By Jack Linden
I had hoped that we Americans, or at least most of us, learned something during the Viet Nam War. It was pretty evident that war was a civil war. We backed the wrong group when we could have helped the country in 1953 and 1954, but we were too terrified of communism. Ho Chi Minh had even written his constitution based on ours, but both Truman and Eisenhower looked upon him as a communist and sided with the South.
The “war hawks” are again screaming for war. The rant in 1812 was “Canada, Canada, Canada.” The modern day war hawks were screaming “Iran, Iran, Iran,” but have now changed one letter and are ranting, “Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.”
Will the cries for war never stop? After all, we went through a civil war, and it started much like the current situation in Iraq, with one major difference — they have been going at it for more than a thousand years while our own Civil War started just a few years after the founding of our country.
In both, religion has played a huge part. At the time of our Civil War, religion played a much more significant role in the lives of everyday people. Don’t get me wrong. Religion is still important today, but in a different — social — way. Mainstream churches splitting over the ordination of gay and lesbian pastors, same gender marriage and the participation in the sacraments. These are schisms in the church, but at least we haven’t started killing each other over them.
Go back in American history 170 years. The three major churches in the U.S. at that time were Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians. But they ended up splitting into North/South Camps over the issue of slavery. And now we have the Methodist church, South and North, and Southern Baptists or just Baptists.
In the Middle East today a religious war is being carried out in the name of politics – Sunnis and Shi’ites in Iraq.
Should America be involved in that civil war? Whose side are we going to take? Do we really know enough about the religious conflict to actually choose sides? Are we willing to go to war on the basis of faith? Will the troops of America go to war “with the Cross of Jesus going before?”
We would be looked at as “those infidels,”no matter what we do in Iraq. We cannot stop the war of religions. Our own Civil War did not heal the wounds of the schisms in our religious beliefs.
It is time the “war hawks” in Congress quit playing politics with a war that we cannot do anything about. No President, Democrat or Republican, can solve the problem. The West drew lines around a territory disregarding long held religious and ideological beliefs. Iraq is an artificial state that has three major warring factions. It was a stable country that would have seen a revolution in the near future. We put in a religious leader rather than a political leader after we abolished civil order. It is a civil war now, but it is not our civil war.
We may have owned it, but we don’t have to keep it.
jdlinden@satx.rr.com
