urge Posts

• Rooted Lisa with some queries on ministry
  One morning I woke up with several queries for her to reflect on, and quickly realized I needed to examine them for myself as well.
  (tags: quaker quaker.ministry)
• Richard M on the Life and Power that will save the Earth
  I don’t think that Quakers have the financial or human resources to save the planet... Instead I think Quakers have a unique tradition of seeing what more secularly minded liberals see as social problems as being really spiritual problems.
  (tags: quaker.witness quaker)
• Johan M on reliance on worship style
  [W]e don't try to pre-empt the Holy Spirit with our own traditions or cleverness, but do all we can to frame and demonstrate freedom, authenticity, and equality in worship. We depend on the Holy Spirit to guide our worship...
  (tags: quaker quaker.worship quaker.minstry quaker.evangelical)
• Robin M on urges in long worship
  (tags: checkback)

• The War as seven G.I.'s see it
  "To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched." Two of the G.I.'s have died in Iraq since writing this .
  (tags: nv)
• LizOpp on trials on conflict and personal reconciliation
  "Since that reception/wake, the Friend and I continue to cross paths in the meeting. Though our respective views on God and Quakerism continue to differ, my heart remains softened and I feel I have been given a gift of the Spirit."
  (tags: checkback)

• Can you believe: The "surge" is not a failure!
  Arguing about the success or failure of the escalation traps us critics within the rhetorical frame of the administration. The issue has always been that the war itself, and the ongoing occupation, are utterly flawed.
  (tags: nv)
• Dan Froomkin: Bush Wins Again - washingtonpost.com
  "Despite everything, President Bush continues to be able to set the terms of the debate in Washington.Consider how the talk now is mostly about when to end the 'surge' -- not when to end the war. How did that happen?"
  (tags: nv)
• Robin M on Extended Meeting for Worship
  (tags: checkback)

In the news:  more than 1,000 service members sign petition to end Iraq War (Stars and Stripes), organized by the Appeal for Redress campaign sponsored by a handful of military antiwar groups including Nonviolence.org alums Veterans for Peace. The simple petition reads:

As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq. Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.

Supporting the troops means making sure American lives aren't being wasted in dead-end wars. Their service and their sacrifice has been too great to continue the lies that have fueled this conflict since the very beginning, starting with the mythical Saddam/Al Qaeda connection and the phantasmic weapons of mass destruction. The current escalation (euphemised as a "surge") of troop levels is simply an escalation of a badly-run war plan. When will this all end?

Update: President Bush has admitted that the Iraq government fumbled the executions.. Meanwhile, the UN puts the 2006 Iraqi death toll at 34,000. When will Bush admit he's fumbled this whole war?

What are the Iraqis and the American administrators thinking? Another botched execution in Baghdad, this time of Saddam Hussein's half brother. Why are the executioners dressed like terrorists, their faces covered with hoods? The videos of Saddam's execution looks like it took place deep in some hidden-away warehouse.

I'm not a big believer in capital punishment. It's primitive and barbaric and it reeks heavily of vigilante justice and the terrorist code. But if you're going to do it, you have to imbue the moment with all the solemnity of the state. The symbolism has to make clear that this is culmination of a long, considered process, that this is a necessary part of a nation's duty to provide law and order to its people.

But the new round of videos coming out of Baghdad look too much like the execution videos made by insurgents kidnapping Western workers and activists. Is the new Iraqi government simply insurgents in suits? Why doesn't Washington even care about the symbolic appearance of these high-profile executions?

It's worth pulling this site out of the semi-retirement of the last few months to happily report that Bush has finally fired Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. It should have happened years ago. Like his boss, Rumsfeld is a man of big ideas but little experience. He has let half-baked ideology trump expertise. For six years he's over-ruled generals to wage a foolish war in Iraq. He famously thought that Iraq could be won with a minimum of ground troops, that high tech wizardry could win a dirty insurgency.

Yesterday's election were a clear message to President Bush that his Iraq policy is unpopular, wrong, and just plain stupid. What's surprising is that our stonewalling president reacted so swiftly by sacking Rumsfeld. He must be terribly afraid of the consequences of a Democratic House of Representatives. Finally he will be accountable to the American people. This war has been immoral and badly-fought. It's time that it ends.

It's gotten so messy that even a pacifist like me can't insist on immediate withdrawal. Like Rumsfeld I'm an ideologue; unlike him I know I'm not qualified to decide on the right mix of diplomacy and military policing needed to keep Iraq and Afghanistan from falling into even greater chaos. A number of top U.S. generals have spoken out in the war, both directly and indirectly and I suspect they have some good ideas--ones that will protect our troops and serve the clear national interest we have in keeping Iraq from civil war. Let's hope they get to speak and that the president and next secretary of defense start to listen.

I'm returning from a working summer sabbatical from Nonviolence.org to find the world situation both completely the same and completely different. It is the best of times and the worst of times, no? My April editorial, Making Friends, Making Enemies and Looking Toward the Future is a call to peace that's as relevant to developments in Israel, Lebanon, Iran and iraq but just as likely to be ignored.

Sometimes it feels that war is inevitable. The terrain of southern Lebanon is once more being chewed up by tanks and rockets. Israel's army and the Hezbollah militia keep one-upping the level of violence. Wars of evident defense can be a great recruitment tool for angry young men and neither military force is in any danger of being overwhelmed or destroyed. That thankless job goes to the civilians caught in the middle. Warfare in the age of terror consists of slaughtering innocents in the name of righteous self-defense. Hostilities never really end, they take a break after enough blood has been spilt to satisfy the powers behind the killing.

The Hezbollah rockets heading south and Israeli tanks going north are symbols of the proxy war that is being run from thousands of miles away. Hezbollah's arms come from Iran, Israel's from the United States. While there might be simmering resentments and isolated acts of violence, there would not be a war without these sponsors. The fighting in Lebanon could be switched off like a light bulb with the slightest nod from either Washington or Tehran.

iraq is the other front of this proxy war. Yesterday General John P. Abizaid, commander of American forces in the Middle East, told the Senate that Iran could slide into civil war. The BBC is reporting that senior British diplomat William Patey informed Tony Blair last week that "the prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of iraq is probably more likely at this state than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy."

Baghdad has more-or-less seen fighting since American troops entered it but the decentralized insurgency is giving way to a kind of sectarian violence that is far more dangerous. If Patey's prophecy comes to pass iraq will be our next Lebanon: a bloody, seemingly-intractable civil war lasting decades, turned on and off by diplomatic whim from abroad, a killing field where innocents die for the false rhetoric of idealism far far away.

Images from Wikipedia articles on the Israel-Lebanon conflict and iraq War