A Most Profitable War

So here's a thought, one that I've not seen pitched out in the bizjournals or propagated by the business-oblivious American Left.

As America starts dropping bombs on Iran, and Iran inevitably chooses to retaliate in the only way it can, there'll be disruptions to Persian Gulf shipping.  Iran's Houthi proxies will start lobbing antiship missiles at passing commerce.  Shia Iran will pitch ballistics at the wealthy Sunni petrostates, and we'll see burning refineries and damaged or sunk tankers.  

Even if we don't see that happen, the markets will price that potentiality into a barrel for a while.

So the cost of a barrel of oil will rise, as will the price at the pump.  That's not collateral damage.  I'm kinda sorta of the mind that this is a goal.  Meaning, somewhere, someone knows that war with Iran is in America's financial interest.

I mean, the primary goal is advancing the interests of Bibi and the Arab Petrostates, who are largely now aligned.  But as a secondary goal, rising oil prices are in the direct interest of American petroleum producers.  

Because right now, the United States of America is sitting on a huuuuuuge reserve of shale oil.  In Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming, we have the largest such reserve known to humankind.  It contains within it trillions of barrels, enough resource to keep us all burning carbon unabated for nearly a century.

But using that oil is very resource intensive.  It's a highly technical process, requiring substantial research and engineering, and thus has a far higher profit threshold than old-school oil drilling.  

If the price of oil, per barrel, is less than sixty five to seventy dollars?  Some production becomes unprofitable.  The farther below seventy bucks a barrel it falls, the more the business model for shale starts to collapse.  Below fifty bucks a barrel, it's time to shut down production.  You're spending more to get it out of the ground than you're making.

Three months ago, oil was running at $58 per barrel, meaning production was getting right near the edge of viability.

Now?

Now it's soared, up to nearly $75 a barrel, comfortably above the point at which domestic shale is commercially profitable.

For OPEC nations that traditionally drill, some losses and damage to production will be more than made up for by soaring profits.  For American production, this war could be a lifesaver.

Which is just such an odd, unpleasant business.

 

The Worst We Could Do

The images of medieval horror from the Middle East continue to pour our way, as helpless captives are beheaded or burned to death by the score in intentionally gruesome displays.

This is old school stuff, part of the pattern and dynamic of our dark past, and intended to both create fear and generate conflict.  Look at the terrible things we do, and fear us, ISIS seems to be saying.

Problem is, what they're doing is...well...quaint, in its bloodstained way.  Humanity has been through the 20th century and industrialization, and the peculiar retro character of their darkness seems callow.

I was reflecting on this while leafing through a book of the worst/most poorly designed weapons of all time, the sort of thing my adolescent sons seem to enjoy.  In that book was reference to arguably the single most horrific weapon ever designed by the United States of America.

This was the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, and the weapon system in question was the SLAM, a hypersonic nuclear ramjet missile, known alternately as Project Pluto, "The Big Stick," or the Flying Crowbar.  The concept was simple, really.

It was designed to fly at near-treetop altitudes, like a drone or cruise missile.  But it was also a hypersonic ramjet designed to evade Soviet radar.  To do that, it would fly under 1000 feet at speeds in excess of Mach 3.5.  The pressure wave of its passing over was enough to incapacitate or kill.

But wait!  There's more!  It also carried a payload of eight nuclear warheads, which it would scatter over targets as it passed.  It could obliterate every single inhabited area in an entire region, killing tens of millions.

But wait!  There's more!  The ramjet used for its power source an unshielded 500 megawatt nuclear reactor.  As it passed overhead at Mach 3.5, it would lethally irradiate everything beneath it.  And because it was nuclear powered, it could keep flying for thousands of miles.  During that time, it would layer death upon death, deafening and shattering and poisoning, passing over again and again.  It was a mindless automaton, an Angel of Death killing the first, second, and all-born, rendering the world below it uninhabitable for thousands of years.

This system was designed, concept proven, and ready to go.  The engineering was sound.  But it couldn't be tested, because, well, it would kill everyone and lethally irradiate an entire region during the course of the test.

And I look at the ritualistic, primitive butchery of ISIS, and know that it pales in comparison to what mechanized, technologically advanced civilizations can accomplish.  After the Somme and Dresden, Hiroshima and Auschwitz?  And considering what might have been, if we had wandered down that path?

God help us, but we're a mess of a species.

Look at How We Kill You

Yesterday morning, as I was doing the final edit on my sermon, I flitted briefly to web-based news sources to check in on the world.  It's always wise, before the community gathers, to be sure you're not blithely arriving, unaware of some momentous and terrible event.

There they were, a sequence of short videos.  A montage, if you will, courtesy of both the armed forces of my nation and those of one of our allies.  They were familiar images, in both content and format, ones we've seen from most of our recent wars.

The format was monochromatic, the images filtered through a FLIR or similar thermal imaging scope.  There, a nondescript building in a compound, marked with a targeting computer's symbol.  Three, two, and at one, there's an explosion leaping from the roof, as the armor-piercing portion of the munition punches through.

Then, a millisecond later, a much larger explosion as the primary payload detonates, obliterating the building, casting a fiery cloud of debris and dust that consumes most of the compound.

The video stops, and loops.  With it, there are others, which I watch.  Here, an animated GIF length image of a tank, which explodes.  There, a vehicle in motion--a truck, or a HUMVEE--and then it flares out as the explosion maxes out the thermal camera tracking it.

It is seven-thirty on a Sunday morning, and in preparation for worship I have just watched dozens of human beings killed.

What struck me, looking at the videos, was that they were a peculiar mirror to the net-circulated videos that I had only been able to watch in part, those from a few weeks ago.  Those were personal, brutal, savage and monstrous, of unarmed men butchered like pigs or cattle.

"Look at how we hate you.  Look at the way that we kill you," those videos said, and they were horrors.

And yet, here we are, sharing our own images of killing.   They are different, in the way that industrial killing is different.

"Now, look at how we kill you," our videos say.  They are distant and dispassionate, precise and clinical.

At the dawn of the internet age, there was this great hope: now, human beings will finally be able to share information freely with one another.  It will change who we are, the dreamers proclaimed.  Through that sharing, an age of peace and mutual understanding will dawn.

It hasn't quite worked out that way.

How Christians Go To War

Someone asked me recently what I think about war.  So let me share a story first, one that was shared with me last week.

An old and dear friend recently returned from a trip to Africa, and we sat, and we talked over some Dogfishhead 90 Minute Ales.  

He's a doctor, who juggles time between a practice that pays the bills and volunteering days of his time a week at free clinics in Southeast and in the DC jail system.  

And though he's neither Catholic nor a person of any avowed faith, he has for the last several years provided his services to a Catholic mission hospital in the Sudan.  But this time, it was not just the challenge of being the only hospital for a hundred miles in a desperately poor region that was at play.  One million people.  One hospital.  Total staff: one doctor, and a handful of nurses.  To add a twist, there is something new:

Sudan is at war.  Forces from the Sudan are pressing into the South Sudan, trying to clear out that region, with the stated intent of driving Christians and animists from their land so that Sudan can be fully Islamic.  And by "Islamic," I mean, "under the control of Bashir."

When my friend was there, there were two doctors, for a while.  But it was more than he could bear.  

There were overflights, regularly, by Sudanese Antonovs, and the Sukhoi fighters that Putin has so graciously provided to Bashir's regime.  Midway through procedures, the staff would have to flee to foxholes, as taking out the one hospital providing hope to the region might prove so demoralizing that folks would finally abandon hope.  He'd lie in that foxhole, and think about being a Daddy to his daughters back home, and wonder, why the hell am I here?

So there was that.

And then there was the day he was midway through a biopsy for a local man whose tumors had grown into a vast flesh collar around his neck...and then suddenly trucks roared into the hospital, filled with the dead and dying.  A barrel bomb had been dropped from a Sudanese Antonov right smack into the middle of a marketplace.  There were scores of the critically injured.  There were two doctors.  Both were general practitioners.

But they operated.  And watched teenage boys die, the life heaving out of them.  And tried to remove shrapnel from what was left of the faces of pregnant women.  There were many, many amputations. Blood was everywhere.  There were hours and hours of frantic surgeries, not in an army hospital with logistical support, but in the dust and dirt of a hospital with barely more supplies than your local MinuteClinic. 

Kids. Women. Fruit merchants.  Dead or forever shattered.  My friend took a long drink from his beer.

"I don't care what they say it is.  War?  War?  It's nothing but murder.  No different.  There is no difference."

And therein lies the challenge, I think, for Christians that wish to take up the sword.  We may equivocate, and find elegant ways to justify the territorial squabblings of nations, as if they are somehow more cosmically significant than two neighbors punching it out over where the fence runs between their properties.  

But the reality of shattered bodies and dying breaths, the ruined potential of a life, that is the great and noble reality of war.  That is the reality known by our Creator.  The shining romantic fantasies of nationalism are, in the face of the reality of war, just a form of insanity.

What do I think of what it looks like for a Christian to go to war?

For that, I turn to another story.  This one is from the Bible, a story of my namesake.  It is the story of a great victory, as the forces loyal to King David routed the insurrection of his son Absalom.  

David loved Absalom dearly, and wanted only that they be father and son again.

Although David had given direct orders that Absalom not be slain, his realpolitik-enforcer/thug/general Joab would have none of it.  Joab knew what war was, and when Absalom was found, Joab himself insured he was killed.

David, on hearing of the death of the recalcitrant child who he loved with all of his heart, was shattered.   He wept, overwhelmed with the loss of his beloved son.  Joab, of course, would have none of it.  It ruined the celebration, and demoralized the troops.  He forced David to stop his embarrassing and counterproductive mourning at the loss of a child with whom he hoped to reconcile.  "You show you love the ones who hate you," spat Joab, as he threatened to abandon David.  "That means you hate the ones who love you."  Then Joab bullied him into sitting before the troops as they marched by in triumph.

Joab is the spirit and truth of war.  But David?  

Joab said it best.  "You show you love the ones who hate you."

David's reaction gets us to the truth of what it means for a Christian to take up the sword.  The one you are bombing or sniping is God's child, more deeply loved by God than Absalom was loved by David.  Maybe they are broken. Maybe they are wrong, or in the service of a tyrant. But that does not change the reality of God's love for them.  

If you are a Christian, you must believe this.  If you do not, then you should set aside the illusion that Christ is your Lord.

Can a Christian go to war?  Of course.  

But to be authentically Christian, you must love the one you take up the sword against, as if they are your own baby.  Your own daughter.  Your own son.

And that is hard and terrible.

Because war is real, and that reality is a hard and terrible thing.

War, Crimea, and Removing the Mask of Faith

As Putin's Russia takes the post-Olympic opportunity to seize a hunk of terrain it's been hankering for since the fragmentation and dissolution of the Soviet Union, it was hard not to go back in time and look at the last time Russia went a-stomping around in that Black Sea peninsula.

It's been a while, a century and a half, since the blood and mess of the Crimean War, and the players have changed a little bit.

Our editorial pages hop about and fulminate about who is doing what, and why whatever it is we are doing is wrong.  Roll it back to 1854, the last time Russians went stomping into Crimea, and the United States couldn't have cared less.  It wasn't our problem.

Oh, there was plenty of editorial page fulmination.  Talkin' heads gotta talk, after all.  There was lots of diplomatic wrangling.  And there were lots of opportunities to get involved for a buck, as Samuel Colt did when he travelled to Russia to see if he could sell them weapons to fight the Brits and the French and the "heathen" Ottomans.

But ultimately?  America did nothing.  As this fascinating historical essay notes, we had no meaningful strategic interests there, and our response was to send a commission.  This involved three guys, whose sole task was to observe and report back on how the Europeans and Russians fought one another.

Of course, things are more global now, and our place in the world is different.  But still, it seems a little difficult to see a direct interest.

Another interesting feature of the first Crimean War?  Its inescapable futility.  It was an unnecessary war to have fought in the first place.  Totally meaningless, brought about by diplomatic bumbling and indecision.  The war itself was much the same, just a fumbling about, filled with miscommunication and utterly pointless loss of life, with victory being determined not by greater nobility, but by lesser incompetence.

This was, after all, the war that gave us the legendary Charge of the Light Brigade, in which a British cavalry brigade received muddled orders.  Knowing the pointlessness of what they were doing, they dutifully charged right into the wrong target...in this case, a known deathtrap surrounded by artillery.  Theirs was not to question why, theirs was to do and die, as Tennyson described it.  Or as a French commander pointedly observed, "It is magnificent, but it is not war.  It is madness."

That Crimea was once synonymous with the complete futility of war should not be lost on us.

And as we sit here again, Europe on one side, Russia on the other, and Crimea in the center, there's another, interesting variance.  Back then, in the middle of the 19th century, the conflict in Crimea was putatively about religion.

Russia's nominal reason for entering Crimea midway through the 19th century was to protect the rights of Orthodox Christians in the Holy Land, which was at that point controlled by the Ottoman Empire.  It was all about faith, and the rights of faith, at least if the pronouncements to the people were to be believed.

But underlying that?  It was just what war has always been, the stuff of national power, tribalism, and the egos of despots.  Over the pride and territorial hungers of human beings was painted a gloss of religion, for the sole purpose of stirring the masses.  Back in the nineteenth century, it was the odd conflict of Slavic Orthodox Christianity versus the tag-team of Catholicism and Islam.

What is interesting, this time about, is that the veneer of faith is entirely missing.

God has been removed as a pretense, and eliminated as a justification.  Faith has faded from Europe, and never has there been a soul who cared less about God than Vladimir Putin.  But there's still tribalism, and the clash of cultures, and the naked power aspirations of despots.

Those things, quite apparently, will happily stir conflict all on their own.

Just as they always have.

War and Space

It was around 1:30 am, and the traffic leading away from Wallops Island was finally letting up.   We'd watched, along with thousands of others, as a Minotaur V had heaved a lunar probe from our world.

At point-blank range, it was awesome.  The fire of the launch was a stark white, not like a sunrise, but like we were on the set of some Spielberg flick and he'd just kicked in a couple thousand kilowatts worth of klieg lights.

As the sky lit, being Americans and all, we hooted and hollered with visceral glee.  I think I may actually have said the word "Dang,"  in that stretched out way that marks me as at least part Southerner.

The launch vehicle itself was invisible to the naked eye, but the long comet-tail of white fire danced upward and away, refreshing with each stage, until it was a vague orangeish dot at the very edge of the atmosphere, on its way to being just another star in the heavens.

It was well worth the trip.  And now, a full day behind us, the boys were asleep in the car.  The big guy was snoring and twitching, the little guy finally shut down after tiring of Minecraft.

Alone with my thoughts and the road, I found myself in a reverie about war and space.  The rocket that went up was, after all, a repurposed ICBM, so that tended to shape my thinking.

So much of what we think about in our human storytelling about space revolves around war and conflict.  Since we began to have a sense of the depth of it, we have cast space in terms of conflict.  H.G. Wells began it, as implacable minds coveted this world.  Now, there's the endless Star Wars franchise, which Disney will sustain for a thousand generations.  There's also Star Trek, which seems to have evolved from boldly going where no man has gone before to boldly blowing things up at a pace no-one has seen before.  We have visualized the vastness of the universe as being filled with monsters, who will one day arrive with their tripods and their death rays and their vast battle fleets, bent on the annihilation of humankind. 

Watching that rocket recede to nothing, though, I found myself pondering the absurdity of that thinking as I drove through the darkness.  War?  In space?  It feels like a projection, an assumption that has no grounds in the actuality of space itself.

Why do we war?  What is the point of it?  It's power, of course, and our desire to control resources and territory.  It's an old thing, a deep part of our organic animal nature.  We want our progeny to flourish, so we need to control the resources that will insure their survival.  We want to expand the circle of our influence, and so we sweep across the world, dominating and destroying anything that might threaten our power.  It's what primates do.  It's what so many animals do.

Looking out into the Deep, the idea that war has much of a place in it seems absurd.  It seems so for several reasons.  

War is about resources.  In the universe, there are resources potentially beyond measure, an abundance so great that it boggles the mind.  

In that vast cornucopia of material resource, we also see that life is a rare thing.  Creatures that need to take resources are not plentiful.  And so as we listen and peer into the deep, we do not see or hear our story of violence being played out anywhere in our wing of the spiral arm.  Space may be filled with energies, but the sound of war drums is so far notably absent.

And life that has reached the stage that it can venture out of the kiddie pool would by necessity need to adapt itself to space.  We are not there yet as a species, being tiny little bipeds that need to cart along a prohibitively large amount of stuff to sustain our existence.  We are, as H.G. Wells observed, creatures of this world.  When we finally move among the stars, we will need to be different.

One of those differences, I would hope, will be that our old hunger for war will fall behind us.  

On a cosmic scale, it just feels so...irrelevant.

Reading the Quran: War, Violence, and Jihad

Talking about an encounter with the Quran without talking about violence and jihad would be an act of intellectual and spiritual cowardice.  Tempting, mind you, as the easy way out is always tempting.  Just don't talk about it, whispers the voice of weakness.

But that wouldn't describe the encounter, and mincing words does no-one any favors.

Reading through the Quran, it is impossible to miss the explicit martial language used to describe both the defense of the faith and the spread of the faith.   It was created in the context of conflict, and by conflict I do not mean the dynamic tension between ideas and concepts.   War is a part of its ethic and worldview, and the call to warfare...again, not spiritual or metaphorical, but actual...is as clear as the moon in the sky on a bright cold morning.

Like the Judges in pre-Davidic Judaism, the Prophet actually took forces into battle.  The Quran describes several clashes, including the Battle of Badr (Al-i-Imran 123-125) and the Battle of Uhud (Al-i-Imran 152).  These were not large scale conflicts by the standards of the ancient world, but involved Muslim forces that were...in the case of Badr...fewer in number than the average Presbyterian congregation.   We're not talking a megachurch battle here.

But it is war nonetheless, albeit on a tribal scale.

An entire sura is dedicated to providing instruction for the spoils of war (Al-Anfal).  Again, this was not  initially intended as metaphor.  It assumes conflict with actual physical opponents who no longer need their stuff, because you've killed them.

From this foundation of expansion and conflict, the Quran is considerably more expressive of non-spiritual, non-symbolic violence than the Gospels.   Conflict with unbelievers is repeatedly and consistently articulated in terms that seem to encourage some pretty unpleasant stuff.

It goes beyond Al-Baraqah 191 and 217, which suggest...depending on the translation...that it is better to kill someone who opposes Islam than to permit discord.   Violence in defense of the faith seems presented consistently as a virtue, particularly in opposing unbelievers/backsliders (An Nisa 89).  Although killing other believers intentionally is forbidden, that's an easy one to get around.  (An Nisa 92) It's not a huge conceptual leap from disagreeing with someone to deciding that the source of that disagreement lies in their obvious departure from the One True Faith, in which case, well, there you go.   As a theme, it's consistent and sustained.

And yet this is hardly missing from the narratives of the Bible, either.  The stories of the Exodus and the tales of conflict in the Deuteronomic History are pretty legendarily splattery, filled with plenty of the old ultraviolence.  Much of that is given divine sanction or support by the authors of the narratives.  The Gospels have references to violence as well, although it tends to be clearly metaphoric.   The embrace of war or force of arms is explicitly and consistently rejected, and replaced with a clear and radical ethic of nonviolence.  The Epistles are that way as well, with even the legendarily unpleasant martial imagery of John of Patmos clearly extant in the heavenly/eschatological realms.

From that foundation, early Christianity was almost entirely pacifistic even in the face of violence, to the immense frustration of Roman critics like Marcus Aurelius, who viewed it as weak and devoid of manly warrior virtue.   When St. Augustine wrote the City of God, which lays out the distinction between the Kingdom of God and human governments, it was at least in part intended as a response to those Roman traditionalists who blamed Christian faith for weakening the martial spirit of the Roman people.

Christianity did catch up in the violence department, of course, pretty much the moment Constantine misinterpreted his vision and drove Maximus and his army into the bloody Tiber.   Now THAT was a battle.  Whenever faith mingles with coercive social or economic power, bad things happen.  Empires are not so good at turning the other cheek.

So the question is: Is Islam inherently a violent faith?

If Islam is not just a faith but also a philosophy for governing a nation-state, then the answer must be yes.  Coercion is an inherent part of maintaining collective order.  Wherever there are laws that establish the parameters of what is and is not acceptable in a culture, the threat of coercion exists to insure compliance.  I say this not about Islam alone, because that is true for every faith, in every place and time.  

Christianity is the farthest thing from a violent faith, and it is also not a system of governance.  Understood correctly, there can never be a Christian nation.  But we're great at misunderstanding, so whenever the sword has stood behind my faith to enforce conversion and compliance, plenty of blood has been spilled in the name of Jesus.  When jihad is understood as the war to insure not internal spiritual integrity but external material control over land, property, and the behavior of others, then bad [stuff] will happen.

For Islamic fundamentalism, the answer is also yes.  Reading the Quran through the lenses of a rigid, ultraconservative literalism would provide plenty of grounds for violence, oppression, and coercion, just as it has in Christianity.  If there are no texts in the Quran whose authority is mediated by/interpreted through higher order values, then violence will be the result.

But for Islam inherently?  The answer is no, from both my readings of the Quran and my experience of Muslims more broadly.   If a Muslim is guided in their reading of Quran by the Spirit, and not by the desire for material power or control over others, I am convinced that they will be guided to interpret it in a way that is conducive to both peaceful coexistence and nonviolence.  Understood in historical context and interpreted through the lenses of every human being's inner struggle,  jihad can be a positive thing.

That is not, of course, what we see in much of the Arab world, which is why that word is now almost indelibly and perhaps irredeemably connected with violence in the minds of the West.  But that violence is a result of the use of the standards of the world as the framework from which a violent jihadi understands Quran.

From all of this, the question arises:  Is there any ground for nonviolence in the Quran?  And for that, another post.

The Meaning of War

As American missiles rain down on the outskirts of Tripoli, and French and British jets begin the enforcement of a "no fly zone," I find myself really struggling with what Western leaders are saying.  For all of the protestations of concern for the well-being of the Libyan people coming from the mouths of Western leaders, I just can't bring myself to buy it.

The Libyan rebels are not, as some have misidentified them, freedom fighters.  Best I can tell, they are a random assemblage of folks who don't like Gaddafi.  That includes some liberal and progressive sorts who justifiably felt oppressed by his despotism.  But it also appears to include plenty of people who don't like him because they are from different tribal regions than his base, or who oppose him because he's a basically secular dictator and they are radically fundamentalist.   The rebels are an inchoate mess.  Images of them show functionally zero command and control, and no training.  They seem to be good at milling around in clusters, or firing semi-randomly at things, or running for cover. 

Gaddafi is hardly someone whose grasp on power I would support.  His regime has been kicking around forever.  Gaddafi's Libya doesn't have many friends in the Arab world, where his secular state socialism puts him out of sync with both the monarchists and the theocrats.  He's also almost universally disliked in Europe's social democracies, thanks to his support of some rather unpleasant terror activities.  We don't like him much, either, and for good reason.

But what we're seeing now is not about our concern the liberty of the poor oppressed people of Libya.  We aren't, as one commentator absurdly put it, siding with freedom fighters against a cruel and oppressive tyrant suppressing his people by force.  That is not why we are there, and not why the French are there, and not why the Brits are there.

We are there because of the oil.  There is no other national interest involved.

Of course, we won't hear this from our leaders.  Such a rationale seems too crass and self serving.  It makes us seem ignoble.   But were our noble rhetoric matched with action consistently, we'd have been on the ground in the Sudan for a decade.  The difference is petrochemical.  This is a clear and golden opportunity to replace the quixotic and suddenly vulnerable despot of an oil rich state with someone more beholden to the West for their grasp on power.   That new leadership will, of course, insure that some or all of Libya's significant reserves of oil are in the hands of a friend in this post-peak-oil time of dwindling resources.

So to do this, we have gone to war.  We are at war in Libya.  Now, we deny this.  We're just acting in an international coalition in a tactical and measured operation to protect the civilians of Libya.  But the actuality of it is clearly different.   War is the use of coordinated and intentional lethal and coercive force in a struggle for land or materiel between nation states.  That is what we are doing.  To argue otherwise is absurd.

Let us for a moment imagine that an international coalition...Canada, Belgium, and Costa Rica...had just levelled Andrews and Quantico.  The East Wing was in flames, punctured by a Canadian cruise missile.  The surface to air missile batteries that ring the nation's capital...they do, you know...were in ruins.   Belgian Sopwith Camels buzz ominously overhead.

Would we be at war?  Would we perceive ourselves as being at war?  Of course.  So what we are doing meets every set of criteria for war.  That we haven't taken certain formal constitutional steps is immaterial.  Reality is reality.

And in the reality of war, what a nation says never matches it's actions.  You say you're going to do one thing.  You do another, unanticipated thing.  In Sun Tzu's the Art of War, that ancient guide to the essence of effectively applying coercive power, this is made clear.  Let no one really know what you are doing, not even your own people.  Especially not your own people.

It's for this reason that America's "support role" means that we lob Tomahawk missiles at Libya by the hundreds.   It's for this reason that our "support role" involves British and French jets relying on us for targeting and mission coordination.  It's for this reason that our "support role" has American military power directly involved in striking targets.  It's for that reason that our "no-fly-zone" now somehow includes tanks and trucks and personnel, which only fly...briefly...after we've hit them with a JDAM.  It's for that reason that our "no-fly-zone" includes taking out Gaddafi's command and control, by which we mean taking out Gaddafi himself.

If it looks like a war, and smells like a war, and burns like a war, and kills like a war, it's war.

'Nam

Being an online gamer does surface some odd moments of human interaction.

For my recently passed birthday, I was given a PlayStation Network Gift Card, with the knowledge that I was jonesin' for a bit of downloadable content.  The content in question was the Vietnam expansion for Battlefield Bad Company Two.  The remarkably robust gameplay, excellent modeling, industry standard physics engine, and amazingly rendered graphics have enticed me to put in many, many hours in BBC2.  The Vietnam expansion takes all of those things, and drops back into the Vietnam era.  It's functionally a whole new game for under fifteen bucks, and while it was very well reviewed and a tremendous amount of male yaya fun, I confess to having a few qualms about it.

There is, of course, the fact that I am the pastor of a congregation attended primarily by Asian-Americans.  It's a bit peculiar being engaged in simulated combat with Charlie, particularly given that Charlie looks like he could be certain members of my session.  Then again, the game requires that you alternate between being US Army and being NVA.  And, unlike the war itself, the game is devoid of racially charged language.  While the US forces do utter some pretty pungent and non-G-rated epithets in combat, the racist slurs that were an unpleasant reality among combat troops back then are notably missing.   There is no "good side" or "bad side." 

But more significantly, Vietnam is...well...it still feels close.  The game's astounding graphics really do evoke the tight, claustrophobic character of jungle combat.  It's lush and impossibly visually cluttered, and virtual death is everywhere.  And it isn't an ancient war.  We were deep in the throes of 'Nam when I was born, and it was the farthest thing from a game.  If you visit the memorial in DC, which I have, the staggering column of names on the blackened stone wound in the flesh of the Mall remains a stark reminder of how many young men lost their lives in that ultimately pointless war.   As a much younger man, I once looked for how many men who shared my common name had died in the war.  There were more than a dozen, including a David Williams who died the day before I was born.

It's a war close enough that those who fought in it are still with us. 

Even in-game. 

Yesterday, as I played on the North Vietnamese Army side defending the Phu Bai Valley from an American assault, I ambushed a squad of US Army soldiers as they made their way through a rice paddy.  Three of them fell before the fourth took me. 

The last of the three had the gamertag "1970VietVet."

That was striking, for a variety of reasons.  It was striking that I would be engaged in a visually realistic simulation of the Vietnam war, and taking down an actual Vietnam Vet.  It was striking that a veteran of that difficult war would be playing a game that so viscerally evokes it. And that this same vet, in the next round, would be playing as an NVA soldier.  For someone who knew that war personally, and likely lost friends to it, that must feel...odd.

It was a helpful reminder that while playing at combat is fun, the real thing...well...it isn't. 

Not at all.

Violence and Wonderland

For family movie night this evening, I curled up with Rache and the boys and popped a Blu-Ray into the PS3.  It was, finally and after failing to hit it in the theaters, Alice in Wonderland.

Or, rather, it was our culture's reimagining of that deliciously fevered Victorian tale.  It was brilliantly rendered, of course, even if we weren't seeing it in eye-popping 3-D.  It was well acted.  It was seamlessly assembled, beautifully quirky in that Tim Burton way.   Funny how that Burton flavor really hasn't changed, not since I plunked down cash to watch Pee Wee's Big Adventure at a much smaller theater in a much smaller version of Tysons Corner Mall.  So much has changed in 25 years, and yet so little...

But I found it troubling.

Not badly made, not at all.  But troubling, because it speaks to the deep difference between the culture in which Lewis Carroll wrote and the culture into which that tale has been reimagined.  The whimsy of the Carroll tales, their faerie madness, well, that was only subtext.

The story we were shown...seemingly the only kind of story we know how to tell...was utterly familiar.  It was one of war.  There are, of course, strong intimations of violence in the original Wonderland tales.  Wonderland is a place where things are not as they seem, and it's not without its dangers.  But not nearly enough for our blood-hungry palates.  Here, swords and revenge and war drums and noble heroes with vorpal swords bringing justice are front and center.  If there is not conflict, not battle, no witty quips uttered as a blade brings an end to a foe, well, honestly, we'd be bored witless.

We want to see the Mad Hatter pouring out hot cups of whupass.  We want Alice the Warrior.  It's the Alice we want to see, so that's the Alice we get.

I suppose, given our culture, I should be grateful she didn't slay the Jabberwock whilst wearing booty shorts and a tube top.  Maybe in the sequel.

It's clear, through this telling, that we no longer have ears to hear about Wonderland.  We'd much rather hear stories of Underland.

Religious Freedom, Afghanistan, and The Point of It All

This last week, a little news item flitted across the religion news pages, to be quickly forgotten. It had to do with two Christian relief agencies, both of which provide material support to the Afghan people. The Afghan government shut down the operations of both, alleging that they were involved in proselytizing, which is explicitly forbidden under Afghan law.

Neither Church World Service or Norwegian Church Aid could be described as evangelical. They're not out there trying to convert. They're trying to fulfill the Christian mandate to provide care for those in need. Both are progressive, ecumenical, and sensitive to the needs, culture, and religious sensibilities of local communities. Take a look at the Church World Service web site. Winning souls for Jesus ain't their schtick.

But after a local television station began making allegations based apparently on nothing more than innuendo and the word "Church" in their name, angry mobs took to the streets. Now both groups have been forced by the Afghan government to suspend operations, as it investigates whether these groups have violated provisions in the Constitution of Afghanistan that forbid conversion from Islam. I have two reactions to this.

First, the allegations are clearly false, but that doesn't seem to matter much in Afghanistan. Truth is hard to find, but it ain't like most folks bother tryin'. Rumors that feed existing hatreds are just so much easier. The cultural sensitivities within that community are as twitchy as a recently-set antipersonnel mine. Outrage comes as easily as flipping a rather well-worn switch. Reminds me of the Tea Party, for some reason.

Second, we recently entered into new territory in Afghanistan. It is now the single longest military commitment in American history. We've been there longer than we were in 'Nam. Thousands upon thousands of American servicemen and women have put their lives on the line in Afghanistan, and many have made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of their country. Without the support of the United States, the government in Afghanistan would not exist.

Yet the government that America has put into place there imposes restrictions on human freedom that are totally antithetical to our values as a nation. Yeah, I know, nobody likes proselytizing. But a nation-state that bans it is not worth the blood and sweat of our troops, nor is it worth all the money we've borrowed from China. I'm not saying that as some way of channeling Ann Coulter, asserting that if we just forced 'em all to follow Jesus, things would be copacetic. Not at all. I just can't see the point of creating a nation...and it is our creation...in which a citizen cannot choose not to follow the religion of the majority.

An Afghan should be free to be Muslim. But also Christian. Or Buddhist. Or Hindu. Or Jewish. They should be free to be an Atheist, if they so choose. Not only that, Afghan Christians and Buddhists and Hindus and Jews and Atheists should be free to talk about what they believe, and free to attempt to persuade others of the merits of their belief. Those are the blessings of liberty which were ordained and established in the American Constitution. Those are the values that make America a good thing, even with all her blemishes.

Yeah, I know, imposing this set of values on the Afghan people would have been an affront to their culture. What we don't seem to have realized as we've poured blood and treasure into that region is that the problem in Afghanistan wasn't governmental. What made Afghanistan the seedbed for attacks against our soil wasn't a regime. It was a set of values broadly held by the society.

We've mistakenly assumed that the processes of democracy are the same as the values of our republic. And though we've done some good there, I do find myself wondering, more deeply than I have before, about the point of it all.

Where Our Heart Is

There are, among pastors responsible for drumming up financial resources to sustain their congregations, a variety of little proof-texts that we're compelled to go to. One of the more painfully cliche Bible passages that always show up when the church needs new carpet for the youth room is the Matthew 6:21:

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Meaning, if something is really important to you, you commit of your material resources to support it. It's a practical measure of assessing what is truly important to a person. If I give money to insure orphans in Malawi have clean drinking water, I make a statement about my priorities. If I give most of my money to Jack Daniels, Louis Vuitton and Jimmy Choo, that also makes a clear statement about my priorities.

Jesus, of course, spun this saying in some very interesting ways, ways that radically subvert our conventional understanding of wealth. But that discussion is for another post. What strikes me this morning is how the simpler funderstanding of the saying plays against the recent talk of a federal spending freeze. From both parties, we're now hearing concern about the exploding federal deficit. So now comes the idea...no more increases in spending. Hold the line. No more growth until we get our addiction to debt under control. I'm actually fine with that principle. We need to learn to live within our means, and soon.

But there is, of course, one exception. Our spending on weapons and the coercive implements of state security will be exempted from that freeze. There are many reasons given for this. Most of them boil down to this: We are at war and facing possible dire threats from possible enemies at home and abroad, as we have been every day of my forty-one years. And every day of my parent's lives. America is always at war or preparing for war. So even though we spend more on guns and jails than the rest of the world combined, we cannot possibly even consider the possibility of not spending more on that area of our national life.

That is because, as any pastor could tell you, war is where America's heart is.

No Good War

Earlier this week, there was a small demonstration here in DC. That's not even vaguely unusual. There's always a small demonstration here in DC. The event was in front of the White House, and was a group of progressive organizations gathering to protest the war in Afghanistan.

Opposition to the war in Afghanistan is now the majority position among progressives in the United States. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center showed that 56% of Democrats favor removing US/NATO forces from the region as soon as possible.

I dislike war. I dislike it intensely. It is among the most broken of human institutions, and is in almost every way antithetical to the core virtues of Christian faith. It is never, ever, ever a good thing, any more than an amputation is a good thing. But here I part ways with the majority of my progressive brethren and sistren. The conflict in Afghanistan is not one we can walk away from.

Both the Taliban and the al-Qaeda cells that they so willingly incubated are the mortal enemies of pluralist democracy and progressive values. The systematic terrorizing of the Afghan people prior to 2001 was monstrous, and there is no reason to believe that our withdrawal would result in anything other than that for Afghanis.

Permitting Afghanistan to return to it's pre-2001 state would also be a catastrophic strategic error, as egregious a mistake as our misbegotten war in Iraq. Yes, many Americans are tired of war. Our sense of national purpose following the 9/11 attacks was utterly squandered. But we can't delude ourselves into thinking that the Taliban pose no strategic threat to the United States or our allies. Sure, they themselves do not. They have no capacity for military operations on a global scale. But the safe haven they provided for Bin Laden cannot be permitted to re-emerge.

The conflict in Afghanistan isn't a good war. No war is good. But some wars are necessary.