Sponges and War: Immoral Word Choices

An excerpt from my new book, The Bible is Not Enough: Imagination and Making Peace in the Modern World (Fortress). Footnotes are omitted below. [As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.]

I was privileged in the last two years to write two small books about my journey into peace and about a hermeneutic for working for peace. The Bible is Not Enough is the second. The other is called The Audacity of Peace, which is more about my personal journey into a peace ethic. [As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.]

America’s Christian nationalism is not arising from America’s fringe. Seventy percent of white evangelicals think the US Constitution is divinely inspired. Seventy percent. The same demographic thinks violence is fine for us but not for them. And that demographic struts around claiming to be the most faithful Christians in the world. Their reality is itself dystopian.

Official military leaders now justify death, killing, murder, and war as “humane” and are seeking an illusive, yet unattainable, middle ground between obliteration and peace, proposing “humane” war, weapons, and policies. The story of the humane war narrative has now been told [Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).]. The thesis, rooted in a study of wars, war theory, and war theorists, is that “in our time, swords have not been beaten into plowshares” but instead their swords have been melted down for drones. And drones, official military personnel now claim, are increasingly “the cleanest mode of war ever conceived,” and they regard this as a “clear choice to make war more humane.” We “Americans are the ones who have invented a form of war righteously pursued as superior precisely for being more humane.” But war, which is a quest for domination, justifies “humane” war only by making it endless. America, led far too often by those claiming to be Christians, has turned in one century from the world’s peacemaker to a humane warmonger. The war-torn world demands a Christian imagination that has the powers of improvisation—not an imagination marked by self-serving justifications. We have a poverty of imagination.

Donald Trump stretched this new so-called humane war to the next level and beyond. But Bill Clinton and the second Bush were the architects of the humane war strategy, and this was perfected by Barack Obama, who has been imitated by Biden. Universal surveillance has been combined with drone-targeted missiles legitimated by their humane-ness and lack of “collateral damage.” Why do more Christians not recognize what war experts know, namely, that “we fight war crimes but have forgotten the crime of war”?

KABUL/WASHINGTON, Aug 2 (Reuters) –

The United States killed al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri with a drone missile while he stood on a balcony at his home in Kabul, U.S. officials said, the biggest blow to the militants since Osama bin Laden was shot dead more than a decade ago.

Afghanistan’s Taliban government has not confirmed the death of Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon who had a $25 million bounty on his head and helped to coordinate the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people.

U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Zawahiri was killed when he came out on the balcony of his safe house in the Afghan capital at 6:18 a.m. (0148 GMT) on Sunday and was hit by Hellfire missiles from a U.S. drone.

“Now justice has been delivered, and this terrorist leader is no more,” U.S. President Joe Biden said on Monday.

Biden said he authorized the strike after months of planning and that no civilians or family members were killed.

The USA’s official explanation, as given by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, reads,

President Biden last year committed to the American people that, following the withdrawal of U.S. forces, the United States would continue to protect our country  and act against terrorist threats emanating from Afghanistan. The President made clear that we would not hesitate to protect the Homeland. With the operation that delivered justice to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al Qa’ida, we have made good on that commitment and we will continue to do so in the face of any future threats. We were able to do so in this instance—and will be positioned to do so going forward—as a result of the skill and professionalism of our intelligence and counterterrorism community colleagues, for whom the President and I are deeply grateful.

These new sponge-covered acts of war are then whitewashed in an attempt to humanize war. Anything can be morally justified if the dominant power’s rhetorical ploy transforms acts of war into a moral good. War is violence, war is the crime.

Violence runs deep in America’s culture. America at war is a part of its identity.