This recent report of the Iraq Study Group offers a welcome infusion of wisdom and bipartisanship in the tortured struggle over what to do about Iraq. The carefully written report offers the only glimmer of hope recently seen in this terrible and disastrous war. The only question is whether the Bush administration can find a way to walk back from its current position in order to embrace the report's key recommendations.
The report covers all major aspects of the quandary that faces the Iraqi people and our own government. It acknowledges that “the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating,” and that the Administration's current strategy is not working. It calls for a fundamental rethinking of Iraq policy from top to bottom.
The most important recommendations in the area of diplomacy include the launch of a comprehensive initiative involving Iraq, all of its neighbors, the United Nations and the European Union, as well as efforts to jumpstart peace efforts between Palestinians and Israel. It also calls for significant increase in the cultural awareness and language skills of U.S. civilian personnel in Iraq, as well as much improved intelligence work in that nation.
The report proposes the establishment of self-governance milestones in Iraq and suggests that the U.S. tie its support for the Iraqi government and involvement in Iraq to progress in reaching these milestones. It suggests various strategies for national reconciliation in Iraq and for improving the performance of the Iraqi police and military. It proposes a heightened emphasis on training the Iraqis, accompanied by a gradual pullback of U.S. combat brigades so that such brigades could be entirely withdrawn by 2008. It suggests that the president definitively renounce any U.S. interest in permanent military bases in Iraq or any control of Iraq's oil.
In a very wise suggestion related to the home front, the report calls for significant efforts to retrain and restore returning troops and equipment, both worn out by the conflict. It also makes the common-sense suggestion that ongoing costs for the war should be built into the annual budget rather than passed through emergency supplemental bills. This would make lawmakers think a bit more about the budgetary consequences of this monstrously expensive war.
If our government were functioning as it should, we would probably not need to turn to blue-ribbon commissions to offer some common-sense solutions to our nation's problems. It really is quite striking to see this “outsourcing” of the major foreign-policy challenge facing our country. The very existence of this study group reflects the depth of the crisis in which we find ourselves. It is a crisis created both by executive branch foreign-policy failures and also by a political culture so often fixated on slash-and-burn political attacks, and on winning the next election, that the national interest seems all but forgotten at times.
The massive carnage in Iraq should serve as a permanent reminder to my fellow Christian conservatives that war is a moral-values issue. Indeed, war is a sanctity-of-life issue. Every day's body count in Iraq should drive this point home with greater and greater urgency. Every body that turns up with holes drilled in it, every head torn apart by gunshots, every soldier whose helicopter crashes and ends his life, every veteran who will spend the rest of his or her life with three or two or one or no limbs, is a human being of immeasurable worth, made in the image of God.
Christians should not have to be reminded to be peacemakers (Mt. 5:9) or to grieve war's horrible destructive power (read Lamentations recently?). As American Christians, our happy embrace of every war that comes down the pike should now be seen for what it is—an aberration that violates our Christian values and serves our country poorly.
At Christmas we hear the message of “peace on earth.” It seems like a pretty good time to renew our commitment to peace, to urge the acceptance of the proposals of the Iraq Study Group, and to pray for a swift end to the killing in Iraq.
-30-
— David P. Gushee is University Fellow and Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy at Union University in Jackson, Tenn. www.davidgushee.com