Killing in the name of

[by mandamommy and trogonpete]

From our perspective, there are two distinct questions pertaining to the Iraq war that are often lumped together.  The first is whether we were right to invade in the first place.  The second question is what we do now that we’re in.  We believe that the first question needs to be answered first, because it necessarily motivates the answer to the second question.

Invasion:

The original justification for invading Iraq is often cited this way:  Iraq seemed to be producing weapons of mass destruction.  The theory was that part of our war on terrorism included pre-emptive strikes against terrorists likely to attack the US. 

But the actual original justification predated 9/11 and had nothing to do with terrorism.  The neoconservative group Project for a New American Century [PNAC] sent a letter in 1998 to President Clinton urging a strategy aimed at “the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.”  The group believed in the establishing of an “American empire” and proposed that American dominance in the 21^st century should be maintained by "fight[ing] and decisively win[ning] multiple, simultaneous major theater wars."  The main goal of the group was to convince the government to invade Iraq. 

So who is the PNAC?  Well, you might have heard of Dick Cheney.  And Donald Rumsfeld.  And 15 other well-known names later part of the Bush administration.  Nearly everybody advising Bush after 9/11 were members of the PNAC, a group that had a clear and public agenda of bringing war to Iraq for the purpose of maintaining American “hegemony.”  These are the very same people who attempted to discredit the entire CIA after the intelligence agency proved that there was no WMD threat from Iraq. 

10 days after George Bush took office he instructed his staff to begin drawing up plans for an invasion of Iraq.

Additionally, it is now well documented that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld lied about the WMD’s and misled the American people about Iraq being part of the war on terror.  There were no WMD’s, and the administration knew it.  Again, this much is well documented [along with almost 1000 other lies told between 2001 and 2003 by the Bush administration about the threat Iraq posed to the US, according to the Center for Public Integrity].

As far as the war on terror was concerned, bin Laden and Saddam were enemies; Saddam represented the secular Islamic ideal so repugnant to fundamentalists like bin Laden, and Saddam considered bin Laden a—well, terrorist.  Additionally, there never was any possibility that Saddam was in the terrorism business—he was a cruel dictator, but he wasn’t interested in flying planes into American buildings.

But the administration said Saddam had WMD’s and that these WMD’s could be used as weapons of terror on American soil.  Donald Rumsfeld, as the Secretary of Defense, made it clear that what was at stake in Iraq was the potential for Saddam to repeat 9/11 but on a much larger scale.  Again, this is a deliberate lie; Saddam never had any connection to al Qaeda and had no interest in terror operations in the US. 

So we invaded Iraq.

The interesting footnote here is that many supporters of the war now cite how bad Saddam was and what a service we have done to the world in getting rid of him.  But what about Robert Mugabe?  What about Kim Jong-il? Than Shwe?  Hu Jintau?  Sayyid Ali Khamenei?  And there’s no way Saddam was worse than Omar al-Bashir.  Should we invade Zimbabwe, North Korea, Myanmar, China, Iran and Sudan in order to depose tyrants?  Is that our role?  If so, why aren’t we doing it?

We believe—as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—that we should “renounce war and proclaim peace.” [D&C 98:16]  War is justifiable only in cases when it is necessary to defend our families [Alma 43:47] and plausibly our rights and freedoms [akin to Alma 48:10].  War is also a purely defensive means of preservation [Alma 48:14] and even pre-emptive war is expressly forbidden, even in cases where a pre-emptive strike would prevent a terrorist  attack [3 Nephi 3:20-21].  Modern scriptures clearly forbid the invasion of Iraq and the prophesies concerning the failure of offensive endeavors are applicable. 

[Each of these scriptures pertains to a situation analogous to the position we were in; the saints in Missouri wanted to take the fight to their persecutors and the Lord forbad it, the Nephites wanted to pre-emptively attack the terrorist Gadianton robbers but were forbidden.  We believe that the inclusion of these councils in the scriptures is very strong council for us and pertains to our government as well.]

This is an unjust war, founded on a thousand lies and violating basic morality.

The immorality of the invasion is key to the discussion about what we do now:

A much more complicated question is what we should do now that we’re in Iraq.  It is very important at this time to step back and admit that nobody—nobody anywhere—has any idea what the future holds.  The military experts told us the war would be quick, painless and easy.  They were wrong.  The civilian experts said the surge would only exacerbate the violence.  They were wrong.  So any time a politician says something like “setting a timetable will plunge Iraq into a civil war” or “the fighting will never continue as long as we’re there,” we shouldn’t believe it for a second.  The truth is that nobody knows and even the best analysis is a guess.

Politicians also like to talk about “winning” and “losing” the war.  This is pure propaganda.  It is meaningless.  In a sense, we have already lost: we lost over 4,000 American soldiers—significantly more than the number of civilians lost in 9/11—we lost our moral standing in the world, we lost trillions of dollars, we lost the opportunity to capture or kill the terrorists responsible for 9/11, we lost trust in our government, and our government lost the trust of the world.  We lost our national integrity.  We created a country full of destitute anti-American terrorists where once there was a country of poor repressed farmers.  A million Iraqis lost their lives.  Every day we stay we lose more.  The only metric of victory in a war like this one is preventing further losses.

This is where the immorality of the invasion comes to play.  Having losses does not imply a war is lost.  World War II was a victory in the sense that Hitler’s ambition at global domination was ended, and Americans had to pay dearly.  But when the cause that these troops are fighting for is an ignorant, arrogant global domination scheme dreamed up by a few radical ideologues in the government, when “dying in vain” becomes propaganda for dying for oil and power, when planning to save American lives is branded “unpatriotic” and “defeat,” then we have lost.  But neither Saddam Hussein nor Osama bin Laden beat us.  We just lost.

Still, it would be clearly irresponsible of America to just pack up and leave.  The infrastructure needs to be rebuilt.  We need to make sure the Iraqi army is competent enough to prevent a plunge into anarchy.  That’s why we need to stay.  But we must stop the bleeding as soon as possible.  This means setting a firm goal with the government of Iraq after which they will be on their own, then get out.  Every day we spend there the more we lose.  An open-ended policy seems foolish; with our tax dollars flowing into the country, what great motivation does the government of Iraq have to pick up the slack themselves?  With no carrot and no stick, the donkey ain’t moving. 

Of course we’re not experts.  We know very little and understand less.  But we do know that the invasion was wrong.  And that fact alone compels us to want out—the best way to repent, we believe, is to stop sinning.  That’s a good first step.