A Pacifist Response to Libya

Monday night (March 28) Pres. Obama addressed the nation explaining his reasons for ordering military action to enforce a “No Fly Zone” in Libya. Essentially, he said that (1) he wanted to prevent the slaughter of innocent Libyan citizens by Libyan government forces and (2) that taking that action was in “our national interest.” While he did not spell out what those interests were, it’s pretty certain that a major factor in the decision had to do with the fact that Libya pumps out a lot of oil.

A few days earlier I was indirectly challenged by two people (a close friend who is clearly states he is not a pacifist, and a former student who is considering joining the Navy) to offer a pacifist response to the current situation in Libya; so here it is.

The root of the word “pacifism” is the Latin word “pace” or peace. In Biblical Hebrew the word for peace is “shalom,” which is a robust word not only meaning the absence of  conflict, but also the restoration of people to each other and to the creation. Shalom is celebrated in the passage from Isaiah where  the prophet writes:

            The wolf will live with the lamb

            The leopard will lied dies with the goat

            The calf and the lion and the yearling together

            And a little child will lead them (Isaiah 11.6)

Shalom is a picture of former adversaries living in harmony and trust, devoid of hatred or fear. As a pacifist I yearn for and work toward this vision of the world, realizing we might not get there fully, but we can get closer than we currently are.

Sam Keen, philosopher and author of Fire in the Belly, comes close to my position on war when he writes: “It would be Utopian to wish that men should no longer kill one another … But a much sounder Utopia is that which insists that murder no longer be legitimized” (p. 114). Applied to Libya it means, yes it may have been necessary to send war planes to bomb military sites and advancing armies in Libya in order to save lives, but let’s not try to legitimize or glorify the fact that we had to do it. The foot soldiers in Qadaffi’s army are as blindly “innocent” as the citizens who they threatened and the rebels fighting against Qaddafi. In war there are no winners.

More importantly we need to look at how we got in a position where it was “necessary” for us to invade Libya. Qaddafi has been in power for 40 years. A little less than 40 years ago in the mid-1970’s the United States faced an oil shortage which caused us to ration gas and wait in long lines to fuel our cars. Then-President Jimmy Carter implored the nation to turn down their thermostats, wear sweaters, drive fuel efficient cars and generally change our lifestyles. We didn’t listen, ridiculed Carter, started driving SUVs, chewed up more and more farmland for suburban neighborhoods and generally ignored the early warning the 1970’s gas crisis gave us. Since then we have had the hostage crises in Iran, two Iraq wars, a war in Afghanistan, ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine, various crises in Lebanon, Egypt, and other Middle Eastern countries; and now Libya. Moreover, Colonel Qaddafi didn’t become a tyrant 10 days ago; he’s been a tyrant for 40 years; President Obama admitted as much the other night. So what is the common denominator connecting all of these events over the last 40 years? Our dependence on oil. President Carter was right then and is still right today.

I have no objection to a standing military that helps earthquake victims in Haiti or ferries victims of Hurricane Katrina to safety, or is currently helping the Japanese people cope with their recent earthquake. I don’t even object to the military trying to stop innocent slaughter in places like Bosnia in the 1990’s or Libya today. But when we must continually turn to military solutions, let us see these incursions for what they are: a tragic failure of we who are the wealthy of the world to curb our voracious lifestyles. This invasion would not have been "necessary" were it not for the oil. Qaddafi would have been a minor desert warlord were it not for the oil. He would not have been tacitly supported as the world looked the other way, had we been working to change our lifestyles so that we were not so oil-dependent.

In 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor forsook his pacifist stance to take part in a plot to kill Adolf Hitler. The plot failed, Bonhoeffer was imprisoned, and was executed for his crime days before the Germans surrendered to the Allies. However as theologian Walter Wink notes Bonhoeffer never considered his participation in the plot a “justifiable action” but rather a sin, and he threw himself on the mercy of God for what he had done. At the time he saw no other option, but he never sought to justify it.

President Obama and the NATO forces are to be commended for the limited role our military has played in the Libyan situation. However, seen in the larger context of our voracious consumptive American lifestyle, and the “interests” we protect to maintain that lifestyle can not be justified. Our continual dependence on carbon based fuels to support our lifestyle continues to lead to wars, destroys the environment, drains resources for addressing desperate needs in our own country, and makes all the world’s people vulnerable to tyrants whose land happens to be sitting over an oil well.

Libya should cause us to heed the call Pres. Carter gave us nearly 40 years ago. The world can not afford us; we can not afford ourselves. A world beyond war, a taste of shalom, can only happen as we not only stop tyrants like Colonel Qadaffi, but also look at ourselves, and ask how are we willing to change so that war does not become necessary to protect our “interests?”

The Futility of Violence and the Need for a Counter-Community of Peace

The recent invasion and bombardment of the Gaza Strip by the Israelis is yet another example of the utter futility of war when it comes to truly resolving conflicts. While there were major demonstrations in European and U.S. cities opposing the Israeli action, the U.S. and other governments have basically stood idly by offering their spoken and tacit support for the Israeli action. Now, in Israel’s defense, Hamas, the radical Islamist group they are combating, is equally culpable when it comes to perpetuating the conflict through the use of both targeted and random violence. How many times do the Israelis and the militant Palestinian groups like Hamas have to attack and kill each other and innocent civilians before they realize there will be no winner in the conflict and no lasting peace in the region as long as war and violence is the route they choose?

On January 7, 2001, in the twilight of his presidency, Bill Clinton said in a policy speech on Israel said “there is no place for violence and no military solution to this conflict. The only path to a just and durable resolution is through negotiation.” However, in that same speech Pres. Clinton went onto say “the United States must maintain its commitment to preserving Israel’s qualitative edge in military superiority.” Now does anyone else see the inherent contradiction there? If there is no military solution, then why are we supporting and supplying their military capabilities? When you bang your head against a wall enough times, you might want to consider another approach.

I am no expert on the politics of the region, but from what I have learned from friends and colleagues who have spent time in the region and have taken time to study the conflict, three things seem very clear. First, the suffering of the average Palestinian at the hands of the Israeli military and domestic policies is morally and politically indefensible. The anger behind the Palestinian attacks has a realistic and justifiable basis, even if their actions do not. However, second, the official policy of nations like Iran and Syria, and their surrogates like Hamas, give Israel the justification to defend itself, even if their means of defending themselves is unjustified. Third, the United States’ policy of blindly supporting Israel in such actions as have recently occurred, only fuels the endless cycle of violence and drives the possibility of resolution further away.

This recent crisis is yet another challenge to pacifists and other people committed to the way of peace to raise our voices about the inability of war and violence to bring about justice and lasting peace. Shortly after the September 11, 2001 bombings, Stanley Hauerwas, theologian and ethicist from Duke University, wrote an essay to a primarily Christian audience which he called a “pacifist response” to the bombings. When questioned about the alternative he would propose to the current U.S. practice of responding to violence with violence, he wrote: “Such questions assume that pacifists must have an alternative foreign policy. I have something better – a church constituted by people who would rather die than kill” (Performing the Faith, p. 206). His words refer to the fact that we who believe in peace must be like the Christian Peacemaker Teams and Witness for Peace teams that literally put themselves in between warring factions, in an effort to force warring parties to seek another way. He is saying that if there was a community of people committed to the way of peace to the degree that our government is committed to war, we might see a different result.

In speaking of Osama bin Laden Hauerwas said: “Indeed, I fear that absent a counter-community to challenge America, bin laden has given Americans what they so desperately needed – a war without end. America is a country that lives off the moral capital of our wars” (Performing the Faith, p. 207). In the same vein groups like Hamas, and nations like Israel, give each other the moral justification to be at war continually and endlessly, when in fact those wars are totally and completely morally bankrupt.

We who believe in alternatives to war and violence, be it from religious or humanist convictions, must be willing to model in our daily life, as well as our political actions, a perspective that rejects war as a means to resolving conflict. The last 60 years of the Israeli-Arab conflict is exhibit A of the futility of that approach.

Some years ago, in the late 1980’s there was a proposal put forth in a Congressional bill to establish a national Peace Academy in the same vein as the national military academies. Obviously, that proposal never went very far on the government levels, but there are think tanks such as the Carter Center in Atlanta and the The Center for Justice and Peacebuilding at Eastern Mennonite University that have taken seriously the charge to find alternative ways. Moreover, there are numerous groups and individuals such as Jimmy Carter, the World Elders founded by Nelson Mandela, and Dan Buttry of the American Baptist Churches, who work tirelessly to help local and national groups find peaceful resolutions. We need to know and hear of these folks. We need to become that “counter-community” Hauerwas talks about. We need to say loud and clear: Enough with war, let us seek another way.