This Is Wrong, Mr. President: UPDATED post speech

This is the first week of Advent, a season of preparation for what Bonhoeffer called “the great turning around of all things.”
As if to prove he is not the messiah (as if such proof were needed) tonight President Obama is going to reassure the world that nothing has really changed. Following in the sunken footsteps of so many of his predecessors, the president is going to choose the path of war and more war.
Bonhoeffer knew that true change that we can believe in does not come through the revolutionary acts of strong men, the grand statements of politicians or even the pious acts of a saint, but instead through the utterly strange action of God.
Thus no one should be surprised by the military steps that President Obama will set in motion tonight. Nothing will be turned around – surely not the arc of the moral universe – by increasing troop levels in Afghanistan. It is a quite open question whether or not even the situation on the ground in Afghanistan will be markedly changed by this action.
Thus I believe the president is making a huge mistake: politically, strategically, morally and historically.
So, first, we hold in the light all of those who are caught in the line of fire -- whether civilian or in uniform, whether on "our side" or the other.
Some of us will be inclined to think that President Obama makes this choice against the better angels of his nature, but it does not really matter. I don’t think George W. Bush was, or is, evil – just wrong on many things. I don’t think Barak Obama is evil, but he is wrong on this decision politically, strategically, morally and historically.
It does not seem to matter whether we send the “best and the brightest,” “the young and the restless,” or the “rich and the famous” to Washington, the disease of war infects them all.
President Obama is wrong politically. As The Nation’s Mark Cooper observes on his blog, “the calculation has been made that his presidency and the Democrats would not be able to survive the charge of cut and run that would be yelled to the high heavens” if he began a serious beginning to the end of the war in Afghanistan. Therein lies the irony of the action all of Washington expects him to announce this evening. Obama was elected, in large part, as an antiwar candidate. Go back and watch his major speeches of the 2008 campaign – from Iowa to Denver, his promise to end the war in Iraq consistently drew the loudest, most enthusiastic cheers. Those voters will not be “fired up and ready to go” in 2012 if the president who promised change has dragged us deeper into a morass that cannot be changed by military means, and that is unlikely, at this late date, even to be improved by such means.
President Obama is wrong strategically. If the aim of the war in Afghanistan was to route from their safe havens those responsible for the atrocities of September 11 – namely the terrorists of al Queda – then the United States and our allies won that war by early in 2002. Quoting an unnamed senior U.S. military official, the Washington Post reported this month that there are “perhaps fewer than 100 members of the group left” in Afghanistan. The same is true if the aim of the war was to unseat the Taliban. Long before we invaded Iraq, the Taliban had been removed from power in Afghanistan and al Queda in Afghanistan had been reduced to a haggard remnant.
The well-documented resurgence of the Taliban over the past 18 months was fueled in part by the continued presence of American (and allied) troops viewed as an occupying force by a people well known for resisting any and all occupying forces. There is plenty of reason to believe that we can negotiate with the Taliban, which was there long before we arrived and will be there long after we depart – whenever that day comes. We are already paying them off handsomely simply to move supplies through the country, as Adam Roston exhaustively reports this month in The Nation. The tangled web of tribal relationships, Taliban leadership, and members of the ruling party in Kabul is such that no one can account for where much of the billions of U.S. dollars pouring into Afghanistan is actually winding up.
Moreover, the 30,000 or so troops that will be added to the fight are probably too few to succeed in a classic counterinsurgency scenario, in which troop levels are determined relative to population size. Even with the increase, troop levels in Afghanistan will be lower than the level in Iraq, which has the smaller population. On top of that, the proposal to turn things over to a civilian government in Afghanistan in 18 months or so seems like an incredibly rosy scenario given the rampant corruption of the current regime. When the current president's brother is among the largest opium dealers in the world it seems more than reasonable to wonder how effective the government can become in a year and a half.
As for al Queda, they have no meaningful presence in Afghanistan. Eight years ago this fall, as American political and military leaders dithered and dreamed of regime change in Iraq, al Queda moved into Pakistan – a U.S. ally and recipient of billions of dollars of U.S. military aid. Their growing presence in Pakistan was widely reported as early as the summer of 2002, when Time ran a lengthy piece on the trend. Al Queda continues to operate in the lawless tribal regions of the mountains along the border, but they do so at a significantly reduced capacity. They are a ragged remnant reduced to living in caves and producing propaganda. They are criminal terrorists; thugs who should be brought to justice.
That we should continue to work strategically with our allies in the region is obvious. That we should be prepared to act swiftly and decisively whenever the opportunity presents itself to capture – or, more likely to kill – bin Laden and his henchmen is equally obvious. Such operations call for smaller strike forces engaging in counterterrorism and criminal justice, not an additional 30,000 troops engaged in nation building by another name.
To capture, try and convict bin Laden would be a triumph for American values. To imprison him for life rather than make him a martyr would be a triumph of nonviolence.
However, it is clearly unlikely that anyone will take him and his lieutenants alive. Killing them then – whether in acts of war or of militarized criminal justice – may be the necessary evil that is part of living in a broken and violent world. Perhaps that would be part of “the Bonhoeffer exception” to the practice of nonviolence. When such killings occur, they are not actions to celebrate but rather events that should lead us to seek God’s mercy.
I do not expect President Obama to share that perspective, but my own commitment to Christian nonviolence leads me to say that the president is wrong morally in this decision.
His moral error ought to spur the church in America into action, both to speak clearly against the ongoing wars of the nation, and also to articulate a new vision rooted in the principles of Christian nonviolence for responding to international terrorism. That call is more urgent today than at any point in our nation’s history, and in the long, mixed history of church thinking on war and peace.
When I was asked at a National Security Council briefing for religious leaders last month what I would say to the president if I had the chance, I said, “I would encourage him to be mindful of history.”
In particular, the president should be mindful of two distinct moments in American war history:
• Counterinsurgency in Vietnam.
• The surge in Iraq.
From the earliest days of the war on terrorism, comparisons to the Vietnam War have been suggested and argued. Were the two wars similar or not in terms of the difficulties of counterinsurgency? Were they similar or not in terms of American knowledge (or ignorance) of the native cultures? Were they similar or not in terms of tactics and strategies? Were they similar or not in relation to their origins? Such questions will doubtless be the subjects of countless history dissertations in the years to come.
Personally, I tend to think that the Vietnam War share some similarities with both Iraq and Afghanistan. But I think the same thing about World War I with respect to World War II. Some things were similar; some things were not.
The real question, however, is why we continue, 50 years past the American entry into Vietnam, to fight that long ago war.
That we are doing so is clear in the echoes of Manichean reasoning about the communists in North Vietnamese so clearly discernable in contemporary discussions of the Taliban and the insurgents in Afghanistan.
That we are doing so is evident in the “hearts and minds” rhetoric in the Army’s new manual on counterinsurgencies, that underscores the primacy of the “battle for the people’s minds.”
That we are doing so is obvious in the rhetoric employed to support the deployment of additional troops.
For example, Peter Hegseth, executive director of Vets for Freedom, is urging President Obama to make the case for “finishing the job.” In so doing, Hegseth lays the groundwork for some future argument that Afghanistan was lost, or that the surge failed, because the politicians in Washington did not provide adequate support for the soldiers on the ground.
The deeper problem, the great unlearned lesson from Vietnam, is that no amount of support for soldiers on the ground is going to alter the outcome, because not only is there no military solution to an insurgency, but there is also no political one – at least not if by “political solution,” one means that America and our allies can build something like a stable civil society in Afghanistan.
As Jonathan Schell argued recently in The Nation, “The circle to be squared is getting the people of a whole country to want what Washington wants. The trouble is that, left to their own devices, other peoples are likely to want what they want, not what we want.”
Indeed, the new counterinsurgency manual explains the battle for hearts and minds this way:
Hearts means persuading people their best interests are served by your success; minds means convincing them that you can protect them, and that resisting you is pointless.
The problem arises when people are persuaded that their best interests are served by their success, and that your continued presence does not protect them but, instead, keeps them from succeeding on their own terms.
Changing public opinion in Afghanistan underscores the problem. Between 2006 and 2009 Afghani public approval of the United States slipped from more than 80 percent to fewer than half the population having a favorable view. The New York Times reported last month that the Afghan public is growing more concerned at the prospect of a surge in troop levels.
A decrease in the level of violence would no doubt improve the public’s perceptions of Americans, and in that regard the experience with the American troop surge in Iraq no doubt seems compelling.
Civilian deaths in Iraq dropped significantly from the 2007 surge through the end of 2008, and have fallen to fewer than 5,000 this year marking the fewest civilian casualties since the war began in 2003. That is good news, but it begs the question of causality, and that question is far from clear.
A report released this fall by the Zurich-based International Relations and Security Network concludes, “The civilian/ethno-sectarian death toll in Iraq peaked in December 2006-January 2007, suggesting US soldiers were unable to check the sectarian bloodshed at its high point, and the preponderance of the sectarian cleansing occurred well in advance of the US troop increase to Baghdad. The troop increase became operational a short time before the end of the civil war, in mid-June 2007. Enough time, roughly two months, to nudge the various Shia militia groups to back down, but insufficient time to end a civil war the US did not control.” Indeed, civilian casualties had dropped from a post-invasion high of 3,160 in July, 2006, to 2,094 in June, 2007, before most of the surge troops were on the ground.
Historians will argue the efficacy of the Iraq surge for years to come, but just as Iraq is not Vietnam, neither is Afghanistan Iraq. What may have worked militarily in Iraq, where the violence and civilian casualties have been mostly an urban affair, may be irrelevant to Afghanistan, where the violence and civilian casualties are mostly in the hinterlands. What may have worked politically in Iraq, where there has been a functioning national civil society for generations, may not work in Afghanistan, where there is little history of a functioning national civil society. (That the Iraqi civil society was for more than 20 years a corrupt and violently enforced one is indisputable, but weighed against the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan its seems beside the point in considering the prospects for a surge in American troops.)
Taken as a guide, then, the as yet incomplete history of the troop surge in Iraq does not offer President Obama much clarity – which is precisely the point.
If the aim of any troop surge at this point is, as it must be, to hasten the end of the war in Afghanistan, the history of the troop surge in Iraq is sobering. Since that surge was announced by President Bush on January 10, 2007, more than 35,000 Iraqi civilians have died as a result of the violence in their country. In that same period, more than 1,300 American soldiers have died in Iraq.
Almost three years after the surge was announced, more than 140,000 American troops remain in Iraq, and despite President Obama’s pledges, increased violence there over recent months seem likely to keep that number steady well into 2010. Three years into the once-new policy and there are roughly 8,000 more American troops in Iraq than there were in 2007. Or put into a different perspective, more than six and a half years into the war in Iraq, the undefined end of the job is still not in sight.
If President Obama is prepared to tell the nation tonight that well beyond the end of his first term in office there will be more troops on the ground in Afghanistan than there are today, and that the still undefined end of the job will remain out of sight, then he will have honestly assessed the history of the surge in Iraq.
I imagine that the president, like so many before him, will argue that the troop surge is the way to peace. There is no way to peace; peace is the way.
On the eve of the invasion of Iraq, I spoke at a rally in Cleveland’s Public Square. I said then that that Bush’s War in Iraq was wrong, politically, strategically, morally and historically. As President Obama prepares to address the nation this evening to announce his troop surge in Afghanistan, I have reached the same, sad conclusions concerning what is about to become Obama’s War in Afghanistan.
NOTE: the original version of this post is in a document with numerous links to supporting documents. The links fell out in posting it to the blog. If you are interested in seeing them, post a comment with an e-mail and I will send the original your way.

If This Is a Dream, Don't Wake Me

No, that's not a terrorist! It's my middle child, Martin, bundled against the chill this afternoon at the pre-inaugural concert on the Mall -- waiting for that quintessential American, Bono, to perform! Hey, if the Irish can claim "O'bama" then we can claim U2.
We've got a house full for the inauguration and King Day festivities in DC this weekend. As I watched the concert this afternoon (from our "front row" place at the base of the Washington Monument ... no more than, oh, about a mile from the stage at the base of the Lincoln Memorial), I thought of Dr. King's speech in Lincoln's shadow, and his dream of a day when white men and black men, Protestants and Catholics, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveholders would be able to join hands. Our house is hosting this week Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, black and white, gay and straight, North American and Latino, young and not so young, men and women. We don't look quite as diverse as the crowd on the Mall this afternoon, but it's a fine mix of America that has found its way to our living room this week to celebrate King Day and the inauguration of President Obama. I think Dr. King would be smiling.

Obama's New Preacher Problem

First it was Jeremiah Wright, now it's Rick Warren. When it comes to preachers, well Obama might better stick with picking Secretaries of State. I wonder where the family will go to church in DC? One thing I do know: I don't want them at my church! Nothing against him or his family -- after all, I canvassed for him, phone banked for him, and voted for him. But I cannot quite imagine the hassle of security and media that would accompany the First Family at worship. Whew! And then, as Revs. Wright and Warren know first hand, one side or another is going to take a whack at you simply for standing next to the president.
I wish Warren luck in his role at the inauguration ... but I'd rather see Jim Wallis.

Neighbor, Community, Politics

I've worked on campaigns going back to the 70s, so you'd figure that well before middle age I would have learned something about the value and meaning of retail politics. Well, duh, I learned it again yesterday as I did a bit of door-to-door work for my choice in this election.
The Obama campaign has canvass launch sites spread across Arlington County (which is among the smallest -- by land area -- counties in the United States). The ground game across Northern Virginia is simply huge with Obama canvassers heading out from at least eight sites across the county.
When I got to my launch site yesterday there were 15 people getting their clipboards and preparing to hit the sidewalks at 3:00 on a beautiful fall Sunday afternoon. You can do the math on the likely number of canvassers in Arlington yesterday for three shifts. We probably had personal contacts in more than 1,000 households.
I managed to find people at home in a dozen. Three, in particular, reminded me firsthand of both the importance of neighborhood politics and a deeper and broader sense of neighborhood that ought to prevail in our politics.
I can walk up the hill from my house to the launch site. I have done so each of the past four weekends and asked for a route that doesn't require me to get in my car. This gives me the opportunity to talk to people who really are my neighbors in a traditional sense of the word. When I find someone at home I always mention the street I live on, and that bit of personal information never fails to open up a channel of conversation.
I met a neighbor yesterday who is a Pakistani-American who told me, "I was enthusiastic for Obama until he started talking about invading my country." I admitted that I was not enthusiastic about that stance either, but that I believe Obama is committed strong diplomacy and multilateralism, and that his calm response to the financial crisis gives us a strong sense of the way he will respond to international crises as well.
My neighbor was not convinced, and he told me of his concern for friends and family in Pakistan. We talked for a while longer, and he said he was likely to vote for Obama but that he probably wouldn't really make up his mind until he was standing in the voting booth.
I'd like to be able to tell you that I swung this voter, but, instead, he reminded me that all politics -- even on international issues -- remains local, and his personal connections to friends and family in Pakistan shifted his sense of locality and of responsibility to neighbors. So, I just said to him, "I think the most important work of this campaign begins on Nov. 5, when we have to work hard to hold Sen. Obama accountable and push him to live up to his own highest ideals, especially on issues like this."
As I walked on to the next house I thought about the long hours of work I have done organizing with Christian Peace Witness for Iraq and about our internal conversations about the need for a strong peace witness around the broader war on terror and the ongoing violence in Afghanistan. My neighbor reminded me that the real work does begin on Nov. 5, because the wisdom of the ancient psalmist is right, "Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help. When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish."
It will be up to us to put the real breath and life into the Obama presidency, just as we have into the Obama candidacy. So, if you are committed to just and lasting peace, keep organizing, keep pressing, keep talking with neighbors.
I was still thinking about my Pakistani-American neighbor when I knocked on the door of an African-American neighbor. I was looking for an 18-year-old man, a potential first-time voter, and he was home.
In fact, his whole family was there and they gathered around the front porch with me to talk about the election. We talked about the fact that his grandparents' generation lived under Jim Crow laws and fought for the right to vote. I told him that I was born in Alabama and, as an Scots-Irish-American, had probably had my diapers changed in "whites only" public restrooms.
His younger sister, a charming six-year-old with beads in her braids and a gap where one of her front teeth used to be, told me that she had polled her entire family and got 13 votes for Obama. Then I remarked how she was about the same age as Sen. Obama's younger daughter, so maybe when the Obama family moves into the White House she could send the girls a "welcome to the neighborhood" card. I said that clearly she was the head of this household so I gave her the campaign literature and elicited a promise from her that she would make certain that her big brother made it to the polls on election day.
With a solemn look on her face, she promised that she would. Not only is politics local, sometimes it is all in the family.
Of course, the definition of family, kin and neighbor is what's at stake so often in our politics. This is nothing new under the sun. Jesus' parable of the good Samaritan was all about defining neighbor, about moving beyond tribal politics to a broader understanding of community.
The last door I knocked on was a Latino-American family just up the hill from my house. The mom and one daughter were home. Although both were enthusiastic Obama supporters, neither were voters -- the daughter being too young and the mother not yet a United States citizen.
The daughter chided her mom for "not taking the test yet." The mom chuckled and said, "I know, I know. I will soon." I said, "well, we're going to want to reelect Obama in four years, so maybe you can aim to be a citizen for that election."
I told them I lived just down the hill, and the daughter said she was in the same school as my younger son. It was abundantly clear that we share a common stake in the neighborhood, the community, the commonwealth.
I ended the afternoon thinking that maybe, if we all continue to work together for authentic change and if we all continue to talk with our neighbors as often as possible and not just once every four years, then someday we will share a deeper sense of that commonwealth no matter what hyphen happens to fall in our American identity.
The heart of the faith-based community organizing that gave Obama his start is personal relationships. While progressives certainly hold no monopoly on personal relationships, there is a reason why such organizing has a particular power for progressives.
Progressives place a high value on relationship while the corresponding value for many conservatives is purity. That's one of the reasons that same-sex issues, for example, are such a hot button: in the conservative evangelical worldview sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman is not pure, and the question of purity trumps the value of any relationship at question. You can detect the same logic -- absent lousy Biblical interpretation -- in the question of immigration which devolves too quickly to the question of who is a "real" American and who is not, who is in and who is out, who is pure and who is tainted.
But the deeper our relationships with neighbors who don't share the same background and experience and ties of kinship, the more we are forced to call into question our own understanding of what constitutes "purity."
My Pakistani-American neighbor pushes me to remain critical of my own candidate in productive ways. My African-American neighbor reminds me of my own roots and the privileges that come with them, and thus pushes me to remain critical of power structures that enshrine exclusions. My Latino-American neighbor reminds me of the promise of America that I often take for granted, and thus pushes me to remain committed to keeping doors -- and borders -- safely open.
All of these neighbors remind me of the urgency of continuing this work beyond next week. We must find more and creative way to use the remarkable network built by the Obama campaign as a movement that begins come November 5, rather than a project that ends on November 4. As Sen. Kennedy would say, "the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dreams shall never die."

Sad, Scared ... but Full of Hope

It's been a strange week here in Lake Woebegone. Markets crashing. More than enough anxiety to go around in the lives of so many folks.
We had a credit card canceled last week. We had never used it, and the reason given for its cancellation was "lack of use." I know card companies do that, but the timing struck me as interesting, then I heard a commentator on NPR say that card companies were shedding as many accounts as they can, and that having a card canceled by the company is never a good thing for one's credit score. Ah well, one can hope that this is the only nick we get beyond the huge losses on those retirement savings. The quarterly statement arrived today; I'm not planning on opening it.
And in the midst of all this, today, right here in "communist" Arlington (oh, that's what Joe McCain, John's brother, said about our community last week), I saw a car with a bumper sticker that said "Obama bin Laden '08."
I have always considered myself a small 'd' democrat. I believe in hearing lots of voices from lots of communities in the body politic, so the past week of presidential politics has been deeply sad. I am also a Southerner, so when I hear hatred aimed at an African-American leader I get scared, too.
But I heard an older man preach a few weeks back about the way America pulled together in his youth during the Great Depression. I certainly hope that we are not going as far down the economic road as that.
At the same time, we do have resources as a people that we can tap into. That sermon reminded me. Then yesterday, I came across this post from David LaMotte, a man whose music inspires me. As David puts it, "it is the job of Christians to stand with all persecuted people when they are persecuted unfairly, as some Christians stood with Jews in southern France during the holocaust (told beautifully in the book “Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed”) Read what Jesus had to say in the Sermon on the Mount. These are our instructions, and Obama in [Dreams of My Father] is talking about unfair persecution of a religion within our country. Friends, if we’ve stopped believing in religious freedom, we have ceased to be America. If we will only stand up to defend people who agree with us, we have nothing left to be proud of."
Right after I read David's blog, I caught Sarah Vowell's Blog of the Nation on the Puritans. Her commentary led me to look up John Winthrop's sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," in which he holds the New World up as a city on a hill.
He wrote the piece during the 1630 crossing of the Atlantic as the Puritans came to America to found that city, and lay claim to their share of its promise. The Puritans' vision surely foundered on the shoals of reality and their own excesses -- including Winthrop's -- but Winthrop's advice to those voyagers rings true today as the nation struggles in the rough water of a battered economy and a diminished politics.
"Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this work, as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace."

I Buried an Obama Voter Yesterday

I buried an Obama voter yesterday morning at Arlington National Cemetery. Now I have to find at least two new ones here in Virginia to honor the one we lost.
Well, actually it's more accurate to say that I officiated at the commital service and, later in the afternoon, at the memorial service for a 95-year-old woman who lived one of the richest and fullest lives I could imagine. Her name was Sally, and for the sake of her family's privacy, I'll leave it at that.
When she died last month, I remember thinking, "the only two things that Sally would be disappointed about in death are not seeing what comes next in the lives of her great grandchildren and not living long enough to see George W. Bush leave the White House."
She could not stand George Bush!
That last time I visited with her, early this summer, we got to talking politics. This was just after Obama had sewn up the Democratic nomination, and she was so excited by that development. She reflected back on all the remarkable change that she had witnessed over 95 years in this country, and found renewed hope and excitement at the prospect of casting a vote for Obama this fall.
She was born on a farm in South Dakota prior to World War I, when travel was literally horse powered. Married to an Air Force officer, she traveled the world and had the broad-minded vision of one who was well traveled and thoughtful.
Though I didn't say this during the memorial service, as I think about her life I cannot help but compare her to Sarah Palin. Both women of the Great Plains and upper Midwest, the young governor does not hold up well in comparison to the 95-year-old farm girl.
Sally was, for more than 50 years, a member of the congregation that I now serve. She came close to leaving it twice, that I am aware of.
First, about 15 years ago, when the church welcomed into leadership its first out gay elder (or member of the church board). Sally did not consider leaving because the congregation elected a gay elder, she considered leaving because some folks in the congregation were up in arms over it. She thought, "where is the mercy in them?" and "the man is clearly right for the job and his partner is lovely."
That first gay elder and his partner of more than 20 years were at the service yesterday.
The second time she considered leaving was when I told her, a few years back, that both Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice were members of Presbyterian churches. She was deeply committed to peace, having served in the Red Cross during World War II, and she could not tolerate the War in Iraq and those who dragged us into it. In the end, she just said, "well, they are not Clarendon Presbyterians!"
She was a passionate believer in equality and in peace. Sarah Palin could have learned a thing or two from her.
When Barack Obama takes office in January, I will go to Sally's grave and lay a flower and a copy of Post.