Finding the Heart’s Treasure: America’s Case for the War in Iraq

By Joseph Wakelee-Lynch

While overturning two regimes, scoffing at the United Nations, and spurning international agreements, the Bush administration has reveled in its unchallenged standing in a unipolar world. But now it encounters an enemy it is unable to subdue: truth.

As the Bush administration readied itself for war on Iraq, it proffered to the American people a menu of justifications for its pre-emptive war:

• Saddam Hussein posed an immediate threat to the safety of the United States because he possessed and was prepared to use weapons of mass destruction;
• Saddam was cooperating with Al Qaeda;
• Iraq purchased uranium in Africa;
• Iraq was a sponsor of international terrorism;
• Saddam was a tyrant.

For each U.S. constituency, it seemed, a reason was put forward that appeased its moral sensibility, including the Christian churches. The attack on Iraq was forcibly squeezed inside the Just War mold, and even propagated to the Vatican.

The government’s war now appears to be riven with falsehood, manipulation, and, perhaps, lies. Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction appear to not exist. Saddam’s secular state was no ally of Osama bin Laden’s Islamic movement. Even the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch seems not what it was said to be. And the president himself lied, or spoke ignorantly, when he said in his State of the Union address that Iraq sought to purchase uranium from Niger.

With their credibility increasingly under scrutiny, administration officials must have considered the recent revelation in Vanity Fair magazine by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz – that Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction was the one cause for war on which the administration itself could find consensus – extremely damaging. It gave credence to the charge that before, during, and after the Iraq war, truth was a tool to be fashioned and refashioned in pursuit of this government’s national security goals.

The government’s public justifications for the war are discredited. Only one still stands, and Bush officials have seized upon it: Saddam was a despot. So he was. But the history of the United States’ crusade against dictators has always been selective.

While the government’s case has been in collapse, other motivations for the war intriguingly remain in the background, never to be uttered: to establish a non-Islamic state on Iran’s border; to eliminate a regional threat to Israel; to usher Iraq, and its oil, into the world’s pro-Western international economy; to advance what some on the political right call democratic imperialism. Were one or all of these the true reasons for war?

The issue of truth-telling, therefore, may emerge as a potent threat to the Bush U.S. foreign policy, and, even more important of course, to the president’s re-election in 2004. The nation’s citizens may soon ask, "If the government’s reasons were untrue, what were the real reasons?"

Now thrust under bright lights, the government offers a menu of excuses: "We’re sure the weapons will be found"; "the mobile labs prove our charges"; "the weapons may have been dispersed"; "all intelligence assessments contain a certain amount of fuzz." Like children confronted with their untruths, the country’s highest government officials mouth evasions of responsibility.

Some secular critics hope that the American people will withdraw their support for the war and the administration, once they realize they have been intentionally deceived.

But we who strive to be followers of Jesus are obligated to be skeptical that that epiphany will ever occur. We recognize faith when we see it. U.S. Christians by the millions endorsed the war, despite the unusual prophetic stand taken by many leaders in almost all denominations, and they still support it.

The fact is that most Americans, along with most U.S. Christians, hold tenaciously to a deep and abiding faith in Americanism, this country’s civil religion. Allegiance to the flag runs deeper than allegiance to the gospel in almost every denomination in the land, and for most Christians no distinction between the two exists.

Joseph Wakelee-Lynch is a writer and editor in Berkeley, Calif., and a contributing editor to The Witness. He may be reached by email at wakeleelynch@earthlink.net