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“I advocate military engagement when I think it’s necessary, but really you can get more bang for your buck from civilian programs than you can from military engagement most of the time. You’ve got to have more options than just dropping bombs on people.” – South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, on why he’s working to protect foreign aid from budget cuts. (Source: McClatchy News)
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It's Finally Over -- and It Was Wrong
My son Jack was born just days before the war in Iraq began. So, for these last eight and a half years, it’s been very easy for me to remember how long this horrible conflict has been going on.
Finally, as President Obama has announced, this American war will soon be over, with most of the 44,000 American troops still in Iraq coming home in time to be with their families for Christmas.
The initial feelings that rushed over me after hearing the White House announcement were of deep relief. But then they turned to deep sadness over the terrible cost of a war that was, from the beginning, wrong: intellectually, politically, strategically and, above all, morally.
The war in Iraq was fundamentally a war of choice, and it was the wrong choice.
From the outset, this war was fought on false pretenses, with false information, and for false purposes. And the official decisions to argue for this war and then carry it out were made at the height of political and moral irresponsibility -- especially when we see the failed results and consider both the human and financial costs.
This week, U.S. Rep. Walter Jones, a nine-term Republican from eastern North Carolina and long-time member of the House Armed Services Committee, spoke to the students of my class at Georgetown University. He called his decision to give President George W. Bush the authority to go to war in Iraq “a sin.”
Even then, he didn’t believe or trust “the intelligence” being used to support a war with Iraq, but confesses he feared the response of a “no vote” among his constituency in a district that includes Camp Lejeune and 60,000 retired members of the military.
Saddam Hussein and Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11, as was falsely implied, and had no weapons of mass destruction, as was falsely claimed and endlessly repeated.
The full story of Jones' transformation by having personal encounters with families who lost their precious loved ones, and by the convictions of his own Christian faith, is detailed in the September/October issue of Sojourners.
In what he calls his “penance,” the congressman has now written 10,000 letters to the families of fallen servicemen and women.
“We were lied to,” Jones told my Georgetown students, and went on to describe his journey to find the truth. Because, for people of faith, “truth matters,” he said.
Jones learned how the intelligence on Iraq was “manipulated” and “distorted” to justify going to war, and that this was a completely unnecessary war. Outside Jones’ office on Capitol Hill is a wall of “the faces,” as he puts it, of those who paid the ultimate price for the manipulation of the truth. And when Jones talks about these young soldiers, you can see how deeply their loss has affected him.
We were “misled” into war by the “previous administration,” Jones said, and, so far, nobody has been held accountable for it. The names he mentioned when speaking about accountability were Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.
“I think people should be held accountable for leading a country to war, if it can be demonstrated that officials manipulated intelligence and the truth,” Jones said. There are wars that could be considered “just,” he said, but this war was not.
Here are some of the costs of an unjust war:
* 4,499 U.S. military killed
* 32,200 wounded
* 110,000 estimated Iraqi civilian deaths
* 2.5 million internally displaced Iraqis
* $800 billion in federal funding for the Iraq War through FY2011
* An estimated $3-5 trillion total economic cost to the United States of the war in Iraq.
* As many as 300,000 U.S. troops returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder.
* 320,000 troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq with traumatic brain injuries
* The number of suicide attempts by veterans could exceed an earlier official estimate of 1,000 a month.
Such a list takes my breath away and should drive each of us to pray for lives that have been so painfully and irreparably changed.
The war literally was sold to the American public with the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Many believed it at the time, and an invasion was mounted on what turned out to be false information. A decade of sanctions and United Nations inspections had already undermined the allegations. And in the almost nine years of war, not a single WMD has been found in Iraq.
The invasion began with triumphal claims that it would be a “cakewalk,” and that U.S. forces would be welcomed as “liberators.” That proved to be initially true with the unexpectedly easy removal of Saddam Hussein from power, which led to the famous claim of a flight-jacket-clad George W. Bush on a U.S. aircraft carrier six weeks after the invasion began: “Mission Accomplished!”
But then everything fell apart. Hussein’s fighters had not surrendered, but simply melted into the cities, lying in wait to fight again. Al Qaeda, which had existed largely only in Afghanistan, formed an Iraqi branch. An invasion turned into an occupation and nearly five years of vicious and deadly street warfare, sectarian violence, and constant terrorist bombings.
By the time the heaviest fighting had died down, the Iraqi people were bitterly divided, huge parts of their country had been devastated, and corruption and fraud were rampant.
As U.S. combat troops return home, they leave behind a badly damaged nation that will require years, if not decades, of assistance and humanitarian development. Our responsibility does not end simply because our military presence in Iraq has.
Clearly, religious communities must reach out now more than ever to returning veterans to make sure they have the physical, emotional, and spiritual support they need.
One of the most unjust aspects of an unjust war is that a small minority of Americans have borne the brunt of the impact and cost of this war -- and in our volunteer army, those were disproportionately lower-income families.
Despite this tragically mistaken war, the sacrifices made by many servicemen and women have been extraordinary. And, even in the midst of war's brutalities, there have been many acts of real heroism -- soldiers risking and giving their own lives for their fellow soldiers and for the lives of Iraqis who also paid a heavy price.
No matter what our view of the war, it is our collective responsibility to be healers for those who are coming home – and for those left behind in post-war Iraq.
We must learn from this horrible and costly mistake.
We must conclude unequivocally that terrorism is not defeated by wars of mass occupation.
And we must strive to re-establish the fundamental principle that truth matters.
Jim Wallis is the author of Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street — A Moral Compass for the New Economy, and CEO of Sojourners. He blogs at www.godspolitics.com. Follow Jim on Twitter @JimWallis.
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ON THE GOD'S POLITICS BLOG |
+ See what's new on the blog of Jim Wallis and friends
Lawyers' Surreal World and the Fight Against Selling Children
by Elizabeth Palmberg
When three dozen prominent interfaith clergy (including Jim Wallis) signed an ad in the New York Times saying that the best way to stop the sex trafficking of children on Backpage was to shut down that website's "adult" section, the company's response was awfully familiar to me.
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Fearless Activists
by James Colten
On October 25, 25 individuals were awarded the Freedom from Fear Award in Seattle at the National Immigrant Integration Conference. The award honors "ordinary people who have committed extraordinary acts of courage on behalf of immigrants and refugees — individuals who have taken a risk, set an example, and inspired others to awareness or action."
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Five Facts You Need to Know about Poverty in America
by Tim King
The morning of October 26, the Center for American Progress released their first annual report to track progress on the goal of cutting the poverty rate in our country in half over the next ten years. There is a lot in there that more people need to know.
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Watching Democracy Happen
by Jim Wallis
Fifty young leaders of Occupy Grand Rapids (I know they don't like to name leaders, but these people truly were), seated in a circle with me and the mayor of their city. It was the first time, at least that I am aware of, that the occupiers of a city were given a chance to meet and talk directly with their mayor.
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Makoto Fujimura Answers, "What is an Evangelical?"
by Makoto Fujimura
"Evangelical" is a dirty word in the New York art world. A friend, an artist, told me that before she understood the claims of the Bible, she thought Christianity was a weird political group, and evangelicals the most extreme and terrifying.
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Women Underrepresented in Big Business: Does it Matter?
by Anne Marie Roderick
While I appreciate some of Caprino's suggestions—especially the ones that encourage women to speak up, take up more space, and trust their own thinking—much of the article rubbed me the wrong way. What I don't support is the assumption that in order to prove our out-of-home worth women have to meet men in the cutthroat "achievement"-driven world of the overworked (and I say "achievement" facetiously because what does that even mean, really?).
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Are America's Hawks Having Empty Nest Syndrome?
by God's Politics Editor
Last week President Obama announced that by the end of this year the war in Iraq would finally end. While many Republicans are quick to criticize the President's decision, Jon Stewart points out that the agreement to withdraw troops by 2011 was signed by former President Bush.
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A Devotion for Wall Street
by Shane Claiborne
Theologian Karl Barth said, "We have to read the Bible in one hand, and the newspaper in the other." For too long we Christians have used our faith as a ticket out of this world rather than fuel to engage it. In his parables, Jesus wasn't offering pie-in-the-sky theology … he was talking about the real stuff of earth.
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When Kids are Sold for Sex
by Tim King
When kids are sold for sex - there is no excuse. That is why Jim Wallis signed onto a full page ad in the New York Times calling for Village Voice Media to shut down the "Adult Services" section of their Backpage.com website.
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Cutting Foreign Aid: Not The America I Love
by Richard Stearns
I have to be honest. While America's house needs a thorough spring cleaning, millions of the poor around the world are barely hanging on to survival, living in mud huts or under no roof at all. Those fleeing the famine now occurring in the Horn of Africa are building tents by tying pieces of cloth to sticks. The very real needs of Americans pale in comparison to the needs foreign aid addresses.
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Linda Midgett Answers, "What is an Evangelical?"
by Linda Midgett
My discomfort with the word "evangelical" goes way back. To when I was five, to be exact. That's when my parents helped start a church 20 minutes outside of our small town in North Carolina that was an "Evangelical Bible Church." It meant that none of the friends on my street went there. And as I got older, it meant that I never went to the cool churches in town that had sleepovers and listened to rock music.
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Fighting Poverty with the Food Stamp Challenge
by Anne Marie Roderick
What would it be like to eat on a budget of $4.50 a day, the average daily allotment for the 45 million Americans who use food stamps? This week, the Sojourners interns are joining other faithful folk nationwide in finding out!
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Folk Music Brings Unity to Occupy Wall Street
by Joshua Witchger
Last weekend, Pete Seeger took his spirit of activism and unity to the occupiers at Zucotti Park, leading a crowd of 1,000 people in lyrics of hope, equality, and a better world. At 92 years old, Seeger – who was joined by 60s folk singer Arlo Guthrie, and several other musicians – marched over 30 blocks in peaceful protest, ending with a variety of musical performances, one of which involved the folk hymn "We Shall Overcome," a song Seeger helped popularize half a century earlier.
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Andrew Marin Answers, "What is an Evangelical?"
by Andrew Marin
To me, reclaiming the word evangelical starts with how Christians see their call by Jesus in Matthew 28 as the Great Commission. First, having the great call doesn't mean it will ever turn into the great reality. There will always be an "other." Opposite. Those who will never believe, be on our side, or agree with who we are and what we're all about.
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Budgets, Boredom, and Being "Stronger Together"
by Tim King
When it comes to the federal budget, the numbers, programs and acronyms are stupefying -- and I mean literally. Doctors in Washington, D.C. have been known to replace Ambien prescriptions with policy briefs on funding levels for DOD or HHS. The work of Heritage Christian Services in Rochester, N.Y., however, is the polar opposite of boring -- it's downright inspiring.
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Jesus the Occupier? WWJD and OWS
by Aaron Taylor
Would Jesus Occupy Wall Street? A common technique for opinion writers is to pose a question in the title of their articles, and then spoon-feed the answer to their readers. This isn't one of those articles. I ask the question of whether Jesus would be on the streets with the Occupy Wall Street protestors because: I think it's a question worth asking, I don't know the answer, and, I genuinely would like to hear what other people think on the matter.
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Sermon on the Worst Parable Ever
by Nadia Bolz-Weber
When my mom and dad returned from visiting Israel and Palestine, they told me that sometimes nice unsuspecting Christians from the West fall for a little scam. Apparently they buy tours of biblical sites that include a visit to the very road where the Good Samaritan helped the man beaten by thieves. This seems like it would really complete a trip to the Holy Land until you realize that the Good Samaritan was a parable.
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D.C. Says No to ICE
by Duane Shank
The District of Columbia has no voting representation in Congress, and our city government hasn't always been the best. But last week, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray issued a new executive order reaffirming and strengthening previous policies that District police and other public agencies will not cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
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BREAKING NEWS: U.S. to Withdraw Most Troops From Iraq by Year's End
by Jim Wallis
The United States needs to continue to respect the sovereignty of the Iraqi people while ensuring continued humanitarian support as needed. Still, there remain unanswered questions as to what this will mean for U.S. contractors, intelligence community activity, and other military operations. For our troops, danger is not over once they are home.
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#OccupyWallStreet: Rediscovering Values
by God's Politics Editor
      Editor's Note: In light of the recent protests at #OccupyWallStreet and around the world, we have revisited Jim Wallis' 2010 book Rediscovering Values: on Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street and picked out some passages that are particularly pertinent to what we are seeing in our nation today.
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The Poor People’s March and Occupy Wall Street
by Valerie Elverton Dixon
At the dedication ceremony for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, at least two speakers -- the Rev. Bernice King, Martin Luther King's daughter, and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, one of King's lieutenants -- reminded us that at the end of King's life he was planning the Poor People's March on Washington, D.C. The Poor People's March is an ancestor to the current Occupy Wall Street movement that we see breaking out across the globe today.
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#OccupyWallStreet: A Liturgy
by God's Politics Editor
Interfaith Worker Justice has published a Prayer Service designed to help people reflect on a moral economy within the context of their religious tradition. Written for clergy and religious leaders, the prayer service is aimed for those Occupying Wall Street and other cities, and for congregational use.
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"Spirit Day" 2011 Round-up
by Tim King
Spirit Day is a national movement to speak out against bullying of LGBT teens. Here are a few links as to what religious communities and leaders are saying and doing about bullying: Jim Wallis on what he tells his kids about bullying and why he wore purple.
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Faith Without Borders
by Jack Palmer
Whose responsibility was it to feed the 30,000 hungry children in the Horn of Africa who have starved to death in the last three months? Who should be ensuring that no child in this world dies before his or her fifth birthday? Who is providing medical treatment to the 225 million people around the world suffering from malaria -- a disease that realistically could be eradicated by 2015?
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Behind the Numbers: We Are Mobilizing!
by Lisa Sharon Harper
Do the numbers 917 billion, 1.5 trillion, 690 billion, 98 billion, and 32 mean anything to you? If not, I bet they just washed over you like water off a duck's back. Numbers feel insignificant -- until we understand their meaning.
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Top Stories:
G92 Summit Touts Looser Immigration Policies
The Institute on Religion and Democracy
[Jim Wallis] said he “cringed” when he heard the “tough talk” of
Republican presidential-hopefuls against illegal immigrants to “energize
their conservative evangelical base.” And he further accused the U.S.
of having a contradictory message: “No Trespassing/Help Wanted.”
#OccupyChurch: Jesus Threw out the Moneylenders for a Reason
Patheos
Christian social justice advocate Jim Wallis similarly likes to say, “You can’t just keep pulling people’s bodies out of the river without sending somebody upstream to see what or who is throwing them in.”
Deconstructing Harry Jackson: Is Jim Wallis' Ideology Really "the Doctrine of Devils"?
The Huffington Post
While, Bishop Jackson and the Rev. Wallis don't directly engage with
each other in the article, it seems that Bishop Jackson took offense at
what Wallis said.
Am I Part of the 99% or the 1%? (Scattered Thoughts on #OccupyWallStreet and Global Poverty)
Patheos
Jim Wallis reflects this tension brilliantly: Tomorrow, the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be more than $1.259 trillion. Tomorrow, almost 14 million Americans will still be unemployed.
Evangelical conference preaches support of immigrants
The Columbus Dispatch
Several of the speakers are conservative politically but liberal on immigration. The two biggest names are Jim Wallis, president of the social-justice group Sojourners, and Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.
"Sojourners in the news" articles are the most recent news clippings that mention Sojourners in any way - whether favorably or unfavorably. Though we provide the text on our site for your convenience, we do not necessarily endorse the views of these articles or their source publications.
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