VOLUNTEERS MARCHING: Left right, left right, left right…

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: These are all vets from all branches of the service—Iraq and Afghanistan vets embarking on a new mission for themselves and their communities—today, trading their military uniforms for a blue shirt.

SPENCER KYMPTON (The Mission Continues): (speaking to veterans) I want you to stand up now if you believe that you have more to give and that you’re an asset to your country.

SEVERSON: This is an orientation session for a rapidly growing non-profit program called The Mission Continues which enlists veterans to serve their communities in over 37 states so far. It was founded in 2007 by Eric Greitens, a former Navy Seal and commander of an Al Qaeda targeting unit. The unit was hit by a truck bomb and it was after visiting his injured comrades that Greitens got the idea for starting The Mission Continues.

ERIC GREITENS (The Mission Continues): And when you say to them, tell me what you want to do when you recover, every single one of them said to me, I want to return to my unit. They all said I want to return to my unit. Now the reality was, for a lot of those men and women, they were not going to be able to return to their unit. I said tell me if you can’t go back to your unit right away, tell me what else you’d like to do. Every single one of them told me that they wanted to find a way to continue to serve.

SEVERSON: Greitens had made a significant discovery about the dark space so many veterans find themselves in when they get home. It’s not so much that they feel unwelcome. They feel unneeded.

NATASHA YOUNG: I was depressed. I was doing a lot of self-pitying at the time. That’s when I came across The Mission Continues.

SEVERSON: Natasha Young was in the Marines for 12 years, a Gunnery Sergeant medically discharged a year ago with cancer and PTSD.

YOUNG: There was no shortage of organizations offering free items like movie tickets or…that’s not what I needed. I needed someone to say that, you know what Staff Sergeant Young, you’re still needed. You have valuable, tangible skills that you can still utilize in your community.

SEVERSON: There are 72 vets in this group out of over 700 who applied. Getting accepted as a Fellow is not easy. Spencer Kympton, the 2nd in command of The Mission Continues is a former Blackhawk helicopter pilot.

SPENCER KYMPTON: You have to be able to demonstrate that you’re not done serving, that you have a particular passion to serve in the same way that you did when you raised your right hand and said you’d support and defend the constitution of the United States.

SEVERSON: The vets who are accepted are hooked up with local nonprofit organizations in their communities.

KYMPTON: Whether that’s mentoring low-income kids, or building homes for the impoverished, or training service animals for people with disabilities, you know those are positive role models for those communities.

SEVERSON: For their 6 months of volunteering, they receive a stipend of roughly 7000 dollars from The Mission Continues which receives it’s funding from foundations and companies like Target, The Home Depot and Southwest Airlines.

On this day, before they return to their communities, they’re bussed to the Trinity River, south of the Dallas skyline, for a final group effort, to clear brush and create an overlook along a newly opened trail. Eric Greitens says what we see here is an example of how military training can work in civilian life.

GREITENS: There’s a tremendous set of skills and abilities which they bring back from their military service that they can now use here at home. They’ve all learned what it takes to work with a team and accomplish a mission. They’re all used to being held accountable. They know what it takes to inspire people in difficult circumstances; they know that success doesn’t come easy. So they bring back those skills and also those attitudes which they can apply in a civilian context.

ROBERT BROWN: You take a bunch of veterans and you put them on an objective. It’s gonna get done one way or another.

SEVERSON: Robert Brown was discharged from the Marines in 2004. He was suffering from a traumatic brain injury and PTSD.

BROWN: I was an RP. I was a Religious Programs Specialist. Worked with the chaplain, so I worked with suicide guys. We had several attempts. Then…

SEVERSON: You needed some help yourself?

BROWN: Yeah.

GREITENS: What happens for a lot of veterans when they come home, especially when they get back to their community is that they can go to a very tough and hard place and they start to wonder what’s next for me and they ask themselves why did this happen to me.

BROWN: I had no idea what I was going to do. It made me homeless. I had no money, nowhere to go. And then I finally had enough courage to go back home and hung out with family but that wasn’t working very good, you know, people’s got their own family and kids.

KYMPTON: When you’re in the military, you’re part of something that other men and women to your left and right are part of alongside with you. And it’s a life, it’s a family. So when you leave that very distinct environment, a piece of you is missing.

BROWN: This is the best I’ve felt. I’ve lost 73 pounds. You know, I’ve still got the issues but you know I’ve got some purpose and focus now.

GREITENS: When we make these decisions that we’re going to commit ourselves to making a difference in the life of one person every single day, what happens is we actually build a whole generation of citizen leaders.

SEVERSON: Greitens started The Mission Continues along with a couple friends using his combat and their disability pay. He could have chosen a higher-paying career. He is a Rhodes Scholar, has a PhD from Oxford, and has authored two books.

GREITENS: I believe that for all of us to have a good life we have to live with a combination of courage and compassion, and I also believe that for all us to have a good life, we have to live for something that is larger than ourselves.

(speaking to veterans): Every generation of Americans who has fought, every generation of Americans who has served, has suffered.

SEVERSON: Greitens is no stranger to public service. He’s done humanitarian work in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda. He says his religion has motivated him.

GREITENS: I think there are a couple of key lessons that come from Judaism that shaped my life. One of them is the idea we have a duty to repair the world and all of us should play a role in our lives in trying to repair the world and to make the world better for the next generation.

SEVERSON: The world appears to be a better place for many of the vets who have gone through The Mission Continues. A study by the Center for Social Development at Washington University in St. Louis found that over 70 percent of Fellows have furthered their education, and 80 percent have found civilian employment.

UNIDENTIFIED FELLOW: Delta Class, atten–hut! We are fellows of The Mission Continues.

FELLOWS: (together) We are Fellows of The Mission Continues!

KYMPTON: These folks have already once signed on the dotted line and said that they are willing and able and ready to serve. We’re just saying, “Serve again.”

SEVERSON: The Mission Continues has now graduated over 500 Fellows and plans to recruit far more of the 5 million who have served in the last ten years.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Dallas.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This is the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, the military’s largest and most advanced medical facility. It’s where doctors send some of the most seriously burned and wounded soldiers to recover, sometimes with artificial limbs. Since the beginning of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, thousands of soldiers, like Private Carlos Gomez, have suffered injuries like his. He was on a scouting mission and was seriously wounded when his vehicle ran over a roadside bomb in Afghanistan earlier this year.

PVT CARLOS GOMEZ: Well, the blast, it shot us straight up in the air so the impact actually broke my left leg. It shattered my heel and my bones down my right, left leg, I mean, and my right leg got crushed. They couldn’t save it anymore so they had to amputate it here at Brooke Army Medical Center.

SEVERSON: Two other soldiers were wounded in the blast. One was killed. At first Gomez wasn’t sure he wanted to live.

PVT GOMEZ: I woke up, you know, not really knowing what happened still. I didn’t know that my leg was amputated, and when I was fully, you know, aware of what’s going on, I saw my leg, yeah, I broke down in tears, you know, and I hated my life, and I didn’t want nothing to do with it.

SEVERSON: The first battle many seriously wounded soldiers face is whether they want to go on with their lives and then endure the long, painful process of healing, often alone. Doctors have learned that wounded soldiers heal faster and more completely when they have family around them. That’s what happens here at the Warrior and Family Support Center in San Antonio. It is the only one of its kind. It was the dream of Judith Markelz, and now she’s the director.

JUDITH MARKELZ (Warrior Family Support Center Program Manager): We attempt to form a home away from home for wounded warriors and their families, to help them feel some kind of connection to each other, things for them to do every day to take them outside of their own world and help them transition back to active duty or to the civilian community where they’re going to have to adjust and make a lot of changes.

SEVERSON: Although it’s located on an army post, the Warrior and Family Support Center is funded entirely from private donations and staffed by about 150 volunteers. Families live in apartments close by, so they can help soldiers accept what is called “the new normal,” which means their life will never be quite the same again. Sometimes family is as important as the medical care.

MARKELZ: To know that someone is there, that someone that comes from home to take care of you makes a tremendous difference for our warriors. If you believe in the triad of the healing of the mind, body, and spirit, then we probably fall in the category of the healing of the spirit.

SEVERSON: Bryant Casteel is a Baptist chaplain at the center. He says the most important part of his job is simply to be there.

CHAPLAIN (CAPT) BRYANT CASTEEL: You know, sometimes you want to find the right words. I found many times when dealing with soldiers there’s not a right word. There’s no right way to tell someone you’re going to be okay. And some say, hey, can you pray for me chaplain? You know, can you let me know things are going to be all right? I can’t promise you, but I can promise you I’ll be here to support you.

SEVERSON: One of the favorite nights around here is bingo night. For a while they forget that the war for them is not yet over. For those who think this must be a very sad place, Judith Markelz says the opposite is true. She says it’s a place of hope, which is the name of the sculpture hanging in the center which was created by a staff sergeant who had 29 surgeries while he was at Brooke. She says the wounded may cry in their beds at night, but never in public.

MARKELZ: These young men and women do not want your sympathy. They want your support and in the help of their healing, because they’re going to be okay. They did what they were commanded to do, and they did it with great integrity and honor.

SEVERSON: And many paid a huge price, like Master Sergeant Doug Reed with the Ohio National Guard, critically wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade in Afghanistan in 2010. He’s the father of seven kids, here with his wife, Jana.

MSG DOUG REED: The angel of death had me in his arms, and Jesus said, “No, I’m not done with you.” So they fought over me, and my jaw came off.

JANA REED: He was very close to death, in the fact that I mean with every surgery they didn’t know if he would ever wake up or ever become independent. And so that’s when I just had to say, “Okay, God, I am not in control. The doctors are not in control. But you are in control, and you are going to have to fix this, if this is what you want.”

SEVERSON: And when he finally did wake up, for two months he didn’t know his wife. He didn’t even know who he was.

JANA REED: But when our kids walked in the door he gave them a hug, and he called them all by their pet names, and so the kids began to cry, not because of what they saw, but because it’s dad, he does know me, when the doctors were saying we don’t think he’ll know you.

MSG REED: I didn’t know what I looked like. It couldn’t have been good, and they don’t see that. They don’t care if I have teeth or not or my jaw is out of shape now or anything else. What they cared about is I was still alive. I was still with them.

SEVERSON: Judith Markelz says the families themselves need support.

MARKELZ: This is not a singular effort. It involved families, children, wives, mothers. An injury or a death is like dropping a rock in the water, and the ripples go forever, and they affect everyone with whom they ever came in contact.

SEVERSON: Private Gomez has two children, and he says he knows things will get better when he gets his prosthesis, but in the meantime his seven-year-old son is having a hard time.

PVT GOMEZ: It’s affecting him. I know definitely it’s affecting him. You know, he has to help out his dad a lot with stuff that I can’t do, like picking stuff up for me, you know, putting on my shoes, stuff like that.

SEVERSON: Gomez says he’s always been religious, but one of the few times he didn’t have time to pray was when he rushed out on a mission in the middle of the night, the mission that cost him his leg. He says the war has not cost him his faith.

PVT GOMEZ: I don’t question God, not one day, you know, why this happened to me. I thank him actually, because it could have been the opposite, you know. I could have paid the ultimate sacrifice and passed away. It was because of him I’m still sitting here talking to you right now.

SEVERSON: Jana Reed says her faith and her husband’s are actually stronger.

JANA REED: Because every day we have a miracle that has been answered, and some people might say, oh, it’s a coincidence, but we’ve just had too many coincidences in the pasts 16 months that I do not accept it. It is not a coincidence.

SEVERSON: Chaplain Casteel says he has seen how the Warrior and Family Support Center has helped soldiers get better quicker. But he worries about what happens when the soldiers go home.

CH CASTEEL: When you walk around here, you don’t feel like you’re different. You don’t feel like, wow, someone’s staring at me or looking at me like I’m strange, and so I think here for a soldier it can be safe. Now when they leave this environment, going back to their home of record, then it could be a little more challenging, and I think that anxiety rises again for the soldier: Hey, will I be accepted?

SEVERSON: There was a time when wounded soldiers returning from the Vietnam War received more hostility than community support. But times have changed.

MARKELZ: Whether you agree with what these young men and women did is of, frankly, no concern to me. If you don’t like the war, it is not an issue for me. The issue is that we continue to support these young men and women for the rest of our days and theirs, because this doesn’t end tomorrow.

SEVERSON: She says that there are now other warrior and family support centers being built around the country modeled after the one here.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Lucky Severson in San Antonio, Texas.

BOB ABERNETHY: The last of the U.S. troops in Iraq came home last month, and we want to explore today how they are being received. Are they getting the help they need? How do they feel about the violence in the country they left behind? Meanwhile, what can be said about the incident in Afghanistan when four Marines defiled the bodies of Taliban fighters, and the picture of that went online around the world? Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, joins me to talk with Nancy Sherman, a University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington. Her specialty is the ethics of war, including what she has called “moral wounding.” Her most recent book is The Untold War. Nancy, thank you for being with us.

NANCY SHERMAN (University Professor, Georgetown University): My pleasure.

ABERNETHY: When people see the pictures of the Marine incident, everybody says that’s terrible, reprehensible, no excuse for it. But, you know, here are guys who may have been on several tours, they’re tired, they see their friends, their buddies, blown up, killed, maimed. It would seem to me a fairly natural reaction to demonize the enemy, hate the enemy and want to do something despicable to express your feelings about this enemy.

SHERMAN: You’re right. The angry responses increased as the weapons have gotten dirtier and the enemies more invisible, and the rules of engagement have clamped down, and so there is a lot of frustration and, as you say, lots of deaths and maimings, and if you can’t exercise your frustration at the living you may do it toward the dead. That said, officers are furious that there was this kind of misconduct, this lack of professionalism, and a sense of not really having compassion for the respect due for the dead.

KIM LAWTON (Managing Editor, Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly): Nancy, we’ve seen in the news this past week, but over successive weeks, ongoing sectarian violence in Iraq between Sunnis and Shiites, tensions in the government. How does all of this contribute to this notion you talk about, the moral wounding of those troops who served there?

SHERMAN: Well, I think troops have been on a roller coaster these ten years, especially in Iraq. They were exhilarated with the fall of Baghdad, frustrated with not finding WMDs, ambivalent about a mission, and reluctantly took on the role of being city builders, city planners, school builders, and the like. And now they see that whole project of stability and democratization unraveling, and they feel, I think, frustration. You know, some come home, their marriages have exploded, they’ve lost custody of the children. They come home carrying heavy, invisible wounds, of a sense of betrayal and PTSD. That’s hard. Was it worth it?

LAWTON: Was it worth it?

ABERNETHY: A sense of their having carried the whole burden and the whole rest of the country not having done so?

SHERMAN: That’s right. They are a volunteer force, but they’re still only, you know, one percent or fewer than the country, and that makes them a kind of isolated group.

ABERNETHY: But they are getting the medical care they need.

SHERMAN: Well, yes, they are getting medical care. It’s better than ever, but it’s massive, and we’re in the process of DOD budgetary constraints. We have to make sure that at primary care they get psychological screening, and that it carries through to the end of their days.

LAWTON: Is there an ethical obligation, a moral obligation we as a society have toward these troops?

SHERMAN: Absolutely, absolutely. They may come home with a sense of resentment because they carried so much. We have to reach out through community organizations, creation of jobs, and simply talking to the vet who comes home.

ABERNETHY: Is that hard to do?

SHERMAN: Yeah, but first thing to do, no judging and a lot of empathy, because it could have been your son or daughter, and it probably is your neighbor.

LAWTON: And is that happening? Do the troops feel that that is happening enough?

SHERMAN: More and more, but don’t be surprised if when you say, “Thank you for your service,” you get a mixed response.

ABERNETHY: Really?

SHERMAN: They want you to know it was harder than just your utterance of that remark.

ABERNETHY: Nancy Sherman of Georgetown University, many thanks.

SHERMAN: Thank you so much.

ABERNETHY: And Kim Lawton of this program. Thank you.

CHAPLAIN STEVEN RINDAHL: The month of May, we sustained our largest volume of casualties. We were conducting memorial ceremonies every few days, and by the time that month was over, I was pretty well worn out.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Chaplain Steven Rindahl served 15 months in Iraq. Now he’s the chaplain at the Fort Jackson hospital in South Carolina, which is also the headquarters of the Army’s Chaplain school. There are 2900 full and part-time chaplains, and many have served at least one tour of duty in a combat zone, and, like Chaplain Rindahl, been haunted by the experience.

CHAPLAIN RINDAHL: We have 17 of our soldiers killed and one of our contracted interpreters, and I did not keep count of how many traumatic amputations and other wounds that caused our people to be evacuated from theater.

SEVERSON: It was his fellow chaplains who took him aside and told him that he was suffering from what has become known as “compassion fatigue.”

CHAPLAIN RINDAHL: I realized that what they were saying was true because I would hear footsteps outside in the gravel, the crunching noise, and I would just be terrified that somebody was coming to tell me about another casualty.

CHAPLAIN MIKE DUGAL: Across the board we have recognized that we do have chaplains that have experienced combat trauma.

SEVERSON: Colonel Mike Dugal is the Chaplain Director for the Center for Spiritual Leadership at Ft. Jackson. The center opened in 2008 partly in response to the realization that, like soldiers, chaplains also suffer the trauma of combat stress.

CHAPLAIN DUGAL: We do have chaplains that are going through the same psychological and traumatic events that our soldiers are going through. It is hard to be empathetic and to show compassion to our soldiers and to see the brokenness, to see the carnage and that not to affect you.

SEVERSON: According to the army, since the beginning of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s chaplains have served a total of more than 20,000 months in combat zones, some have gone on as many as eight tours of duty. One survey revealed that 20 percent of these chaplains had suffered compassion fatigue or some sort of PTSD.

Like the soldiers, these chaplains are often in the heat of battle where death is very real and the casualties are friends. Lieutenant Colonel Graeme Bicknell is not a chaplain, but he is an army expert on compassion fatigue.

LT. COL GRAEME BICKNELL: It can be nightmares. It can be lack of desire to eat, sort of feeling sad, sadness, avoiding certain behaviors because it reminds you of what happened.

SEVERSON: He says it’s understandable that chaplains would experience compassion fatigue.

LT. COL BICKNELL: The more empathic a person is, the more they’re able to relate to somebody or be in their shoes. The more vulnerable they are to compassion fatigue. And I think that with chaplains, that empathic relationship is incredibly important to be able to benefit the soldier.

CHAPLAIN JOHN READ: I guess I first learned in a profound way how trauma can damage the soul when I was clinically trained at Brook Army Medical Center.

SEVERSON: Chaplain John Read is the army’s Director of the Soldier and Family Ministries.

CHAPLAIN READ: You see the gun shot wounds, the stabbings, the burn patients, all the volatility of the kinds of things you see in a war zone. I mean I recognized there, as a clinically trained chaplain working in a hospital setting how that would affect me in terms of questions of life, death, grief, loss. The things that profoundly become kind of moral, ethical, spiritual aspects of our lives.

SEVERSON: He tells of seeing the body parts of 38 little Iraqi kids blown up by a terrorist bomb right after learning he had just become a grandfather. And of the soldier who died in his arms.

CHAPLAIN READ: He had just become a naturalized citizen two months before his death, killed in a rocket attack. I held him in my arms as he died and gave him, recited a prayer from his specific faith that he was from, and the peaceful look on his face as he thanked me and died, I will just never forget. But there isn’t a day that I don’t wish that he could somehow be with his wife and kids.

SEVERSON: One thing that often comes through is the deep, abiding respect and fatherly love these chaplains have for their soldiers.

CHAPLAIN DUGAL: It is natural for chaplains to weep with those who weep because a lot of these kids, most of these kids are the age of my youngest son and I’m a father to them. There are times that when I reflect about the cost that our military has paid since 911, I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to be with them. Because it is an honor.

SEVERSON: And it is not only the soldiers chaplains weep for — it’s the soldier’s families.

CHAPLAIN READ: The chaplains that go out and do many notifications, supporting the casualty notification process and the death notifications. It’s a heavy load to bear. And so at some point in time, invariably they have to re-engage themselves in a meaningful way to move in and through and beyond that.

SEVERSON: That’s where the chaplain’s school and the Center for Spiritual Leadership come into play. They get training here, discussion groups, reading lists, counseling.

There’s a chaplain museum tracing back to the Revolutionary war. It was George Washington who first dictated that each regiment should have it’s own chaplain.

CHAPLAIN DUGAL: When pain and suffering is very real, soldiers know that they can turn to the chaplain.

SEVERSON: Chaplain Greg Cheney served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He says there was a time when what he experienced in combat challenged his faith.

CHAPLAIN GREG CHENEY: Definitely, I mean when you go through that kind of extreme circumstances, there were times when I would, you know, question God and ask God what’s going on. Yeah, it’s one of those experiences where everything doesn’t make sense when it’s happening.

SEVERSON: Ultimately, he says, his faith actually grew from his combat experience.

CHAPLAIN CHENEY: Even when I was going through that, I felt an amazing sense of calm in those situations as I ministered to those soldiers, and I know that that could not have been anything from myself, it was only God, you know, Jesus Christ working through me to touch these soldier’s lives.

CHAPLAIN DUGAL: I would definitely say that my faith has developed and not to the point of questioning the existence of God, but having to deal with the reality of pain and suffering and realize that there are no just simple answers.

CHAPLAIN RINDAHL: If you think about what Christ did for humanity. He left a place of ultimate privilege in order to take on a hardship and ultimately sacrifice himself for people who didn’t know him. And soldiers take upon themselves the obligation to leave the most privileged county in the world and be willing to sacrifice personal comfort and, although not intending to sacrifice their own life, at least be willing to.

SEVERSON: There’s a phrase that’s become quite common among veterans, and among chaplains, of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It’s called “the new normal.” It means that their lives are never going to be quite the same as before.

CHAPLAIN READ: Sunday school teachers I had had as a kid growing up who kind of always celebrated my journey, said you’re not the same. And I would say, reflectively, how am I different? Well, you’ve seen things that none of us will ever see. We can see that in your eyes.

SEVERSON: For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Crystal City, Virginia.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Going into the Iraq war, U.S. military officials described the overwhelming force they intended to employ as “shock and awe.” Now it seems that same phrase could be used to describe the overall cost of that war and the one in Afghanistan and the U.S. engagement in neighboring Pakistan. It’s much greater than predicted by the government, according to a report compiled by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. It’s called the Eisenhower Research Project, codirected by Professors Catherine Lutz and Neta Crawford.

PROFESSOR NETA CRAWFORD (Political Science, Boston University): I’ve been looking at the history of war and its conduct for a long time, and what struck me about these three wars most startlingly was how much we don’t know about the costs.

PROFESSOR CATHERINE LUTZ (Anthropology and International Studies, Brown University): The reasonable estimate is approximately $4 trillion for the war, up to today and including some of the future costs that we’re obligated to pay for veterans care.

SEVERSON: That estimate includes the cost of the fighting that hasn’t ended yet, but it does not include as much as a trillion dollars just for the interest payments on the war debt through 2020. That’s a unique aspect of these wars.

CRAWFORD: Every other war the US has fought historically has been paid for by revenue, either by raising taxes or selling war bonds. In this war, the United States has almost entirely financed it, paid for it by borrowing.

LUTZ: What surprised me most was this idea that wars have such a long tail into the future of negative effects that we pay environmentally, we pay in human suffering, we pay in financially decades into the future.

President George W. Bush in 2003: “My fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

SEVERSON: Originally, the Bush Administration projected the Iraq war would be short and cost approximately $60 billion, clearly off the mark, but historically not unusual.

LUTZ: Governments often try to sell wars to the public and they use, at best, a very, very conservative estimate that will seem the most attractive and reasonable to the public. There tends to be an assumption that force will work, and therefore the job will be done in a couple of weeks or a month.

CRAWFORD: That doesn’t usually happen. In fact, it hardly ever happens. You have to really destroy a country to get people to roll over, and in every instance, the duration of war is almost always underestimated.

SEVERSON: To date, more than 6,000 U.S. troops have come home in coffins, although until recently images of the solemn event at Dover Air Force Base have been forbidden. Less well known is the fact that more than 26,000 allied military and security forces, most of them Iraqi or Afghan, have also been killed.

LUTZ: A lot of the information about the war is not available to the American public. For a variety of reasons, the idea that you want to have a sanitized version of the war available for purposes of morale, for the public at large, for the troops.

SEVERSON: Hundreds of aid workers have been killed, others kidnapped. Twenty-three hundred U.S. contractors have died. But what we rarely hear about are the numbers of civilian deaths, and they are considerably greater than military casualties.

CRAWFORD: In Iraq, it’s been about 125,000 people killed, civilians killed. In Afghanistan, the conflict has killed directly about 12,000 to 14,000 civilians.

SEVERSON: The hostilities In Pakistan have actually taken more lives than the war in Afghanistan—about 35,000, including civilians and militants. There, the U.S. military relies increasingly on drone attacks. The cost of this operation is classified.

CRAWFORD: These strikes have killed about 2,000 people. We don’t know exactly how many, and we don’t know exactly how many of those people were insurgent targets. Now this is a secret war, but it’s an open secret.

SEVERSON: Another war statistic is the number of wounded. Among U.S. servicemen alone that number is nearly 100,000, and the wounds are often severe.

LUTZ: This war differs from previous wars in a number of ways, and so there are certain kind of injuries and severity of injury that we did not see in previous wars. Survival rates are higher because of battlefield medicine and other factors.

SEVERSON: The insurgents’ use of IEDs or improvised explosive devices has been a major cause of injuries.

LUTZ: So we have a lot more injuries that are, again, whole body impact rather than just a single bullet kind of injuries, and these kinds of traumatic brain injuries that have such long-term negative effects and often interact with some of the other problems, the PTSD and other injuries that have this major effect on the person.

SEVERSON: It’s the hidden costs or unquantifiable costs of war that keep popping up in the Watson Institute report, which was compiled by 20 academics from around the country—the cost, for instance, to our civil liberties. The report says there has been unprecedented surveillance of American behavior and phone conversations that have been allowed through the Patriot Act, which was enacted to fight terrorism at home.

LUTZ: It is common to wars in general that they have often expanded the power of the government beyond what they were, what those powers were in peacetime, and that those powers are often maintained past the end of the conflict, and so in line with the idea that wars are never over when we think they’re over, that’s one way in which that statement’s true.

SEVERSON: Then there’s the image of the U.S., which has suffered globally, first after the torture pictures from Abu Ghraib, then the reports of the secret prisons and the detention of hundreds of terror suspects at Guantanamo, many of whom were released after several years.

CRAWFORD: It’s tarnished the image of the United States as a country of the rule of law.

LUTZ: For the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, this has been a nightmare decade.

SEVERSON: The report says the psychological effects for the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan have been “massive”—depression, post traumatic stress disorder, broken families, targeted victims and collateral damage of a counterinsurgency war.

LUTZ: The number of refugees from these wars have been estimated by the UN at 7.8 million persons in those three countries—Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. And that’s equivalent to the population of Connecticut and Kentucky being forced from their homes.

SEVERSON: The environmental harm is difficult to calculate but significant: damage from spilt fuel, spent munitions, toxic dust, increased rates of respiratory and cardiovascular disease, which is also showing up in returning troops.

SEVERSON: The report also takes into account what the wars have accomplished—the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the killing of Osama bin Laden, the diminished ability of the Taliban, greater rights for women in Afghanistan, the spread of democracy, although Iraq and Afghanistan are listed as two of the world’s most corrupt countries. But like the costs, it will be impossible to measure the benefits until well into the future, and it’s the future that concerns the authors of this report.

LUTZ: The data is out there, but it’s very difficult to access. In some cases it’s not there at all. We need to know what those data are for past conflicts in order to try and project forward to other conflicts. That’s how a democratic society should operate is with full information about what public policy decisions are being made and who’s being asked to pay what. These have been costs that have also been born very unevenly, so the people who are paying the costs, military families, veterans, civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan—those people deserve to have their story told.

SEVERSON: Benjamin Franklin is quoted as having said, “Wars are not paid for in wartime. The bill comes later.” The Watson Institute report says the bills for these wars will keep coming in for as long as 40 years later.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, this is Lucky Severson in Washington.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Happy days in Roswell, New Mexico, as soldiers in a National Guard engineer company deployed in Afghanistan come marching home. For some, unless they get called back the war is over. For others, it’s only begun.

MICHAEL ABBATELLO: I was a rifleman.

SEVERSON: In an infantry unit?

ABBATELLO: In an infantry line unit.

SEVERSON: In the Marines?

ABBATELLO: Correct, Marine Corps infantry.

SEVERSON: Michael Abbatello joined the Marines September 12, 2001, the day after the terrorist attack on the Twin Trade Towers. Like tens of thousands of American soldiers coming home, he has struggled with the warning signs of post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, symptoms like nightmares, insomnia, hyper-vigilance and guilt, and for him something even deeper—a wounding of the soul.

ABBATELLO: Something is changed. You know, you feel down to your spirit. You know that you’re different now. You know, we don’t really have a consciousness of our own spirit until it’s wounded, and then it needs help.

SEVERSON: With the increase in crime and suicide among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, the notion that war can actually damage or warp the soul has been gaining traction among experts in the field. Nancy Sherman, a professor at Georgetown University, has studied and written extensively about the hearts, minds, and souls of soldiers.

PROFESSOR NANCY SHERMAN (Georgetown University): I like to talk about the moral emotions of war, and they include wounds, but they’re the hard, bad feelings that may erode at your character. That’s the really deep ones.

SEVERSON: The kind of emotional wounds Lieutenant Colonel Eric Olsen witnessed as a chaplain in Iraq.

LT. COL. ERIC OLSEN: It’s a hard place where you are asked to do some very difficult things, and once you’ve crossed those lines it’s hard to navigate back. It is a soul wound. It’s definitely a soul wound.

SEVERSON: Michael Abbatello is still suffering from the guilt that his unit wasn’t there to protect an Afghan father who had provided intelligence on the enemy to the Marines.

ABBATELLO: He had trusted us to some degree that we would be there to support him and his family if he was going to be taking chances to help us, and we betrayed his trust. I mean to a certain degree we weren’t there for him. So yeah, I have guilt.

SEVERSON: What happened to him?

ABBATELLO: Him and his family were gunned down in front of their house. His beard was cut off. He was stripped and laid on top of his family.

SEVERSON: You knew the kids, too? The kids, the whole family?

ABBATELLO: Yeah, yeah.

SEVERSON: A recent survey by the Rand Corporation found that over 300,000 veterans are suffering from some form of PTSD, which has put enormous pressure on veterans’ hospitals like this one in Los Angeles, which also houses New Directions, a residential treatment program for veterans. Clinical director Monica Martocci says no one knows the number of PTSD victims for certain because many veterans refuse to acknowledge it.

MONICA MARTOCCI (Clinical Director, New Directions): It doesn’t bode well for their career if they’re in any way seen as mentally unstable.

SEVERSON: Those who have studied the issue say moral wounding is especially prevalent among recent vets because so many have served more than one tour of duty. Ed Tick operates a sanctuary called Soldier’s Heart for stricken veterans and says they aren’t the only ones suffering.

DR. EDWARD TICK: Twenty percent of active duty troops and as much as 40 percent of Guards and National Guardsmen and reservists are coming back with PTSD. These are astronomical numbers, and we could go through substance abuse and divorce and child abuse and homicide and imprisoned populations, so they are really hurting.

SEVERSON: The Justice Department estimates that nearly a quarter-million veterans of wars dating back to Vietnam are serving time behind bars. The New York Times found 121 cases in which Iraq and Afghan veterans committed murder after their return from war. Only a few had been screened for mental health problems, and unlike many civilian criminals, the overwhelming majority had no prior criminal record.

Dr. Jonathan Shay, a neuroscientist who works with the Veterans Administration, ridicules the age-old theory that good breeding and good character will keep you morally strong even in the face of war.

DR. JONATHAN SHAY: Well, that idea has a great pedigree, and I’m afraid it’s complete crap. It is simply wrong. Moral injury causes good character to become deformed.

SEVERSON: It alters it? It changes who you are?

SHAY: It alters it. It makes you bitter. It makes you cynical. It makes you filled with hatred.

SEVERSON: Michael Abbatello had never been in trouble before, but he served time in prison after his wife convinced him to sell all his unregistered civilian guns to someone who turned out to be a government informer.

ABBATELLO: You get so used to having a rifle. You know, I used to get these fears like I had forgotten my rifle somewhere, and to even imagine life without a rifle is scary.

SEVERSON: Monica Martocci says Michael Abbatello’s attachment to guns is not uncommon.

MARTOCCI: That’s what they were trained to do and what they learned, especially in combat, is that the world is not a safe place, and they are taught to protect themselves and others so, I mean, they think everyone else is crazy for not having a weapon with them at all times.

SEVERSON: The rate of suicide among vets of the current wars has also been on the rise. A federal study in 2005 found that veterans were twice as likely to commit suicide as those who hadn’t served in the military, and PTSD is considered a significant reason why almost 25 percent of America’s homeless are veterans of all wars, even though they make up only eight percent of the population. The largest number of homeless vets reside in downtown Los Angeles, and many have found help at the venerable Union Rescue Mission.

SEVERSON: Anthony Ortega now works at Union Mission. He was injured by shrapnel while his National Guard unit was in Afghanistan, found this place after living on the streets. When he got home, badly injured, Anthony fell into drugs and onto the street.

ANTHONY ORTEGA: And then doing some of the things we have to do, as far as serving our country, goes against what’s in the Bible. Coming back, having to deal with that was very difficult.

SEVERSON: Billy Zinnerman was a sergeant major in the Marines. He says the first Gulf War, where he served on reconnaissance patrols, changed him spiritually.

BILLY ZINNERMAN: Without a doubt, because you see no spirituality in war. Combat does not, for lack of a better word, expose you to the opportunity to serve the Lord.

SEVERSON: After he lost his faith, he lost his wife and his home, and now he’s trying to help other veterans at the Los Angeles mission.

ZINNERMAN: I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a position to say to yourself, if you have believed in God you think God has abandoned you. That’s what you feel in combat, because you feel there can be no God with this type of carnage going on.

SEVERSON: Everyone we spoke with agrees that an important factor in the turbulent return of some vets is that much of the country has not shared the pain of the two wars they have been fighting.

SHERMAN: There’s lip service to the service and to saluting the service, but does the public really understand in a deep way, empathetically, what the moral burdens of war are? I don’t think so.

SEVERSON: The good news is the Department of Defense has instituted a reintegration plan for returning vets called the Yellow Ribbon Program.  Chaplain Eric Olsen officiated at this one.

OLSEN: We try to see them as soon as they come home and in 30 days and 60 days, and we bring them together and sort of tell them what they’re going to go through.

SEVERSON: And more churches are joining in, like the Unitarian church here in Albany, New York, which recently sponsored it’s first healing circle ceremony for veterans like Michael Abbatello.

ABBATELLO: I’ve lost more friends to suicides then I did in combat.

SEVERSON: For too many veterans, coming home doesn’t end with kisses and hugs. Now there is an increasing awareness and some say an urgent need for America and Americans to step up and share the pain of our returning veterans and help them reclaim their lives.

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: Welcome, I’m Bob Abernethy. It’s good to have you with us. Today, a special report on the events and issues we see ahead in 2011. We do this with the help of Kim Lawton, managing editor of this program, Kevin Eckstrom of Religion News Service, and E.J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution, the Washington Post, and Georgetown University. Before we begin our discussion, as we close out the first decade of the new millennium we remember some of the stories that set the stage for the news we expect to cover in 2011 and beyond. Our managing editor Kim Lawton took a look back at the events of the last decade.

KIM LAWTON, managing editor: The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 were perhaps the defining moment of the decade, and the repercussions are still being felt on many fronts. In the wake of the tragedy, mainstream Muslim leaders tried to spread a message that Islam is not synonymous with terrorism. But those efforts were complicated by an expanding extremist movement that recruits over the Internet, as well as several high-profile arrests of Muslims plotting more attacks. American Muslims worked to define their place in US society, but many felt unfairly targeted by enhanced security measures and what they saw as a rising tide of Islamophobia. President Obama made improving relations with the Muslim world one of the priorities of his new administration.

The 9/11 attacks led to American involvement in long and difficult wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Religious and ethical leaders debated whether each conflict was just. President George W. Bush argued for a doctrine of preventive war, the idea that it was moral to attack a country to prevent it from attacking us first. The ethical debates intensified with revelations that the US was using torture as a means of getting information. After thousands of deaths of troops and civilians, President Obama announced the end of combat operations in Iraq and the intention to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan.

Economic crises dominated much of the end of the decade as recession, unemployment and foreclosures took a toll on faith-based groups and the people they serve. Religious institutions were forced to slash their budgets and lay off staff even as they were asked to do more to help needy people.

Religion continued to be a potent force in politics. In 2000 and 2004, President Bush rallied religious conservatives. He set up a new White House office to expand government partnerships with faith-based social service organizations. Analysts spoke of a God gap, with voters seeing the Democratic Party as unfriendly toward religion. In the run-up to the 2008 elections, Democrats and the Obama campaign developed an unprecedented outreach to compete for religious votes. Many in that faith coalition were disappointed the Democrats didn’t build on the momentum in the 2010 midterm elections. Meanwhile, religious conservatives were energized by the Tea Party movement and vowed new activism leading up to the 2012 elections. Religious groups across the spectrum were involved in policy debates, from health care to immigration and gay marriage.

Issues surrounding homosexuality provoked bitter debates within religious institutions and American society as a whole. The 2003 election of Gene Robinson as the first openly gay bishop in the US Episcopal Church brought the worldwide Anglican Communion to the brink of schism, even as other denominations continue to debate the role of gay clergy. In 2003, Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage, with four other states and the District of Columbia following suit. The issue continues to work its way through the courts.

For the Roman Catholic Church, a dramatic changing of the guard with the 2005 death of John Paul II, who had been pope for more than 25 years, and the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. For the US Catholic Church, much of the decade was focused on addressing a massive clergy sex abuse crisis, enacting new guidelines to prevent abuse, and confronting litigation that saw more than two billion dollars in payouts to victims. In 2010, the clergy abuse scandal exploded across many parts of Europe and posed new challenges to the Vatican and top church leaders.

The new millennium began with a sense of relief that a predicted Y2K computer meltdown never materialized. It ends with the development of social media like Facebook and Twitter offering new online possibilities for personal connection and outreach, enabling information to be disseminated at lightning speed—both for good and for ill.

ABERNETHY: Kim, many thanks for that. Welcome to you, to Kevin Eckstrom, and to E.J. Dionne. E.J., we have a new Congress, Republican control of the House, more Republican votes in the Senate. Walk us through that a little bit. What do you expect that will mean for some of the social issues that are of most concern to religious communities?

EJ DIONNE (Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution): You know, watching Kim’s set-up piece I was thinking of Yogi Berra’s great line: ‘Predictions are hard, especially when they’re about the future.” And who would have imagined a decade unfolding the way this last decade just unfolded? So I think we’re all in a difficult situation here. I think when you look forward to this Congress, so much of it is not going to be about social issues. The last Democratic Congress kind of acted to get some of those out of the way, notably don’t ask don’t tell. I think they really wanted that through because they knew it was going to be very difficult this time over. You may have some debate about abortion around the healthcare bill. Republicans want to repeal it. I don’t think they’ll be able to but they going to have a variety of ways of trying to hem in President Obama in sort of putting it into effect. So I think you may see it there. I think one of the sleeper issues will be fights we might have around the National Endowment of the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, where you have, if nothing else for purely political reasons it’s a question where conservatives can talk about it as an economic issue: should we be spending the money? But there are always issues related to cultural values that get into those debates. So I suspect you are going to see some of those arguments around the humanities and arts endowments. Personally, I hope it doesn’t happen that way, but I think that is going to happen.

ABERNETHY: How about immigration?

LAWTON: Well, I was going to say that I am going to be watching to see how some of the evangelical political activists maneuver with the Tea Party politicians that got elected. You know, in this last election there was so much talk about how the Tea Party was so ascendant and there were a lot of religious conservatives that were supportive of the Tea Party. But when you get to issues like immigration or some of the other issues involving a social safety net for the poor, evangelicals don’t always line up as economic conservatives. And so while they might be hoping for some action on abortion or maybe even some of the gay marriage type issues—I don’t know that that’s going to come up in Congress, but I’m going to be watching some of the economic issues that do have some moral implications to see how much evangelicals, and some Catholics who were supportive of the Tea Party—where they come down.

ECKSTROM (Editor, Religious New Service): Right, and there are a lot of moral issues that a lot of religious groups care about. And so I think what you’re going to have is maybe a different set than what we’ve seen in the last couple years. Whereas under the Democratic Congress we were talking about moral issues like the environment and the minimum wage increase and things like that, you’re probably not going to see as much of that with a Republican House. Instead, you’ll have issues that maybe more conservatives tend to latch on to. But it’s not that these social issues are going to disappear, it’s just that there are going to be a different set of them.

DIONNE: That’s a good point, because you are going to talking more and more about budget deficits and cuts in government programs, and I think it’s going to be fascinating to see how religious groups that sometimes seem to be aligned with conservatives on some of the cultural questions are actually going to be saying no, you can’t cut this program for the poor or that program for the poor, because there are a lot of Catholics, a lot of evangelicals, and many in the rest of the religious community—mainline Protestants, Jews, Muslims—who really want to protect some of those programs. So I think their voices are actually going to be very important at a time of budget stress.

ECKSTROM: And one issue I think that’s worth watching that we’ve already seen indications of is that House Republicans want to hold hearings on American Muslims and the radicalization of American Muslims – sort of home-grown terror threats – and what’s going wrong within American Islam that it’s allowing this to happen? So it’s a different kind of religious issue but one that’s already going to be on Congress’s agenda.

ABERNETHY: Before we leave that, E.J., what about the tone, the spirit that you expect. Is it going to be awful?

DIONNE: I’m not very optimistic that we’re going to see an outbreak of comity and friendship across party lines. On the Muslim hearings, having Congress sort of investigate a religious group in the country raises all kinds of questions, which I hope get raised. I’m not sure that the deal that President Obama reached with the Republicans on taxes can be easily replicated across other issues. After all, tossing out about $858 billion is a lot easier than cutting $400 billion or whatever they decide to do. So I think it’s going to be a very difficult couple of years.

LAWTON: And also, sort of in the backdrop, this coming year in politics is going to be the run up to the 2012 presidential election, and so that’s going to be complicating anything anyone wants to get done because there’s going to be a lot of posturing as people try to set themselves up for the next presidential election.

DIONNE: Which brings us to some very interesting debates inside the Republican Party. Your point about the Tea Party and the Christian conservatives overlapping but distinct groups—how are they going to play those roles inside the Republican fight for the nomination?

LAWTON: And a lot of religious conservatives were very unhappy with the Republican establishment, felt like they took them for granted, Republicans took the religious conservatives for granted—wanted them to come out and work and vote but didn’t necessarily take care of their issues. It will be interesting to see whether they feel the same way about the Tea Party as well.

ABERNETHY: And back on this question of tone, everything perhaps is going to be made more dramatic by the fact that it’s going to be, this year, the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

LAWTON: It’s hard to believe that it was almost 10 years ago when those attacks happened and that really did set up a lot of difficult issues for us as a country, both in terms of the war and as well as in terms of interfaith relations. I know a lot of Muslim groups are sort of bracing after seeing in the previous year a lot of protests against mosques and things of that nature. They’re concerned about the atmosphere and a lot of Muslims I’m talking with are worried about what’s going to happen leading up to the 9/11 anniversary.

ABERNETHY: But Kevin, you or E.J. have made the point that we have this real problem of trying to deal with homegrown terrorism and terrorism here that just emerges out of the suburbs some place, and on the other hand protecting the civil rights of a whole group of people.

ECKSTROM: This is a huge challenge for American Muslims and one of the big debates within the American Muslim community right now is how much do they cooperate with law enforcement on trying to prevent these sorts of attacks that nobody wants to see? How much should parents report their kids if they’re acting strangely or going to bad Web sites or talking in radical terms? And there’s a lot of Muslims who are afraid of being entrapped by the FBI and being led into plots that they might not otherwise do. But then they also know that if they don’t report them nobody else is going to and if there’s an attack, things are only going to get worse.

DIONNE: You’ve got tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Muslims living in American suburbs, living middle-class lives, and if one or two or three or five of those thousands of kids is discovered to get involved in terrorism, suddenly we’re talking about these very middle-class, classically American places being breeding grounds for terrorism. I think one thing that is going to sort encourage that is if we make this big American Muslim middle class feel excluded from the rest of us, and we’re really going to have to think that through. Of course we don’t want home-grown terrorism, but we’re nowhere like where the Europeans are, because we have this great tradition of upward mobility and inclusion in our country.

LAWTON: And this has been a challenge for American Muslims themselves within their communities. If we launch programs to combat homegrown terrorism, homegrown extremism, if we launch programs in our mosques, does that appear like we’re giving in to the stereotype that all Muslims are potential terrorists, and so they’ve really struggled within their community how to approach this problem. They want to look proactive. They want to look like they’re addressing this as good, loyal Americans, but how do you do that without giving into the perception?

ABERNETHY: Kevin, what do you expect to happen with the cultural center/mosque near Ground Zero?

ECKSTROM: Well, it’s going to be a challenge. They presumably have all of the zoning things that they need. They’ve got their permits and the city is going to allow them to build it. What they’re missing right now is the money. And it’s going to take them a while to raise as much money as they’re going to need, but it’s also going to be difficult to get, I think, a lot of people to support that because that center is so radioactive and it’s generated so much heat that there’s going to be a lot of people who maybe don’t want their names associated with it. And on the flip side, there’s a lot of Americans who don’t want the money coming from some foreign anonymous donor somewhere, so they have a big challenge there.

ABERNETHY: Now you were referring earlier to the fact that the beginning of 2011 may well seem like the beginning of the election campaign of 2012, E.J.

DIONNE: Right, and I think you’re going to see some sort of interesting positioning inside the Republican Party. I mean, we still don’t know if Sarah Palin is or is not going to run for president. Sarah Palin seems to be more representative of the Tea Party side of the right, although she has clearly some Christian conservative support. Mike Huckabee is going to be competing with her as the spokesperson for Christian conservatives, but every Republican running for president wants a piece of that vote, because it is such an important vote in the Republican primaries, and that’s going to start right now. It’s already started, before the show went on the air.

ECKSTROM: And I think something worth watching there is Mitt Romney, who is at the front of a lot of these polls, these straw polls, whether or not he tries to make the case about his Mormon faith again with the evangelical base. A lot of people say, you know, he did that; he doesn’t need to do it again. Other people say that he’s never going to win them over; there’s a certain amount of the base that’s just never going to accept a Mormon candidate. So I think it will be interesting to watch how he navigates the Mormon question.

ABERNETHY: And meanwhile, E.J., every pundit worth his salt is giving Obama advice about what he needs to do, how he needs to change himself, how he needs to change his language. Talk about that.

DIONNE: Well, the range of advice goes from you must be nicer to the Republicans and look like you’re a centrist to you’re political and moral obligation is to confront these guys and have a big argument so that the issues can be clear to the country. And I think he’s going to try to do a little of the former to say I’ve reached out my hand to them, and when the hand is rejected on certain issues, he’s going to flip to the second. But I think one of the things to look for is whether he does speak more in a moral and spiritual language both about himself and the underpinnings of his policies, but also about this sense of America can grab its position in the world back after a period when Americans felt we were in decline. I think there’s going to be some John Kennedy-esque rhetoric coming out him getting the country moving again in the coming year.

LAWTON: And the Democratic Party is going to have to figure out what it wants to do in terms of faith-based outreach. There was a lot of criticism from Democrats about how the party handled that in the last midterm elections and a lot of faith-based moderates and liberals and even some conservatives that don’t consider themselves Republicans felt that the party didn’t do enough to reach out to them, so that’s going to be something they’re trying to figure out as well.

ABERNETHY: Meanwhile the troop withdrawal from Afghanistan is supposed to begin n 2011. What are your expectations there?

LAWTON: Well, there’s some really difficult ethical debates still lingering in terms of what America leaves behind in Iraq and Afghanistan in terms of civil society and …

ABERNETHY: And safety and protection for the people who helped us.

LAWTON: Exactly. Religious minorities and people who were seen as being part of the American offensive—what’s going on with them and what responsibility does America have within that? And those are going to be difficult questions. I’ve been surprised how little the religious community has been focusing on these issues of war. It seemed like last year, in the last election, people just didn’t really talk about those ethical, moral issues.

ECKSTROM: And, you know, we’ve heard a lot of talk about the president’s problem with his base—you know, the liberal base is dissatisfied for any number of reasons. But it’s worth remembering that a good chunk of that base voted for him because he said he was going to close Guantanamo Bay, and it’s still open, and that he said he’d get us out of Afghanistan, and he actually sent more troops in. So there’s, I think, some ethical problems that he faces in terms of not moving fast enough on that issue.

DIONNE: Actually, he said he’d get us out of Iraq, and he said Afghanistan was the good war, and we’ll presumably continue to pull out of Iraq. My hunch is that if we have a withdrawal this year from Afghanistan it’s going to be very small. It’s clear that the new timeline that the administration wants seems to be 2014. And there’s going to be some opposition in his own party to not withdrawing more quickly. I also think some of the new conservatives who are less interventionist in Congress may also be a surprising opposition to a long commitment there.

ABERNETHY: Let me ask you to look at Europe and the Vatican. What do you expect there in terms of this ongoing struggle about the sex abuse of kids by priests? Anybody?

DIONNE: Everyone is silent.

ECKSTROM: Happy topic. Well, this pope has the unfortunate possibility of his legacy being presiding over this sex abuse scandal that reared its ugly head—that the church didn’t learn anything from the first time around. And I think he has made some progress in sort of admitting that the church needs to do some introspection and figure out what went wrong so that we don’t make this happen again. But the pope is going to be 84 in 2011. I don’t know how much more time he has left in that job, but probably a few years, and I think he’s going to be doing some legacy-making, because this is now at the point where he can still do some things and see what happens.

LAWTON: Well, so many people in the church are frustrated because they want to get beyond this issue but they just can’t do it, and so that’s been something they’ve all had to confront.

DIONNE: I think it’s sort of an argument between people who defend the Vatican and the church say look, they understand, they’ve tried to fix this, they’ve made some moves versus others who say that they still haven’t fully taken responsibility for changing the structures of the church. It’s a classic argument between more conservative or traditionalist people and people looking for greater change in the church because they think it needs it, and I think that is an ongoing struggle and that the sex abuse scandal is a piece of that larger struggle.

ABERNETHY: Our time is almost up, but before we quit, in this coming year do you see something happening or that might happen or do you see some person that you’re going to be paying particular attention to?

LAWTON: Well, we should also point out that last year a lot of the things we discussed we didn’t predict. So, as E.J. said, it’s hard to know that. I think it is going to be a pivotal year for religious groups and issues surrounding homosexuality, whether we’re talking court cases around gay marriage or whether we’re talking denominations still really struggling over how to handle gay clergy and gay bishops. And the Anglican Communion, which has really been torn about by this subject, is also going to have to face some tough questions this coming year.

ECKSTROM: I’m going to keep an eye on Archbishop Tim Dolan in New York, who is the new president of the Catholic bishops conference. He’s a media-savvy guy, he gives you a bear hug, he’s sort of a telegenic face for the church. But he’s no shrinking violet. He will take on the issues of the day, but in sort of a friendly kind of way. It will be interesting. The only real power he has is the power of the megaphone, and which issues he chooses for the bishops to emphasize.

DIONNE: I think that’s an excellent selection. I would say if I could combine Palin, Huckabee, Obama, Romney—we’re going to see if the nature of the discussion of religion in our politics changes substantially this year or not. As we’ve already said, there are challenges to each of those figures, and it will be interesting to see how they deal with it.

ABERNETHY: I have been wondering with respect to Iraq and now Afghanistan why there was no peace movement—not more of a peace movement. Do you think with Afghanistan, as we begin to come out of there, that there will be such a thing?

DIONNE: I think going into Afghanistan there was very broad support when we started because many people, except for pacifists and a few others who have legitimate reasons for opposing all war, most people thought this was kind of a just war response, so you didn’t have a big opposition. I think now a lot of people say God, this is a terrible mess. I don’t have a good answer coming out of it, and I think that sort of undercuts what might otherwise be a big peace movement.

ABERNETHY: Thanks, E.J., our time is up. Many thanks to Kim Lawton of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, Kevin Eckstrom of Religion News Service, and E.J. Dionne of the Brookings Institution. That’s our program for now. I’m Bob Abernethy.

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