Living By The Sword

Then Jesus said to him, "Put your sword back into its place. For all who take the sword will perish by the sword.

- Matthew 26:52

With these words Jesus rebukes Peter for striking the servant of the high priest with his sword. Peter meant well. He lashed out with his sword to defend Jesus even though doing so against a "great crowd with swords and clubs" was a suicidal move. His heart was in the right place. It turns out that history is replete with what seemed like well intentioned decisions that ended up going horribly wrong. The church in America has an internet front row seat to a prime example right now.

Unfortunately this teaching of Christ is not restricted to just those who draw the sword or that particular event. Whenever violence is employed on a wide scale, innocents suffer. Millions died in the World Wars, many millions of them civilians. Mothers incinerated with their children, the elderly dead under the rubble of bombings. We even have a nice clinical name for it, "collateral damage". There simply is no way to wage war on a large scale without innocents suffering, even when that suffering is unintentional.

The news coming from Iraq is ugly and for Christians is especially heart-breaking. The once small but relatively secure population of Christians in Iraq is on the verge of extinction, as is the case all around the Middle East. Forced conversions, torture, rape, murder and the defilement of bodies are all happening right now to our brothers and sisters. Many of us sit in our homes in America aghast that this could be happening in 2014 and we are filled with a combination of impotent anger and horror at what we see, knowing that there is little we can do other than pray (and prayer is no small thing). What reminded me of  "live by the sword, die by the sword" is the very real part that American Christians unwittingly played in setting the stage for this atrocity that is happening to our family in Iraq.

It is hard to remember the Middle East as it was before 9/11/01. For the last dozen plus years we have known nothing but war. When September 11th happened, America as a whole was looking for vengeance. Someone to hold responsible and someone to make pay. To be honest I am not sure we much cared who that was. Like President Bush said, if you aren't with us you are against us. Given a general lack of "hard targets" America invaded and eventually occupied Afghanistan, home of the Taliban. Concurrently a case was made, leaning heavily on alleged weapons of mass destruction, to invade Iraq and finish the job we left unfinished under the first President Bush. As anyone could predict, American forces steamrolled the Iraqi military and we set up shop with dual occupations for the next decade, a decade that was drenched in blood, both American and Iraqi.

Fast forward to more recent years. In 2011 the so-called "Arab Spring" kicked off across the region. Formerly stable regimes in Egypt and Libya collapse. America is interfering a little here and a little there. Syria is embroiled in a civil war that still rages. Iraq is destabilized and with the withdrawal of American forces there is nothing to stop the ISIS other than the ragtag efforts of Iraq's military. Religious minorities are persecuted, notably for us many Christians who face unspeakable atrocities.

In a tragic irony, the collapse of Iraq and the ensuing conditions that allowed the ISIS to seize huge areas of Iraq and persecute Christians were a result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq that deposed Saddam Hussein (a dictator that largely tolerated Christians) in an unprovoked assault of a sovereign nation that was widely supported by American evangelicals. While I disagree with him on a lot of issues, I think Jonathan Merritt is largely on target in his piece, Blame Obama and U.S. evangelicals for the persecution of Iraqi Christians. Without the widespread and largely unquestioning support by American evangelicals of a preemptive invasion of Iraq, it is possible that America would not have gone down that road. I know of what I speak because I was pretty vocal about my support of the decision by President Bush to invade and occupy Iraq. In other words, in our thirst for vengeance over 9/11 and our ungodly fear of terrorism, Christians supported a decidedly unjust war that set the stage for unimaginable persecution of our brothers and sisters. Of course the sins being gleefully committed by the ISIS and other satanic groups in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere are on their own heads. Should God not grant them repentance and a regenerate heart they will perish to face a holy justice that will last for an eternity. That doesn't absolve American evangelicals for their role in helping to create the conditions that ISIS is thriving in. This is just another example of Christians being manipulated by the powers of the world into supporting their machinations and yielding unintended consequences, just as the church was manipulated into supporting World War I which led to Hitler and Stalin and the persecution of Christians as well as Jews and others.

Some may say and not without justification, that this is not the time for theological point scoring, not while our brothers and sisters are being tortured, raped and brutally murdered. I say that with all due respect, and I am as deeply grieved as anyone, this is precisely the time to have this conversation. We are seeing the unintentional fruit of a misguided and unbiblical war of aggression enthusiastically supported by the church. In an era when memories are short and attention spans are measured in 144 characters, we need to open our eyes now, not just to the tragic events we see playing out on social media but also to the events that have led to this situation because we will forget all about it once the news is replaced by something else.

We must stop turning to Caesar to advance our own agendas because it always turns out badly for the church when we yoke ourselves to the godless power of the state. We need to repent in sackcloth and ashes and beg forgiveness from our brothers and sisters in Iraq. I especially need to do this because I was driven by the fear of man to support a war that endangered my family in Iraq and elsewhere. We need to vow to stop letting Caesar manipulate our fear or greed or selfishness to support his wars with our witness, our treasure and our children. How many Christians have sent their children to be sacrificed on the altar of Baal to appease Caesar and accomplish his goals? I say no more. No more wars for gold or pride or power. No more of our children sent to die and to kill for Caesar. No more endangering our brothers and sisters in other lands to preserve our ungodly lifestyles in America. No more living by the sword and being surprised when we perish by the sword.

No more.

Ten Years Later

Today marks an important date in American history as we remember the start of the liberation/invasion of Iraq. I vividly recall ten years ago the building up to the invasion of Iraq and I likewise remember how enthusiastic I was. Saddam Hussein was clearly a bad guy. We were about a year and a half removed from 9/11/2011 and our national blood lust was still running high. As a fairly young Christian deeply entrenched in American conservative evangelicalism I saw nothing inherently contradictory in supporting a war of aggression against a sovereign nation. After all everyone knew that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Everyone knew that Iraq was supporting terrorists. President Bush was "our guy", an unapologetic evangelical Christian Commander-in-Chief. What possible reason would a red-blooded American Christian have for not supporting the overthrow of a dictator, installing democracy and preventing the bad guys from getting WMDs? I was all set to join the military after 9/11 and would have gladly left my family behind and marched off to war to set straight the enemies of America and smite the ungodly Muslim terrorists.

Ten years later I have a much different perspective. I still think that Hussein had MWDs in limited numbers at some point that were moved or hidden. There was a pretty lengthy lead up to the war giving him plenty of time to move them and he clearly possessed them at some point because he used them on his own people. As the snarky saying goes we know Hussein possessed WMDs because we still had some of the receipts. Regardless, by the time we got there they were gone and our justification for the invasion was looking pretty shaky. Was his regime an imminent or even realistic threat to the U.S.? I kind of doubt it. Was the U.S. justified in invading Iraq igniting a conflict that lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths, mostly civilian? Today I would say absolutely not. Our Constitutional mandate to wage war is very specific and invading another sovereign nation without a declaration of war and under false pretenses doesn't qualify. Is America "safer" today? I don't see how. Sure we fought over there instead of hypothetically over here but the tens of thousands of Iraqi dead don't bring me much satisfaction. I am no longer willing to trade dead Iraqi civilians to perhaps avoid dead American civilians.

As a Christian I am even more troubled by my past support for an unjustified war of aggression and the general enthusiaism for this war among my brethren. The Iraqi people and Muslims around the world are a huge mission field and they, quite rightly, see Christianity as an American religion that is at war, literally, with their religion and their culture. Jesus said we are to love our enemies but we have often seen our enemies as synonymous with America's enemies and rather than love them our motto has been "get them before they get us". So questions of who was right and who was wrong, whether a war was justified or carried out ethically, etc. are of far less importance to me than my non-negotiable obligation to love my enemies even as Christ in loving His enemies redeemed me and took upon Himself the penalty for my sins. By and large American evangelical Christians did very little to love as Christ loved in the days and months leading up to and following the invasion of Iraq.

I look back today with sadness. Far from "Mission Accomplished" I see a mission field poisoned against the disciples of Christ seeking to take His message of enemy love to a people who are in desperate need of His redeeming blood. I see us as a people who have lost sight of our primary calling, draping the flag over the cross and reading the Scriptures with red, white and blue lenses. I personally repent of my lust for blood in those days and I call upon my brethren to do the same. This is not an anniversary to celebrate, it is a sober and painful lesson to learn and never forget.

We're getting out of Iraq sez Obama!

But not this year...

And not all of the troops....

In fact we are going to leave 35,000 to 50,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely...

So, in Obama-speak, getting the troops out of Iraq really means leaving up to 50,000 soldiers IN Iraq and just changing the name of their mission...

Is that the "change" people voted for? Changing the name of the mission for the 50,000 troops left in Iraq?

(Note: I think we should leave troops in Iraq, just like we still have troops in Germany and Japan)

News I never thought I would see

It must have been painful for the mainstream media to write this.

For years the defeat monkeys have been banging the drum, Iraq is a lost cause. We are wasting lives, we can never win. The violence is up, hope is down, run now while we can.

Now, all very quietly, we start hearing that maybe things are better, way better, in Iraq than we have been led to believe. From the Associated Press...

Analysis: US now winning Iraq war that seemed lost

BAGHDAD - The United States is now winning the war that two years ago seemed lost. Limited, sometimes sharp fighting and periodic terrorist bombings in Iraq are likely to continue, possibly for years. But the Iraqi government and the U.S. now are able to shift focus from mainly combat to mainly building the fragile beginnings of peace — a transition that many found almost unthinkable as recently as one year ago.

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point where the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government.

That does not mean the war has ended or that U.S. troops have no role in Iraq. It means the combat phase finally is ending, years past the time when President Bush optimistically declared it had. The new phase focuses on training the Iraqi army and police, restraining the flow of illicit weaponry from Iran, supporting closer links between Baghdad and local governments, pushing the integration of former insurgents into legitimate government jobs and assisting in rebuilding the economy.

Scattered battles go on, especially against al-Qaida holdouts north of Baghdad. But organized resistance, with the steady drumbeat of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and ambushes that once rocked the capital daily, has all but ceased.

This amounts to more than a lull in the violence. It reflects a fundamental shift in the outlook for the Sunni minority, which held power under Saddam Hussein. They launched the insurgency five years ago. They now are either sidelined or have switched sides to cooperate with the Americans in return for money and political support.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told The Associated Press this past week there are early indications that senior leaders of al-Qaida may be considering shifting their main focus from Iraq to the war in Afghanistan.
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Systematic sectarian killings have all but ended in the capital, in large part because of tight security and a strategy of walling off neighborhoods purged of minorities in 2006.

That has helped establish a sense of normalcy in the streets of the capital. People are expressing a new confidence in their own security forces, which in turn are exhibiting a newfound assertiveness with the insurgency largely in retreat.

Statistics show violence at a four-year low. The monthly American death toll appears to be at its lowest of the war — four killed in action so far this month as of Friday, compared with 66 in July a year ago. From a daily average of 160 insurgent attacks in July 2007, the average has plummeted to about two dozen a day this month. On Wednesday the nationwide total was 13.

Beyond that, there is something in the air in Iraq this summer.

In Baghdad, parks are filled every weekend with families playing and picnicking with their children. That was unthinkable only a year ago, when the first, barely visible signs of a turnaround emerged.

Now a moment has arrived for the Iraqis to try to take those positive threads and weave them into a lasting stability.

What's this? The surge that McCain supported and Bush proposed worked? How could that be, that the strategy ordered by a moron and a war-monger could have actually worked? Maybe it is optimism that Barack Obama, he of hope and change, might be President. Yeah, that's it. It must be a result of Barack's wave of hope, in fact I wouldn't be surprised if his visit alone to the region didn't lead to an amazing reduction in violence and a dramatic uptick in hope.

The American Left seeks to turn every military conflict into the next Vietnam, to recapture that defeat and the self-importance of the "peace" movement. The self-loathing of the American Left prevents them from supporting our troops, beyond calling to bring them home in defeat. Some people need to be dealt with, sometimes the state must wield the sword. For far too many Americans, America is the problem not part of the solution. We can do nothing right, and indeed our only purpose should be to abase ourselves and apologize for our very existence.

Not this cowboy. I still love our land, I still have faith in our nation. Someday history will, if given a fair chance, look back at a free Iraq which I hope will be the first of many democracies in the Middle East, and like the democracies in Europe and in Asia they will owe their freedom to American blood and we will have asked for nothing in return.