Author Archives: Fred Yi

Islamic Center Controversy

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BOB FAW, correspondent: Even today, nine years later, what happened at the Twin Towers horrifies, wounds, inflames.

SALLY REGENHARD: Our loved ones’ blood really consecrated that site forever and ever.

FAW: Sally Regenhard’s only son, 28-year-old firefighter Christian, a Marine, aspiring writer, and avid rock-climber, was killed on 9/11. No trace of him has ever been found.

post01-islamcenterREGENHARD: My son was a saint who was murdered by sinners.

FAW: Among the more than 2700 killed in Lower Manhattan that day was firefighter Bill Burke, who got his men safely out of the doomed towers before he perished.

MICHAEL BURKE: He got Engine 24 and the civilians they saved out. A fireman who worked for him said Bill Burke led the best of the best. He was better than all of us.

FAW: Nothing is more hallowed than Ground Zero for relatives like Regenhard and Burke.

BURKE: There’s just a sense of sanctity to the site that’s being offended here.

FAW: Ironically, Muslims proposing that 13-story cultural center on Park Place two blocks from Ground Zero insist they are trying to honor the site. Daisy Khan is director of the American Society of Muslim Advancement and wife of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, organizers of the project.

post02-islamcenterDAISY KHAN: We’ve been in the neighborhood for 27 years. It’s our neighborhood that got attacked, and it’s our obligation and our responsibility and really even our honor to rebuild it.

FAW: Daisy Khan insists that the center, which will include an arts theater, a place for prayer, athletics, and education, will be a testimonial to healing and interfaith harmony.

KHAN: The extremists have defined the agenda for the global Muslim community, and we wanted to amplify the voices of the ordinary Muslims who are, you know, law-abiding citizens, and it was my way of, like, helping rebuild by building a center that would create a counter-momentum against extremism.

REGENHARD: I want to make it clear that I and my—members of my group do not have anger towards Muslims. But it’s too close, it’s too painful, it’s too soon. I’m still trying to find remains of my son.

BURKE: It amounts to an insult. It comes across as intentionally provocative.

FAW: Proponent Khan, though, has drawn a line in the sand, arguing that being forced to move the site elsewhere amounts to “surrender.”

KHAN: I think it would be un-American to ask anybody to leave the neighborhood. We’re part of the neighborhood. I don’t think anybody should be driven out of their neighborhood. It’s about acceptance. Muslims are not being accepted as equals in this country yet.

MOSQUE PROTESTER: No mosque, not here, not now, not ever.

post03-islamcenterFAW: Indeed, throughout the country there are recent signs of what some call Islamophobia. Nearby, on Staten Island, an abandoned Catholic convent was to be sold to Muslims to build a mosque. But after much protest the board of the church that owned the convent voted the sale down. In Columbia, Tennessee a mosque was fire bombed. In Murfreesboro, Tennessee, vandals targeted equipment being used to build an Islamic center. And in Temecula, California the site of a proposed mosque brought forth both sides of the debate.

MANGO BAKH: Islam is not a religion. Islam is a totalitarian, terrorist ideology.

JENNIFER EIS: There is nothing to fear from them. They are our neighbors, and they want to be able to worship freely, just as our ancestors did.

FAW: Against that backdrop is it any wonder that a prominent anthropologist who’s recently completed a landmark study of Muslims in America concludes the Muslim community feels “under siege”?

AKBAR AHMED (American University): Americans are really going through a time of uncertainty, of some fear and some anger, and they want to blame someone, and in times like this that’s why you’re sitting on a tinderbox. It’s very easy to then suddenly target or make a community a scapegoat, so even something as simple and ordinary as constructing a house of worship becomes an act of defiance, controversy, debate.

post04-islamcenterFAW: The debate over that proposed Muslim cultural center here, so close to Ground Zero, has been framed as a choice between religious tolerance and honoring the dead. But some would argue the real question is not the Constitution but sensitivity—that given what happened on 9/11, shouldn’t moral claims take precedence over legal rights?

THANE ROSENBAUM (Fordham University Law School): The legal issue’s clear. There is a right to free speech, and there’s a right to the exercise of one’s religion. We have that. Now what? What happens in situations where the exercise of that free religion, right, is going to trample upon the profound sensitivities of an already vulnerable, traumatized group?

FAW: Thane Rosenbaum, a professor at the Fordham University Law School, says the relevant precedent is 1984 when, 40 years after World War II, Holocaust survivors objected to a Carmelite convent proposed near Auschwitz and Pope John Paul intervened and moved the building elsewhere. That kind of compassion, says Rosenbaum, should prevail at Ground Zero.

ROSENBAUM: This isn’t about bigotry. This isn’t about religious persecution. This really is about sensitivity and a profound sense of loss. There’s something that just doesn’t feel right about the haste, the speed, the urgency with which their mosque must be there. I don’t see the tolerance in that. It seems to me the tolerance there is only one-way tolerance: religious liberty and freedom at all costs.

post05-islamcenterFAW: In the midst of all the turmoil, some relatives of 9/11 victims—it is difficult to say just how many—do support the cultural center near Ground Zero. On that terrible day nine years ago, Herb Ouida was working on the 77th floor of one of the towers, while his 25-year-old son, Todd, was on the 105th.

HERB OUIDA: I said, “Have a great day, sweetheart.” I tell you those words because those were my last words to my son.

FAW: A son, he remembers, who overcame a long battle with anxiety to go on and graduate from the University of Michigan and have a bright future in finance.

OUIDA: I think religious tolerance honors those that were lost. What we’re saying for the Muslim world is we don’t trust you, we don’t like you.

FAW: We don’t want you.

OUIDA: We don’t want you, and that’s exactly a victory for al-Qaeda. I don’t want to give them that victory. I don’t want to give them that victory. I’d rather say to them, “We stood by what we believe in, despite what you did to us.”

post06-islamcenterFAW: Daisy Khan says most 9/11 families agree with Herb Ouida and support the Islamic center. But for relatives like Sally Regenhard, the refusal of those backing the Islamic project to consider another site is just one more indignity.

REGENHARD: You can never change hearts and minds by shoving your culture or religion down the throats of others. I think they need to understand that.

FAW: With both sides so entrenched, the outcome is uncertain. What is clear, though, is that this dispute is about far more than location or real estate.

OUIDA: I’m just afraid that we—that there’s something we’re unleashing here, something that we won’t be able to control if we don’t stop it.

AHMED: I think there’s a bigger crisis taking place right now, and that is really the battle for American identity itself. What is the America that’s going to come out of this?

KHAN: Are we going to erode our ideals, or are we going to continue to live up to our ideals and let this moment be a passing moment, and let this be the test, the litmus test?

FAW: It is much more than a litmus test, though, for some whose wounds may never heal.

REGENHARD: Right now we’re asking for sensitivity, and maybe my son could have accepted what’s happening now, but we mere mortals—we cannot.

FAW: In the midst of enduring pain, shrill protests, and calls for compromise, then, a head-on collision between legal and moral rights in a debate which could determine in post-9/11 America whether tolerance is a two-way street.

For Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly this Bob Faw in New York.

Shofar Family

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BOB ABERNETHY, host: The holiest time in the Jewish calendar begins next Wednesday evening (September 8) with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and ends with Yom Kippur ten days later. For Jews around the world, it’s a period of introspection and atonement. During both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services, congregants hear the sounding of the ram’s horn or shofar. Our producer, Noelle Serper, visited the Glickman family near Buffalo, New York, for whom sounding the Shofar has been a three-generation tradition.

NOELLE SERPER, producer: When the congregation gathers at Temple Beth Am to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, they will experience what Jews have for centuries—the blast of the shofar as a kind of wake-up call.

RABBI IRWIN TANENBAUM (Temple Beth Am, Williamsville, New York): Tekiah…

It’s a reminder. It sends a shiver, that we can be better than we are, and how do we approach God but with that strange cry in our ear, and perhaps on our lip, and we come before God and we say who are we? What are we? Remember what we could be, and help us along.

post02-shofarfamilyThe Glickmans, for three generations, have been our shofar blowers here in this congregation.

SERPER: Marshall Glickman became Temple Beth Am’s Ba’al Tekiah, or the one who sounds the shofar, over 40 years ago.

MARLENE GLICKMAN (Widow of Marshall Glickman): They used to time him, because he could hold it so long, and they couldn’t believe it. He felt a commitment to his religion and a commitment to his God and to his congregation. He just felt like it was a gift that he was giving to the community and that he was the person through God giving that gift. At his funeral, there were over 800 people.

JOE GLICKMAN (Son of Marshall Glickman): When the funeral was over, when they put him in the ground, we blew the shofar, and it was quite nice. It was very lovely. The notes were great, and I don’t know that I’ve ever played the notes as well as we did at that point. But at that point I guess people said, “Wow, you should keep on playing,” and “Why don’t you and your son play in echo?”

RABBI TANENBAUM: Tekiah…

JOE GLICKMAN: It just gives the room a deeper vibrating, vibrational sound that echoes through one’s heart, one’s chest.

RABBI TANENBAUM: Shevarim Teruah…

JOE GLICKMAN: They listen to the shofar, and they can close their eyes and say, “This is the same sound I heard 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago.” These are the same prayers, the same music, and they feel a oneness with times gone by.

STEVE GLICKMAN (Marshall Glickman’s grandson): Blowing the shofar is a family tradition that my grandfather started when he was 15, and I started when I was 14. It just makes me happy to continue that tradition.

Andrew Finstuen: Land of the Free, Home of the Exceptionalists?

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Glenn Beck’s Restoring Honor rally was a giant civil religious celebration of American exceptionalism.

Beck began his event by referring to America as a chosen nation. Pastor Paul Jehle, who offered the opening prayer, reinforced Beck’s sense of America’s divine purpose by drawing upon Puritan John Winthrop’s immortalized call for America to be a “city on a hill.”

Historians have very little use for the idea of American exceptionalism and its supporting religious rhetoric. The historical record points not to the exceptional experience of America but to its common history with other nations. America is, after all, a nation of immigrants, and it is one shaped by both transatlantic and transpacific exchanges. Apart from this historical challenge to American exceptionalism, insistence upon the nation’s unique greatness raises the specter of America’s exceptionally violent history and culture. Not only was America among the slowest of nations to abolish slavery, it is well known that America’s violent crime rate and prison population exceed that of any other industrialized country on the planet.

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Yet these are not the only problems with the exceptionalism narrative. Exceptionalists like Beck claim that colonial America was a haven of religious practice and freedom that anticipated the founding of the United States on Christian principles and religious tolerance. While respected historians affirm the importance of Christianity in early America, they have also demonstrated that both colonists and the first citizens of the new United States subscribed to a variety of faiths—or none at all. They have shown that figures such as George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin may have been sympathetic to Christianity, but they were hardly orthodox Christians.

Colonial Americans, moreover, were not exceptionally tolerant of religious dissenters. Prior to the writing of the free exercise clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, Puritan and Anglican state churches dominated colonial religious life, and they actively limited the free expression of groups such as the Quakers and the Baptists. Even with the free exercise clause in place, Americans practiced toleration fitfully. This is why Catholics were considered by a substantial number of Americans to be un-Christian and un-American well into the 1960s and why the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. The recent controversy about the proposed mosque near Ground Zero is simply the latest episode in America’s checkered history of religious freedom and “tolerance.”

These historical realities have no effect on Beck and other proponents of exceptionalism because their vision of America depends upon a combination of historical amnesia and revisionist history. For example, Beck repeatedly implored Americans to focus not on the “scars” of history but on the good America has done and will do. It was the height of irony for Beck to ask Americans to forget the scars of our past on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech—and in the shadow of memorials to Abraham Lincoln, World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Korean War. Americans visit these sites precisely to remember, to grieve, and to honor the scars left by the horrors of assassination, slavery, and war.

There was one brief moment, however, when Beck’s comments matched the gravity of the American past. Midway through the program he noted: “America has been both terribly good and terribly bad.” He followed this comment with a vague admonition to learn from and repair the bad, only to quickly return to his message about American greatness. Had Beck sustained this theme of the ambiguity of American history he would have been more faithful to the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr, the two figures who loomed largest over the proceedings. Lincoln’s and King’s rhetoric—especially the Second Inaugural and the “I Have a Dream” speech—were premised on a full acknowledgment of the good and bad of American experience. They understood that national “scars” represent both injury and healing, and they knew that to dismiss the injury precludes the healing.

Lincoln and King are exceptional historical figures. They had an exceptional grasp of the greatness and misery of the American past. They had an exceptional sense of caution when they spoke of God in relation to American destiny. They had an exceptional vision of American promise. More Americans should follow their exceptional example.

Andrew Finstuen is director of the Honors College and associate professor of history at Boise State University. He is the author of “Original Sin and Everyday Protestants: The Theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, and Paul Tillich in an Age of Anxiety” (University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

Harold Dean Trulear: Moving Through Darkness

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For those of us interested in the intersection of religion, ethics, and politics, President Obama’s recent address to the nation on the end of combat operations in Iraq offered several interesting moral judgments.

One was “a belief that out of the ashes of war, a new beginning could be born in this cradle of civilization,” suggesting that war can have a purpose despite its awfulness and reflecting Obama’s ongoing optimism about the human condition.

The president invoked notions of peace, both a “lasting peace” for Americans and a peace beyond the current conflict in the Middle East, though “peace” was never defined. He spoke of the “billions of young people [who] want to move beyond the shackles of poverty and conflict,” and I am assuming he included those of inner-city America, but I can’t be sure. He exhorted us to take responsibility for disabled veterans in a call that rivaled any we have heard since the 1940s and 1950s, and he made a virtue of our accountability for those who represent us in military combat.

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The president also asserted that war is “the darkest of human creations,” and here I heard a contestable statement that could invite challenges from those who might seek to nominate experiences other than war. A quick Google search reveals quotations attributing such ultimate darkness to American slavery, child and domestic abuse, rape, the Holocaust, genocide, and torture. I would hesitate to assign “darkest” status to war or any of these horrors.

The use of the term “creation” to describe something so admittedly dark as war raises questions about human nature and the human spirit. The language certainly represents a leap from the positive view of humanity that normally characterizes Obama’s oratory and vision. The human capacity for evil comes in many incarnations, and we have had presidential assertions of such a reality before, often attached to an “axis.” It seemed paradoxical coming from this president for whom hope has defined much of his campaign and administration. If he truly means humans created the darkness of war, how can he be so certain of better days ahead, especially given our continuing presence in Afghanistan and the fact that both Iraq and Afghanistan represent millennia of conflict?

In the past, successfully navigating the darkness of war came with a clear sense of victory for one side or the other. But the president told us we live “in an age without surrender ceremonies.” So how do we move through the darkness if we have no ritual to signify the significance of this moment, except for a presidential address? Is the president now also a high priest who speaks ex cathedra from the holy of holies, the Oval Office, to our darkened souls? No ritual of celebration—just a word from on high? That is not the president’s fault. It speaks more to the changes in our world and our need to find other ways to be sustained in times of darkness.

Might religion, not politics, offer a more proper navigation tool? Religion restrains our declarations of “peace when there is no peace,” as the Hebrew prophets said. It celebrates as victory a people’s veritable endurance of darkness. But while prophets are rare, we have priests in abundance, few of whom can give us the categories we really need to think about war and peace. We feel the absence of a prophetic voice in the public square, yet I don’t think we would allow a president to exercise such a voice. The priestly function of the office is one we have created.

There are few prophets out there, yet all of our religious traditions have a prophetic dimension to them. The prophetic tradition moves beyond the self-interests of the prophet’s community (Blacks for Blacks, Jews for Jews, etc.) to point to a higher ideal for the Creator’s bright creation and its persistence through the darkness of human creations. Recent “friendly fire” from Black prophets and overt criticism from Tea Party voices fall short here. The best of the prophetic tradition transcends self and tribal interest and points beyond any particularist blessings—American, Black, Republican, or otherwise—to look to a transcendent principle against which to measure our aims.

The priestly presidential office cannot offer this. Prophetic religion can. Hebrew prophets held their measuring sticks to Israel and Egypt, Jew and Babylonian. Martin Luther King sought a community that included the poor, both domestic and foreign. Islamic pilgrimage crosses race and ethnicity.

Have our religious traditions become “non-prophet” organizations led by tribal priests? Who will play Nathan to the nations? Who will say to all who usurp and clamor for the power that war provides: “Thou art the one”?

Harold Dean Trulear is associate professor of applied theology at Howard University in Washington, DC.

Howard Rhodes: Turning the Page on War

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President Obama’s declaration that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over brings to a partial close a drama that has engulfed American political culture for nearly a decade. His address to the nation carefully avoided both a declaration of victory and a retroactive resolution of the Iraq war debate. Instead, it looked forward and sought to affirm the democratic hope that American society can be sufficiently unified to bring positive results out of what many regard as a costly and avoidable mistake. His speech implicitly argued that, regardless of what we believed about the justification of the war in the first place, we are now responsible for determining what the legacy of the Iraq war will be in our foreign policy and our domestic affairs.

post01-rhodesiraqReligious citizens have particular reason to think hard about their role in determining this legacy. They, or the ideas and traditions they care about, bear a burden of responsibility for both the problems and the hopes as we move forward.

Many of them played a crucial role in encouraging the enthusiasms that led to the Iraq invasion. Conservative American Christians, in particular, actively embraced what Andrew Bacevich calls, in his book The New American Militarism, the “marriage of military metaphysics with eschatological ambition.”

“God is pro-war,” as the Rev. Jerry Falwell famously titled one of his articles in 2004. Falwell, of course, was representative of only a small percentage of American Christians, but his supreme confidence in construing the war in Iraq as a matter of good versus evil, and understanding the humanitarian dimension of the Iraq invasion in relation to the kingdom of God, was an extreme riff on views that were much more widely shared. Indeed, the most powerful Christian political movements in the United States today exhibit both an unwavering commitment to the essential goodness (and seeming omnipotence) of American military power and a strange confidence that their cultural and religious interests are being served by the ongoing war on terrorism. Even many citizens outside these movements (and these particular religious communities) display a determined confidence that the end of America’s quasi-imperial self-assertion in Iraq will be our ongoing role a “leader of the free world.”

Such views are theologically untutored and politically dangerous. In particular, they display a worrisome blindness to the full range of elements that constituted the political act of invading Iraq and that shape its potential long-term consequences. In different ways, they are premised on false or inadequate descriptions of the undertaking.

There were three principal justifications offered for invading Iraq: self-defense, the defense of the international rule of law, and humanitarian concern for the people of Iraq. All three of these—if true—are just causes for war, according to the Christian just war tradition. But a just cause does not a just war make. One requires, in addition, a “right intention.”

The criterion of right intention does not merely demand an examination of what military and political leaders think or say about what they are doing when they initiate a war. “Right intention” points toward the full range of factors that place an action in its moral species. Given everything that we know now—and even what we knew then—about how the Iraq invasion was conceived, can we really just highlight the humanitarian dimension of this undertaking and declare it the essence of the act? The fact that an unjust action has beneficial consequences or reflects some praiseworthy desires does not change the fact that it was an unwise act; it does not render irrelevant the fear-mongering, mendacity, and hubristic overreach that also played a role. The just war criterion of “right intention” requires, among other things, that the conscientious citizen drop down from the level of short-hand “principles” and describe more fully the circumstances, desires, emotions, and beliefs that go into making a complex action what it is.

There was no shortage of just war theorists in the land when the Iraq war emerged on the horizon. Indeed, their writings and public talks insured that the basic criteria of just war ethics (whether in its Christian or secular form) were well known and bandied about by even the unlikeliest of people. The views these thinkers offered, however, were often emaciated and unfit for the task. At their most critical, these theories were publicly impotent. The arguments were too abstract, and the communities whose beliefs they hoped to represent were poorly organized or nonexistent. At their most supportive of the war, the arguments were so theoretical that they merely served to justify actions that were justified on quite other grounds by the people who actually undertook them. They were exercises in placing an abstract set of ethical principles on a complex set of facts and circumstances to which they were largely alien. Too much of the picture fell away, or was rendered invisible, once the theoretical justification was put in place. What people need is a justification of war that gives a full, clear, and powerful account of the many reasons they have to be critical and worried even in the best of circumstances.

This fact invites a change in the characteristic genre of contemporary just war reflection. It may very well require that just war theorists, most of whom are employed in university philosophy or religious studies departments, learn to abandon the stilted forms of academic ethics and acquire new habits of “thick description.” The formal reasoning of the just war criteria must be put in the service of richer descriptions of the actual beliefs, practices, and circumstances that shape complex political actions. The criteria can then perform both an expressive role (by making ethical commitments that are implicit in the nation’s undertakings explicit and available for critical scrutiny) and a constructive role (by proposing important ethical considerations governing certain actions). Michael Walzer’s book Just and Unjust Wars remains a classic example of this approach and is too infrequently imitated.

As Americans now endeavor to “turn the page” (in President Obama’s phrase), we must determine whether the irrevocable past will endure like a nightmare in our efforts at world leadership or whether we will be capable of the repentance, reformation, and simple good-neighborliness that will be necessary to restore those nonmilitary aspects of our power. It is ultimately a question of the democratic freedom to remake ourselves in the light of our highest ideals. It is also a question of imagination. At the present moment, there are few reasons to be sanguine about the probable success of this effort.

Religious citizens have particular reason to contribute to public debates about the road forward. Despite the popularity among many of them of imperialistic theologies and distorted pieties, such citizens are heirs to longstanding traditions of moral and political insight, and thus have the capacity to help this society imagine new ways of employing its power and resources. Furthermore, these citizens—unlike, say, your average analytic philosopher—inherit traditions and employ arguments that are deeply embedded in the practices of actually existing communities. Ideally, religious citizens will be able to organize themselves into communities of conversation and study, so as to become communities of democratic accountability.

Howard Rhodes is currently a member of the adjunct faculty at the University of Iowa College of Law.

Tobias Winright: Post War Just War

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In his sober address to the nation, President Obama announced the combat mission in Iraq is at an end.

As a theological ethicist who subscribes to all the criteria of the just war tradition—the version Mennonite pacifist John Howard Yoder said has “teeth”—I was critical from the outset of the US-led war in Iraq. In the seven years since Operation Iraqi Freedom began, I have regretted that perhaps just war ethicists, including myself, did not do enough to oppose it, especially if we really regarded it as an unjust war.

What does it mean now to say the war is at an end? “End” can mean “stopped” or “concluded,” but it is important that Christians and others, for whom just war continues to be a valid moral approach to dealing with serious threats to innocent human lives, recover another understanding of what “end” means. The end, understood in the just war sense of “purpose” or “goal,” should be, as St. Augustine taught, tranquillitas ordinis or “tranquil order”—a just and lasting peace, a genuine peace that is more than merely the absence of war.

Such a peace should be restorative for all affected by the war. President Obama observed that around the world today “old adversaries are at peace,” and I suspect he had in mind US friendships with Germany, Italy, and Japan. He said our combat mission is ending, but “our commitment to Iraq’s future is not,” and he emphasized at the same that we are now also trying to build for our nation “a future of lasting peace.” That involves refocusing attention on the US economy, and it will include providing health care, education, and employment for returning US military personnel. All of this is congruent with a just war meaning of “the end.” Much of it, however, should have been in our sights from the very outset of the war.

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The president referred to “lessons learned.” One lesson those who subscribe to the just war criteria should have learned is that just war categories need to be longitudinally extended to include postwar justice. Even if the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were just, more needs to be done to guide us to put in motion the ingredients for a just and lasting peace. On the flip side, if a war is unjust because the criteria for going to war and for conduct during war were not satisfied, then the duty to establish postwar justice is all the more imperative, even though that won’t retroactively make it a just war.

One postwar criterion would be the principle of restoration, including restoration of public services such as the police: before embarking on war, make sure appropriate plans, equipment, and personnel are ready and in place to restore law and order on the streets and in the communities of the defeated nation. In his speech President Obama mentioned that US troops “shifted tactics to protect the Iraqi people [and] trained Iraqi Security Forces.” Such a shift would not have been necessary had the Bush White House not denied in June 2003 the Department of Justice’s recommendations for an International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program, which called for the deployment of over 6,600 international police advisers, consisting of trainers for police academies, plus armed international constabulary units with 2,500 more personnel to help coalition military forces restore stability in Iraq (see “The Police in War: Fighting Insurgency, Terrorism, and Violent Crime” [Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2010] by David H. Bayley and Robert M. Perito). Meanwhile, there were looters raiding homes, businesses, and museums; Iraqis were killing Iraqis; government buildings were ransacked and burned. Many scholars in other fields—including security policy experts such as Graham Day and Rama Mani—highlight the crucial role police (as well as courts and prisons) play in the transition from war to a just peace. Oftentimes the police of the defeated country disband during the war or are corrupt or implicated in the evils that led to war, so a transitional police force, accompanied by trainers, is necessary until a new force consisting of vetted, well-trained, and human-rights-respecting police is in place.

I am hopeful that progress in this connection is now underway in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the meantime too many persons suffered—Iraqis, Afghans, and also US military personnel—from a lack of the kind of efforts that postwar justice would require for any war to be considered just.

Tobias Winright is associate professor of theological ethics at Saint Louis University, a former law enforcement officer, and coauthor with Mark Allman of “After the Smoke Clears: The Just War Tradition and Post War Justice” (Orbis Books, 2010).

Thomas Cushman: Victory over Totalitarianism

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President Obama’s speech might have been far more effective—and honest—if he had admitted the most elemental truth about the war in Iraq: that the surge of troops ordered by George W. Bush actually worked to defeat the terrorist insurgency that threatened to derail the whole experiment in liberty and freedom in Iraq.

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Obama opposed this troop surge and was, indeed, on the vanguard of the defeatist antiwar left. Had his view prevailed, Iraq would have been reconquered by al-Qaeda and Baathist extremists whose victory over a weak United States would have been the most potent recruiting tool imaginable for America’s enemies for generations to come.

Obama made the political move of declaring the war to be over, but it is not. Fifty thousand American troops remain, and they are combat-ready, and American military presence will always be necessary in Iraq in order to maintain the fragile equilibrium there. The president’s proclivity to announce American withdrawal strategies publicly, not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan, will only embolden those who wish to derail the most exciting experiment in democracy in the Arab world.

Obama said in a pre-speech press release that he was not going to offer a “victory lap.” Well, why not? That is what US armed forces are entitled to because of their blood, sweat, and tears on behalf of Iraq. Because of their efforts, the insurgency was dealt mortal blows, and now the Iraqi people have an opportunity to make a free and decent democracy in an area that has been characterized by the bloodiest sort of despotism. It was warming that Obama expressed such heartfelt admiration and awe for the troops, but he needed to provide a more affirmative vision of successes in Iraq—a vision that casts it as a victory over totalitarianism, which has always been a central aspect of America’s civilizing mission. It is precisely the renunciation of that mission and Obama’s willingness to appease the new wave of authoritarian leaders around the world that signify the evisceration of a Democratic Party once proud to stand for democratization and human rights in foreign policy.

The speech was disappointing as well in its craven attempt to link the economic crisis of the middle class to the expenditures on the war. Politicizing the war by trying to get the middle class to see its present quandaries as a result of it will not fool the average American, who understands that Obama’s failed economic policies and his drive to increase taxation and social entitlements are, at base, what is making their existence miserable. Obama has been president for nearly two years, and he continues to lay the blame for the economic crisis on his predecessor. He still has not learned the lesson that Americans were only willing to go along with that game for a short time. They elected a president to lead them, not to be a recriminator-in-chief.

It is highly doubtful Obama’s speech will convince the middle classes that the war is the principal reason for their crisis. Such rhetoric appeals to the anti-war left and fulfills a central campaign promise, but that constituency is now a small part of Obama’s political retinue. The November elections will decidedly show that the voters are no longer interested in voting on referenda on the Bush administration and that they expect the president to lead.

Thomas Cushman is professor of sociology at Wellesley College and coeditor of “The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocity” (Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Interfaith Leaders: To Bigotry No Sanction

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Washington, DC religious leaders spoke against rising anti-Muslim rhetoric at an August 30 press conference, and some of them also shared their thoughts about the recent rally on the National Mall organized by conservative commentator Glenn Beck. Watch Rev. John Wimberly of Western Presbyterian Church, Rev. Timothy Boggs of the National Cathedral, Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and Rabbi Jonathan Roos of Temple Sinai. Edited by Fabio Lomelino.

 

Rev. Soritua Nababan: Please Don’t Burn the Quran

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News of a Florida church’s plans to burn Qurans on the anniversary of 9/11 has provoked outrage across the Islamic world. The Organization of the Islamic Conference has issued a special alert among its 57 member nations. The Dove World Outreach Center, an independent nondenominational church in Gainesville, has proclaimed September 11 “International Burn a Quran Day.” Several American faith groups, including the National Association of Evangelicals, have urged the church to cancel its event. Christian minorities in predominantly Muslim countries are also speaking out, asserting that the plan could further endanger their already-vulnerable communities. Watch the reaction of Rev. Soritua Nababan, a leader of the Protestant Christian Batak Church in Indonesia and one of the top Asian representatives at the World Council of Churches.