. DUPLANTIER: Before the Titanic, I think it was the most significant cruise ship disaster, and the daughters all perished.

LAWTON: Anna sent Horatio a telegram which said, “Saved alone. What shall I do?”

Rev. DUPLANTIER: He’s heartbroken to find out his daughters have perished, and so he takes a boat over to meet Anna, and when the captain shows him roughly the place where the shipwreck had taken place, he was inspired to write a poem that later became the hymn “It Is Well With My Soul.”

WINTLEY PHIPPS (singing): “When sorrows like sea billows roll…”

LAWTON: “It is Well” remains one of the most popular Christian hymns, sung in churches around the world and recorded by multiple gospel artists.

Mr. PHIPPS (singng):  “…it is well with my soul.”

LAWTON: After their tragedies, the Spaffords decided to move to the Holy Land. They believed the end of the world was near and that Jesus would soon come back to Earth on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives. The Spaffords and a small group of fellow believers called the Overcomers wanted to be close by when that happened. As they waited, they established a commune in East Jerusalem that became known as the American Colony.

Rev. DUPLANTIER: They weren’t there to try to convert people. That was one of the unique things about them. They didn’t proselytize. They said their prayers, they welcomed people, they offered food when they had it. But they were not there to try to convert other people, which was very different than especially evangelical Christianity in that period.

LAWTON: The American Colony eventually moved to the former palace of an Arab pasha. Jews, Christians and Muslims were all welcome there.

Rev. DUPLANTIER: From the absolute beginning they were generous, they were known to share their food. They really were thought to be a place of hospitality and, you know, Christianity at its core, it really is a faith of hospitality.

LAWTON: But there was also controversy. After Horatio died in 1888, Anna took over leadership of the colony. Her style was authoritarian, and she imposed a rigid set of rules.

Rev. DUPLANTIER: She kind of dictated how life would be. Certainly they were unique and different than mainline Christianity of today in how they lived. They were very disciplined. There was a period of time where men and women, even if they were married, apparently lived separately.

LAWTON: DuPlantier says after Anna died in 1923 the religious zeal of the colony changed.

Rev. DUPLANTIER: In any kind of community like that it’s always going to be a challenge to sustain that over a period of time. So I think partly that’s why the religious fervor fell away in the next generation, because you know it was very much based around the personal faith of Anna and Horatio.

LAWTON: But the charitable work of the colony continued. Anna’s daughter Bertha focused on caring for children.

Rev. DUPLANTIER: That began kind of the ministry that evolved, from taking in orphans to helping with health care and, you know, over a period of time turned into a hospital and then evolved over time into the Spafford Center as it is now.

LAWTON: The Spaffords’ compound has become the famous American Colony Hotel, which has been named one of the leading small hotels of the world. The hotel provides key support to the children’s center. The Spafford Children’s Center is just inside the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City near the Damascus Gate. It’s in the house where Horatio and Anna Spafford settled after they arrived here from Chicago in 1881. The house eventually became the headquarters for the Spafford family’s charitable works. Today, the center is not explicitly religious, although it has many faith-based connections. Dr. Dajani says, like their predecessors, they serve people of all faiths, and they try to teach the children religious tolerance.

Dr. DAJANI: We want them to be tolerant for each other and for different opinions. We take them to the mosque, we take them to the Holy Sepulcher and to other holy places. They are always amazed at each other’s beauty.

LAWTON: For duPlantier, the lasting legacy of the colony is the joy he sees in the children who come to the center, a testament of hope, he says, that turmoil and tragedy need not prevail.

Rev. DUPLANTIER: To see the joy that is just prevalent in the folks really has renewed and continues to renew my knowledge that God finds a way. No matter what circumstances we find ourselves in, God finds a way to redeem them if we look.

LAWTON: And that, he says, makes things well with his soul.

I’m Kim Lawton in Jerusalem.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: It’s a common observation that one of the most important paths to peace between enemies is to learn to see others not as demonized stereotypes, but as unique human beings. When she was in the Middle East last month, Kim Lawton learned about the Parents Circle-Families Forum — Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims who have lost loved ones in their long conflict but have learned to replace hate with reconciliation, even friendship. Here is Kim’s special report.

KIM LAWTON: Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, Palestinian refugee camps in the West Bank have been hotbeds of unrest and often scenes of angry confrontation between displaced Palestinians and Israeli soldiers. Because of the continuing military and political conflict, few Israeli civilians ever venture in. But don’t tell that to Rami Elhanan. On this day, he and his wife Nurit have come to the Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem to visit their friend, Mazen Faraj. It’s is an unexpected friendship. Both have lost family members in the conflict. Yet their grief has brought them together.

MAZEN FARAJ: Today it’s our responsibility for our children and for our families to build something new.

RAMI ELHANAN: We put a crack in this wall of hatred and fear that divide these two nations, and we show another way. We show another possibility. We show the ability to listen to each other’s pain, which is essential if you want to get to any kind of reconciliation.

Mr. FARAJ: This was the first room for our house.

LAWTON: Faraj has lived in Dheisheh his entire life. During the early part of his childhood, fifteen people in his family lived in this one crowded room.

Mr. ELHANAN: This is the place he’s always talking about—that you don’t need someone to hate you to teach you how to hate when you grow up in a room like this.

LAWTON: In April of 2002, there was a violent confrontation between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians fighters outside Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, the site where Christian tradition holds that Jesus was born. Palestinian fighters holed up in the church, and Israeli soldiers laid siege. During a lull in the fighting, Faraj’s 62-year-old father went out to Jerusalem to get groceries. He was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers.

Mr. FARAJ: He got killed in April 2002 when he was coming back from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. The Israeli soldiers, they started shooting him and without any reason. No one can kill his soul. They succeeded to kill his body, but without his soul. His soul’s still around us and give us like the power every day, how to keep going in our lives.

LAWTON: But there is great pain on the Israeli side as well. Elhanan had 14-year-old daughter, Smadar. Of four children, she was the only daughter, and the family had called her “the princess.” On September 4, 1997, the first day of school, Smadar went to a popular shopping area in Jerusalem.

Mr. ELHANAN: And she went down the street with her girlfriends to buy new books for the new year. Two suicide bombers blew themselves up, killing five people that day, including three little girls. One of them was my 14-year-old Smadar.

LAWTON: Elhanan says he was overwhelmed by anger and despair.

Mr. ELHANAN: It took me almost a year to understand who I am, to try to recover, and to understand that I have to choose a way for myself and translate these feelings of anger and despair into something constructive and create some hope out of it. And I joined the Parents Circle and I found a meaning for my life.

LAWTON: The Parents Circle-Families Forum was launched in 1995 as a way to bring bereaved Israelis and Palestinians together. The group now has several hundred participants who’ve lost immediate family members because of the violence in this region. Organizers believe it’s the only project of its kind in an area where conflict is still ongoing. The nonprofit group sponsors face-to-face dialogue meetings for bereaved family members and public lectures about reconciliation.

Mr. ELHANAN: The minute I saw in that meeting the first bereaved Palestinian families as human beings I was completely shocked. It was the first time ever in my life that I meet Palestinians as human beings after so many years of demonizing each other. So this was the turning point.

LAWTON: Faraj, who was dealing with his own feelings of anger and revenge, went to one Parents Circle meeting where Elhanan spoke.

Mr. FARAJ: And it was this man talking about his suffering and his pain, too. But I told him, “What do you know about suffering and pain? You just live in Jerusalem. ou are Israeli, you are the occupier, you are everything.” And then he starts to talk about his daughter, and then really I found out that, whoa, it’s the same pain.

LAWTON: The two men became close friends. Elhanan was drawn by Faraj’s humor.

Mr. ELHANAN: He’s the only guy in the world that makes me laugh.

LAWTON: Faraj couldn’t believe that Elhanan was willing to visit him in the refugee camp. They built a deep mutual respect.

Mr. FARAJ: He’s just a human being, and you can deal with him in an easy way, and you can build a discussion with him with easy way, and you can build the fight also in easy way, too. But the most important thing’s that he’ll respect the other.

Mr. ELHANAN: What he’s doing needs a lot of guts, and his ability to face the world, tell his truths after all the things that he’s been through, I think it’s admirable, and I really respect him for it.

LAWTON: Faraj and Elhanan started doing joint lectures for the Parents Circle.

Mr. ELHANAN: We use this enormous respect that the two societies have for people who paid the highest price possible to convey this message, to convey the message of dialogue, of reconciliation, of peace.

LAWTON: Elhanan and Faraj have given more than 1,000 joint lectures in Palestinian and Israeli schools. They say most of the kids have no idea that Palestinians and Israelis can be friends.

Mr. ELHANAN: If there is only one kid at the end of the class who nods his head with acceptance to this message, we saved one drop of blood. According to Judaism, this is the whole world.

LAWTON: The Parents Circle is nonsectarian, but is supported by several Muslim, Christian, and Jewish groups. In 2008, Catholic Relief Services brought Faraj and Elhanan on a speaking tour across the United States.

BURCU MUNYAS (Program Manager, Catholic Relief Services): They are giving a message of hope in the midst of hopelessness in the Holy Land. So we thought that this would be a strong message to bring to our US Catholic audiences.

LAWTON: For their part, Elhanan and Faraj try to keep the focus on relationship, not religion.

Mr. FARAJ: It’s the important things that we don’t want to make this conflict like a religion conflict.

LAWTON: Their work isn’t always easy. Both men have received sometimes strong criticism from within their respective communities.

Mr. ELHANAN: People tell me that I’m a traitor or a — but I think more people are impressed by my ability to translate the pain into hope.

Mr. FARAJ: I really believe in what I’m doing and — but not all the people they really accept that, but anyway, if you believe in something you have to continue.

LAWTON: Parents Circle supporters hope these relationships can be a model for others, which they believe will help further the political peace process.

Ms MUNYAS: By building trust with each other they become more and more ready to trust the other side, to compromise, and to tell their leaders that they are ready, that they can move ahead, they can compromise, and they can sign the peace agreements.

LAWTON: Faraj and Elhanan agree.

Mr. FARAJ: We have a different culture, a different religion, and different, also, conditions on the ground, too. So how we can find a way? This the problem. It’s not about that’s it, I found the solution for the conflict. No. But the first step, we have to know each other.

Mr. ELHANAN: I devote my life to go everywhere possible to tell the very simple truth that we are not doomed. It’s not our destiny to keep on killing each other, and we can stop it by talking to one another — that simple.

LAWTON: Simple in theory, much more elusive to work out. But they hope their relationship proves it is possible. I’m Kim Lawton in the West Bank.

In A FAREWELL TO ARMS, Ernest Hemingway famously wrote about the dim possibility of adequate commemoration for those lost in the slaughter of World War I:

“I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

When Hemingway wrote, war poetry was still poised between the old and durable need to honor the dead and acknowledge with both regret and proper gratitude the dire nature of their civic contribution, and the second and more unsettling need to voice the sometimes dishonored and dishonoring terms of that sacrifice — the anguished appearance of war guilt for crimes perpetrated during the course of war by some of these sacrificial victims, the soldiers.

By the second half of the last century, war poetry came to embody an antiwar ideology. Judgments about politics and history have thoroughly rearranged the conventions of the war poem and have changed the way we look at courage and honor, as well as sacrifice. Part of what has happened is also an awareness of the bastardizing of public language, although I shrink from any judgment that things are any worse now for words than they ever were. It has never been easy to speak well about the moving target of difficult issues like war. There are certainly always new problems and new situations, as we think about justifying war and are faced with the horrifying results…Any war, no matter how victoriously prosecuted, is of course always a defeat for the civilized impulse, for the need to come up with other than violent resolution of conflict. And then there is the deadening of language that happens with the incessant barrage of public communication — “compassion fatigue,” in journalism professor Susan Moeller’s phrase.

But here I like to think of Maya Lin’s serene and wise description of how language is subverted, and memory served, by her brilliant memorial for the American dead of Vietnam:

“I always saw the wall as pure surface, an interface between light and dark, where I cut the earth and polished its open edge. The wall dematerializes as a form and allows the names to become the object, a pure and reflective surface that would allow visitors the chance to see themselves with the names. I do not think I thought of the color black as a color, more as the idea of a dark mirror into a shadowed mirror image of the space, a space we cannot enter and from which the names separate us, an interface between the world of the living and the world of the dead.”

Here is “Facing It,” Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem about encountering the Vietnam Veterans Memorial:

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t,
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way — the stone lets me go.
I turn that way — I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

Even the title gives us some clue about the difficult act that the poem covers. Facing “it” is hard: first, the swelling tears have to be acknowledged, the hard swarm of the memories, and the realization that the black, glassy, and highly reflective surface of the memorial itself forces a look inside oneself, as well as a look outward, back to a specific name, to someone who went up in a white, booby-trapped flash. The memorial also insists that inside and outside the self are hard to separate, and that the separation of past and present is equally difficult, as we inevitably carry the past within our present. Among the other fusions that a visit to the memorial affirms, we are made to see that we are always at one with the living and the dead, and that as a nation, black and white, we face similar grief and loss. “I’m a window,” says the poem’s speaker; through me, other people’s losses come to the surface. At the memorial we meet as a community, however disparate.

And then, simply but powerfully, the poem moves to a self-correction. At first, a woman’s gesture reflected in the stone seems a hostile one of erasure. The woman is attempting to scrub away at the names. Then it becomes clear to the speaker, and to us, that the gesture is homely, loving, and domestic: a mother, presumably a surviving relative of one of the names, bends to comb a boy’s hair, to make him more presentable to the dead. It is an homage she is paying, and it is that unadorned homage and that respect with which the poet chooses to end.

Lorrie Goldensohn is the editor of AMERICAN WAR POETRY: AN ANTHOLOGY
(Columbia University Press) and the author of DISMANTLING GLORY: TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOLDIER POETRY (Columbia University Press), which was nominated for the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: There’s a little-known multifaith initiative also working for Middle East peace, with support from the U.S. government and visiting delegations of American Christians, Muslims and Jews. They say there can never be peace in the Holy Land without strong relationships between religious leaders. Kim Lawton is in Jerusalem.

KIM LAWTON: Just outside of Bethlehem, an American group is touring the Aida Palestinian refugee camp. These are not typical Holy Land pilgrims. It’s is a delegation of Christian, Muslim and Jewish leaders who are part of an American faith-based initiative to bolster peace in this land of conflict. Former U.S. Ambassador Tony Hall is heading the initiative, along with Cardinal Theodore McCarrick.

Bishop Munib Younan

Ambassador TONY HALL: I don’t think any of us are under any illusions that we’re going to solve the peace problem, but we also realize that you can’t have peace without religious leaders, and that’s why we come here and try to build these relationships.

LAWTON: This is Hall’s thirteenth trip to the region in the last 24 months. He says as a former Democratic congressman and ambassador he’s seen the limits of politics and diplomacy.

Amb. HALL: I have, you know, voted for war, I’ve voted against war. I’ve voted for this program or that program. I have spoken against treaties. As an ambassador I signed treaties. About the only thing I know that works: building relationships, praying together, and let the faith aspect take over. It’s strong. It’s powerful. We never do it.

LAWTON: For more than two years, the U.S government has supported a dual-pronged approach: bringing interfaith groups of Americans to meet with their counterparts here in the Holy Land, and supporting a coalition of top religious leaders here who are trying to create an environment where peace can take hold.

Amb. HALL (at press conference, from file footage): What you have before you is a council not of religious leaders, but of the religious leaders.

LAWTON: The Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land was first announced at a Washington news conference in November 2007. Its members include Israel’s chief rabbis, the Supreme Judge of the Palestinian Islamic Courts, and the heads of the major Christian denominations. Rabbi David Rosen, of the American Jewish Committee in Israel, is also part of the council of the Holy Land

Rabbi DAVID ROSEN (American Jewish Committee, Israel): Never in the history of the Holy Land did there ever exist a body of the leadership of the three faiths of this land. I suppose it’s both wonderful and pathetic.  It’s pathetic that this has never happened before. It’s wonderful that, despite everything, we’ve managed to keep it going.

LAWTON: The council has established a rapid communication hotline to address protection of holy sites and to respond to derogatory portrayals of other faiths in the media or within religious communities. Now, the council is launching a project to monitor school textbooks. According to council member and Lutheran Bishop Munib Younan, that project is much needed.

Bishop MUNIB YOUNAN (Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land): We are working now on monitoring the textbooks both in Israel and Palestine, and to see, you see, what we teach about the other, because usually what we teach about the other is very shameful.

LAWTON: Still, politics all too often interferes. Tensions have been particularly high since the recent conflict between Israel and Gaza.

Rabbi Steve Gutow

Rabbi ROSEN: While most Christian denominations can be said to be independent, Jewish and Muslim religious representatives are subject to, if not subjugated by, the political authorities. So when things are tough politically, it tends to be much more difficult for them to be at the table. And yet, not withstanding all those pressures, we still manage to weather the storms.

Bishop YOUNAN: We have the suffering of our people under our skin. So when we sit we speak on reality. So this is the reason sometimes it’s difficult.

LAWTON: Hall brings interfaith delegations from the U.S. to encourage council members and to meet with local Muslim, Christian and Jewish groups across the spectrum. The deliberately interfaith nature of the group can be challenging, especially when people confront viewpoints different from their own. Suhail Khan is an American Muslim with the Institute for Global Engagement.

SUHAIL KHAN (Senior Fellow for Christian-Muslim Understanding , Institute for Global Engagement): You definitely feel that there are different narratives. and you feel different people within the group sometimes bristling at what they’re hearing, sometimes not willing to accept whatever narrative they might be hearing at the time, and so that has been a challenge but, again, I’m finding that it’s helping us really come together.

Bishop YOUNAN: For me, it’s important that they see reality and see the complexity of the reality in which we are living as, in this part of the world — to hear both sides, both fears, both worries, but at the same time not to abide in the fears and the worries — to give us a sign of hope.

LAWTON: Several delegation members say they are returning to the U.S. with a new sense of responsibility for getting involved in the peace process.

Rabbi STEVE GUTOW (President, Jewish Council for Public Affairs): I mean, the power of bringing Christians and Muslims and Jews together — it’s stunning and powerful. And if we bring, you know, the real masses of our faith and the real elites of our faith and get them deeply engaged that something needs to be done here, I think we’ve done something good.

LAWTON: The initiative began under the Bush administration, but leaders on both sides of the ocean hope President Obama will continue the program, and perhaps even expand it.

Rabbi ROSEN: So I’m hoping that this new administration, especially with the contacts we have thanks to our friends in the United States who have been so supportive of the work that we do, that we can be perceived as a stakeholder and a strategic asset on the part of this administration in its new initiatives.

Suhail Khan

LAWTON: There are also questions about how supportive Israel’s new political leadership may be.

Rabbi ROSEN: I wouldn’t automatically assume that the fact that it is more right wing and less inclined to make political concessions means that it is going to be less understanding of the religious dimension.

LAWTON: Ambassador Hall admits the task can seem daunting.

Amb. HALL: It’s tough. This is a tough country. It’s a tough Holy Land. Everybody, you know, talks about peace, but it’s peace talking, not peace making. So I think it’s a matter of building relationships, it’s a matter of coming back, it’s a matter of doing it drip by drip.

LAWTON: And as people of faith they say they won’t give up.

Rabbi GUTOW: I think when one brings God into the equation, when one brings our highest selves, our spiritual selves, into the decision making, I think that hope always springs, that hope is always there.

ABERNETHY: Kim Lawton joins us now from Jerusalem. Kim, it seems from here that this is an unusually difficult time for peacemaking there. What’s your sense of what Pope Benedict can accomplish?

LAWTON: Well, certainly the tensions from the conflict over Gaza in recent months are still very much a part of the mix here. Pope Benedict has said that this is not a political mission, but a spiritual pilgrimage. But, of course, there is a strong political overtone to everything he says and does. He has spoken very frequently about his concern about the conflict here. He cares very much about Middle East peace. He will be meeting with political leaders, and people are hoping that he can use that sort of moral bully pulpit that he has to, indeed, have an influence.

ABERNETHY: In recent years the pope has said some things and done some things that have offended both Muslims and Jews, so there’s some fence-mending to be done, too, isn’t there?

LAWTON: Indeed, he really has some multifaith challenges before him. He will be visiting some mosques in Jordan and here in Israel. He’ll be the first pope to actually visit the Dome of the Rock, which is so important to Muslims—one of their holiest sites. He’s hoping that symbolism of going to those places will help counteract some of the negative publicity he got after he made a speech where he quoted a Byzantine emperor who had some not very nice things to say about the Prophet Mohammad. But he’s hoping that the visual impact of this trip will help. The same thing with the Jewish community: there have been some concerns after the pope lifted the excommunication of a bishop who denied the Holocaust and some other issues. The Vatican has been working hard behind the scenes to repair those relationships, and so now, again, they hope that there’s a really public, visual indication that the pope does care about the Muslim people and the Jewish people.

ABERNETHY: Kim, when the pope and other religious leaders speak about bringing spiritual power to bear on complex political issues, how do they think that can work?

LAWTON: Well, for them as people of faith, the most — the biggest power is indeed spiritual power, and so I think that’s what they’re hoping they can draw upon to really make a difference here. You know, when I spoke with Ambassador Tony Hall about his effort he said we’ve tried everything else and nothing else has worked, so why not do that, especially in this place which is so holy to the three major religions of the world. Religion is so tied to the politics that it’s hard to separate it out, and I think the pope and a lot of the other religious leaders that I’ve been talking to really in order for peace to firmly take hold you have to have the religious community on board and you have to harness some of that spiritual power.

ABERNETHY: Kim Lawton, many thanks.