WASHINGTON — In not untypical fashion, the faithfully
left-leaning National Council of Churches (NCC) has issued a
poisonous little July 4 greeting to the American people.
The statement from the NCC Governing Board is not a celebration
of two centuries of American democracy and religious liberty, with
gratitude to God. It is instead a screed against the “dishonorable”
war in Iraq.
“It has become clear that the rationale for invasion was at best
a tragic mistake, at worst a clever deception,” the statement
generously opines.
Although comprised of denominations totaling over 40 million
mainstream Americans, the NCC has for 40 years been a voice for
unending 1960s’ radical protest.
Headed by former Democratic Rep. Bob Edgar (who is also a United
Methodist clergyman), the NCC is still fighting the Vietnam War, 30
years after its close. It is ironically appropriate that Edgar is
leading the NCC’s latest anti-war crusade. He has boasted that he
served in the Congress that cut all aid to South Vietnam, clearing
the way for the subsequent slaughter, persecution, poverty, and
refugee crisis that followed in a communist-ruled Indochina.
Now Edgar and his NCC want to do for Iraq what they helped
accomplish for South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Likening
themselves to the “biblical prophets of old,” the NCC wants to
declare “NO” to “leaders who have sent many honorable sons and
daughters to fight a dishonorable war.”
The NCC also wants to shout “NO” to shameful abuse of prisoners,
“NO” to a war price tag that allegedly “has rendered our federal
budget incapable of caring for the poorest of our own citizens,”
and “NO” to theologies that supposedly “demonize” other nations and
religions while claiming “righteousness for ourselves as if we
share no complicity in human evil.” Somehow the council forgot to
wish President Bush and his Republican friends a happy Independence
Day.
Not wanting to be entirely negative, the NCC also wants to say
“YES” to “compassion” over “domination,” to an early fixed
timetable for U.S. military withdrawal from Iraq, to honoring the
human rights even of enemies, to spending and taxing priorities
that “put the poor first,” to a “restoration of truth telling,” and
to “last resort” rather than “first strike” as the criterion for
war.
The NCC frets that on the day Americans celebrate their freedom,
the “freedom promised in the toppling of a dictator has been
replaced by the humiliation of occupation and the violence of a
civil war.” Grudgingly, the statement also briefly acknowledges
that a “cruel dictator” was deposed in Iraq, though it does not
name who he was. Human rights in Iraq have never been a main
concern for the NCC, except to use as a rhetorical weapon against
the United States.
Edgar and the NCC long lambasted U.S.-supported sanctions
against Iraq for ostensibly killing hundreds of thousands of
Iraqis. The July 4 statement also bemoans the “untold numbers of
Iraqis whose deaths we are unwilling to acknowledge or count.”
The NCC has never expressed concern over the 1 million Iraqis
killed by Saddam’s regime, a number that would have been much
higher absent the decade-long no-fly zones upheld by the U.S. and
British air forces in defense of Shiites and Kurds.
BEFORE THE U.S. OVERTHROW of Saddam, Edgar and other NCC officials
rushed to Baghdad to meet with Saddam’s vice president, Tariq Aziz,
and to offer their solidarity against the impending war. The
subsequent discovery of mass graves, the endless tales of
starvation and torture and mass murder under the Saddam regime, the
reasonably successful election in Iraq early this year, and the
opening to new freedoms such as religious liberty in Iraq have
never been topics of great interest to the NCC.
Instead, the NCC has from the very start demanded complete
withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Those troops, according to the
council, are the cause of “humiliation” for the Iraqi people. For
the NCC, Iraq’s problems began with the United States and will end
with the U.S. departure. Tellingly, the NCC proclamation says
nothing about what the Iraqis might expect after the last U.S.
helicopter evacuated Baghdad. It does not appear to be
concerned.
Always likening itself to Old Testament prophets when it issues
its left-wing political fusillades, the NCC has forgotten who those
prophets actually were. Ardent enforcers of ancient Israel’s
Jehovah-centered theocracy, prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah and
Ezekiel damned the worship of false gods and the practice of what
NCC officials might prefer to call “alternative lifestyles.”
These “biblical prophets of old” likely would not have been
pleased by the NCC’s statement, also from this week, praising the
Supreme Court decision against the display of the Ten Commandments
in court houses. Nor would the NCC really have liked biblical
prophets such as Samuel who, when King Saul refused to slay a
captured heathen king, grabbed a sword and beheaded the unfortunate
fallen monarch himself. Such prophecy!
Edgar and the NCC aren’t demanding that President Bush behead
Saddam. Instead, they are charitably focused on obtaining better
treatment for Saddam’s imprisoned followers. Less charitably, they
are lobbying for a complete U.S. withdrawal that would permit some
of Saddam’s former murderers, with their Islamist allies from other
nations, to attempt to take back Iraq. The ensuing bloodshed,
tyranny, and chaos might even equal the horrors of 30 years ago,
when Indochina was finally “liberated” from U.S. influence, thanks
to policies advocated by the NCC and the congressional votes of
prophets like Bob Edgar.
