Where Do We Go From Here?

The march on Kuwait turned into something akin to a Roman triumph, complete with beaming general, rolling engines of war and lines of bedraggled prisoners ... America was seen as a giant again -- its military might beyond compare, its diplomacy sure-handed, its self-confidence restored ... Fashionable notions like "American decline" were hastily cast aside, replaced by older phrases like "world policeman" and "pax Americana."

--NEWSWEEK (March 11)

The Persian Gulf war was a slaughter. While the United States continues to avoid the issue of Iraqi casualties and Saddam Hussein's regime seeks to cover up the extent of its horrific losses, Saudi and European figures now put the number at 100,000 people killed in six weeks. Standard estimates in modern warfare of two to three people injured for every death expand the number killed or injured to upward of one third of a million, suggested by one British expert in a March 12 National Public Radio interview -- the most intensive toll since World War II.

Not only was it a slaughter of Iraqis, it was also a slaughter of something else: visions of how the world could function that might be different from the American "new world order." The vanquishing of competing visions has become as essential to the rule of Pax Americana as the vanquishing of Iraq's dictator and overrated army.

A homemade video smuggled out of Iraq shows the gruesome pictures of the innocents of all ages, but especially women, children, and elderly people, who became the "collateral damage" of our Nintendo war where no victims appear on the screens. A few reporters tell us of the "highway of death" leading north out of Kuwait City where U.S. war planes cut off retreating Iraqi soldiers, held them in place, and then rained death on them.

The victims were "basically just sitting ducks," said one squadron leader. Bombing the Iraqis withdrawing from Kuwait (who were doing what the U.N. resolutions called upon them to do) was like "shooting fish in a barrel," said another pilot. Likened to scurrying cockroaches by yet another bomber pilot, the enemy army was eliminated, just as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell had prophesied -- "First we'll cut it off, then we'll kill it."

But that's not all they hope they have killed. "There is no anti-war movement," proclaimed President George Bush at the end of the war. The commander-in-chief who earlier promised to "kick Saddam Hussein's ass" now gleefully exclaimed, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!" Well maybe, but not "by God."

Yet even that is being claimed. Participants in the National Religious Broadcasters Convention (which has supported every act of violence ever undertaken by its government and has wished for more) cheered when President Bush declared to their meeting that the war was "just." (Is that the way the "just war theory" is supposed to operate? The king defines the war he is fighting as good and righteous and all his royal religious advisers heartily agree?)

In a remarkable coincidence of timing, Richard John Neuhaus got half the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal the next day to praise the president's just war theology and to attack the church leaders who had opposed the war as being hopelessly marginal and irrelevant to the American mainstream. (I suppose deciding whose religion is relevant and whose is not has always been the job of the king's court prophets or, more currently, of Pax Americana's theologians.) By the way, no replies to Neuhaus' article were accepted by The Journal.

Less predictable and most disappointing was Billy Graham's overnight stay at the White House the evening the war began and his worship service the next day with the president and his cabinet. The news of both, of course, was broadcast from the White House to the worldwide media at a moment when the president's decision to choose the war option could most use the evangelist's great credibility.

Again, war becomes the "last resort" when the ruler making the war says it is, despite all evidence and moral judgment to the contrary. Complicity in the causes of the war, double standards, and less-than-righteous motives in making war are conveniently ignored; and when the fighting starts, alternatives to violent solutions are defined as never having existed. To which religious leaders are found to say "Amen."

Haunting memories of similar use and abuse in the Nixon years painfully reoccurred. Graham's prayer at the end of the war was one of "praise and gratitude" to "our" God, who heard "our" cries, protected "our" service men and women, gave wisdom to "our" leaders, united "our" nation in support of "our" soldiers, and answered "our" prayers -- the evidence of which was that the land battle lasted only 100 hours and fewer than 100 of our soldiers were killed.

The prayer concluded, "We also pray that those who have suffered in this war will know your great consolation." What about the hundreds of thousands of people killed, injured, displaced, or left grieving from this war? Is God "theirs" too? At the end of every speech he gave during the Gulf conflict, President Bush said, "God bless the United States of America." Is God's blessing only, especially, or mostly for us? Is the peace of Christ to become synonymous with the peace of the new world order -- Pax Christi become Pax Americana?

After a debate with former education secretary and "drug czar" William Bennett on CNN, I asked him about the attack on the churches he had just made in the National Review, charging church leaders who raised moral questions about the war as having "virtually nothing useful, significant, or specifically religious to say." His article went on, "That we can no longer look to the spokesmen [sic] of most of the mainline American religious institutions on important moral issues is bad news indeed. That they have become increasingly irrelevant [there's that word again] to the public debate is, alas, the good news."

I told Bennett that, on the contrary, the churches' moral leadership in the Gulf crisis was one of our finest hours. Perhaps the good news is that the power elite of Pax Americana's practitioners, like William Bennett, can no longer look to every American church leader for a blessing. The best news of the Persian Gulf war is that the most important social institution against it, from the beginning and to the end, was the churches. That is a new moment and something to build a new future upon, both spiritually and politically.

As for the recurring charge of irrelevancy, well, maybe they're right. If relevancy means accepting the framework and assumptions of the new world order of Pax Americana that have just been re-established, let us happily be accused of being irrelevant. Indeed, the label could become a clear sign of conscience.

THE PEACE OF AMERICA, like the peace of Rome, is no peace at all. Pax Americana, as Pax Romana, requires the slaughter of innocents, the worship of idols, and the co-opting or crushing of all other visions.

George Bush says that in the new world order, the weak can trust that the strong will rule "with mercy." What is sure is that the strong will rule and the best the weak and poor and oppressed can hope for is mercy, not justice.

At a remarkable news conference on March 6 -- the same day President Bush was offered the opportunity by the Democrats to accept his great "victory" in a speech to a joint session of Congress -- Republican Sens. Phil Gramm of Texas and Pete Domenici of New Mexico released "new figures" to show that under Ronald Reagan and George Bush the poor have actually "thrived." The timing was no coincidence. Having appeared to win over everyone, the president announced that Secretary of State James Baker would soon leave for the Middle East to shape the peace and continue to establish the new world order.

Due to the weight of its own oppression and hypocrisy, the Soviet countervision to Pax Americana has collapsed. But the euphoria of people set free has as yet failed to produce any alternative to Western-style consumption and ecocide. The vacuum created by the end of the Cold War has been filled by a resurgent American predominance that allows no other visions.

But the poor, the earth, and the human heart cry out for new visions, now more than ever. The early Christians sided neither with the "morality" of the empire, nor with the "barbarians" (like Saddam Hussein) who threatened it at its frontiers. They offered another way.

In the aftermath of the war in the Persian Gulf, the patriotism of Pax Americana and the ascendancy of George Bush's new world order could easily drive us to despair. Indeed, feelings of defeat, resignation, and withdrawal threaten the spirit of many Christian peacemakers these days.

However, the present moment also brings a fresh clarity. It could become for us a kairos time -- a time full of fresh possibilities, a transitional period that could signal new directions. Above all, the arrogant assertion of American righteousness and power offers Christians with a different vision an invitation to go deeper. To go deeper in the commitment we have already chosen, to go farther down the path we have already set our feet upon.

If we can choose the harder way of personal and social transformation, both our spirituality and our politics will change. It will mean an unwillingness to accept the limitations of merely reforming a system whose materialistic, exploitative, and dominating values are so corrupting. The liberal collapse of conscience during the war reveals the futility of a reformist agenda.

It will mean a clear distinction from the secular political Left that refuses a single standard for justice and human rights, prefers shallow slogans to political substance and conviction, holds on to failed ideology, and whose self-appointed leadership of the peace movement continues to narrow its focus and limit its horizons.

It will call us to counter the spiritual formation of the popular culture that has become the repository and reinforcer of the prime values of the new world order, rather than a force against it. The mass media literally define public opinion while claiming to reflect it.

Precisely at the moment when a new world order proclaims dreaming to have come to an end, it is most important to dream. Vision is the key spiritual and political necessity now. It is the lack of vision that is Pax Americana's most profound moral failure, and visionless religious conformity that is the greatest threat to genuine faith.

The religion of the prophets and the way of Jesus have never coexisted comfortably with the practitioners of political power, but always with their victims. The prophets of God will always be more at ease in the wilderness than in the guest room of the palace.

A former missionary to Latin America shared a reflection with me just days after the war ended. He recounted how the 1964 military coup in Brazil wiped away a progressive political movement that had been building. Overnight the hope for change collapsed, the Left was crushed, and religionists who had become politicized caved in with it. Brazil's economic "miracle" was proclaimed, and everyone went along.

Well, almost everyone. One who voiced a clear no was Roman Catholic Archbishop Dom Helder Camara. Along with a few others, he called upon Christians to go deeper -- deeper into community and deeper into solidarity with the poor. Some did. And out of the faithfulness of that little remnant, a new movement was born -- the base community movement.

Eventually, 100,000 small communities of the poor became the real miracle of Brazil. From defeat and despair, seeds of courage were planted, and from those faithful seeds blossomed new life. The missionary saw parallels to our situation now.

I thought of the story when I met Dom Helder Camara again in early March at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, where we had both come to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Nevada Desert Experience, a protest initiated by the Franciscans. He is now very old and frail, but there he was in the desert, with 500 other Christians thought to be irrelevant to the new world order for refusing to accept one of its principal doctrines -- nuclear deterrence.

It's time for us to go deeper. This war revealed how vulnerable we are, how much we are still attached to "success" and to "winning," how hard it is for us to feel marginal, how lonely we become when the system scores a great "victory." We need community more than we thought. The experience of our own poverty and marginalization can turn us more toward the poor who, like us, will find no joy in the new world order.

Where do we go from here? To the decision to make some clear choices. What could be more redemptive than for the violent assertion of the new world order to prompt a renewal of faith issuing forth in the creation of spiritually-based communities, close to the poor and with the capacity to vision a different world? Such communities could help to create a distinct style of life and not just hope for positive signs in the changing culture.

In an age when Pax Americana says there are no other options, such little communities throughout the churches and beyond could offer the possibility of a real alternative and, eventually, of a genuinely new world that is even now begging to be born.

Jim Wallis is editor-in-chief of Sojourners.