A Better Path

President Barack Obama is perceived as a deliberate decision maker, one who thoughtfully weighs all options before moving ahead.   He came into office committed to slowly withdrawing American military forces out of the military mess in Afghanistan and Iraq that he inherited.  With that end finally in sight he has made an about-face, choosing to reengage in Iraq and Syria in a fight against the Islamic State. 

Seeing a series of Westerners alone and kneeling in a forlorn desert, waiting to be beheaded, played a part in pushing the reluctant president over the edge.

There is no overstating how abhorrent these executions are but, nevertheless, the president and congressional supporters of all stripes are making a grave mistake in trying to bomb Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.  Killing a slew of Islamic State militants may seem cathartic and satisfy the urge to “do something” but the long-term impact of American military action will be the creation of a new generation of embittered warriors willing to go to even more wretched extremes of human brutality.  After all, they’ve seen friends exterminated by a missile descending from above.  Their moral calculus determines that it is we, the Americans, who are insensitive to the value of human life.

We could ask the question, what if?  What if Iraqis and Syrians, as well as people anywhere else in the world, recognized that their primary interaction with Americans was with our nurses and our engineers, our linguists and our teachers, instead of our soldiers?  What if we dropped blankets, soccer balls, and bottles of aspirin instead of missiles?   The sober truth is that war inevitably plants the acrid seeds of revenge.  What if we tried a different path?

One of the problems of our Middle East misadventures is that the cost of this war is born, grossly disproportionately, by a very few, our military men and women.  They volunteer to go where they witness unspeakable horror, and then return home to see the rest of us far more interested in the our favorite football team, our new I Phone, or “Dancing with the Stars.”  What if the daunting task of building peace in the Middle East was something many more Americans had a stake in?

One way to start would be to end completely our dependency on Middle East oil.  What if we said, we will all pay a couple dollars more per gallon at the gas tank in order to dramatically reduce our reliance on carbon fuels?  What if we agreed to follow the lead of the European Union and agree to cut emissions by 40% by 2030?  What if we made it a national goal to dramatically reduce our dependence on foreign oil and to dramatically increase clean energy sources?  Such a commitment would touch all levels of American life. It would further unleash our best minds to accomplish these challenging goals.  It would bring our men and women in uniform back home.  It would help to preserve this one planet that we are blessed to live upon.

A striking reality of the Islamic State is that they have placed their hands on American made military equipment.  It has been good for sectors of the American economy to build the tools that have been part of the war effort in Iraq.  The hard truth is that America’s fine minds and skilled workers create the weapons that cause carnage and death.  These lethal instruments of death are sold to our friends but switch sides once a city falls, a battle is lost, or soldiers run.  One step towards slowing down the cycle of violence in the Middle East is for our country to stop producing and selling weaponry.  We should redirect our industrial skills into products that build life, not destroy it.

Believing that the only language the Islamic State and their ilk understand is violence, we choose to descend to the moral lowlands, becoming like our enemies.  We could take the simple but divinely wise counsel to flesh out what it means to “love our enemies.”  We could stubbornly refuse to fight and kill, aligning ourselves with nonviolent movements of the past.  We could insist on being all about schools and dispensaries, agriculture and tree-planting, well-digging and engineers, conflict resolution and soccer fields, free-thinking and clean water, family planning and cross-cultural sensitivity, windmills and religious freedom.    

The grisly deaths of Westerners perishing in the Iraqi desert are appalling.  The understandable human response is to fight back, to avenge, and to extract an eye for an eye.   But there is a better way.  Those who died were humanitarians, curious about the world, desiring to report on and respond to human suffering.  In their lives we see hints of how the nations of the world ought best to respond to the Islamic State.  Truth telling, providing aid to the refugee, steadfastly standing with the voiceless, and exposing the emptiness of fundamentalist thinking are the better tools.  When we respond with our own violence we only stoop to the level of the Islamic State, demonstrating a shared belief that the way to show that ghastly killing is wrong is to engage in killing ourselves.  It’s a difficult path, and it’s a costly path but its far better to bake bread and drop blankets, not bombs.