Anti-Liberation Theology

RELIGIOUS FIGURES who opposed the liberation of Iraq have a lot of explaining to do. Fashioning themselves prophets of peace, they caustically denounced the "rush to war." Having granted the United Nations an almost transcendent moral authority, they declared Operation Iraqi Freedom an "immoral" act of aggression. In the months leading up to the conflict, they made a litany of brash claims and gloomy predictions--all proven to be utterly false.

Take their suggestion that Saddam Hussein was not the devil many made him out to be. Some religious leaders even denied that he ever used chemical weapons against the Kurds. George Hunsinger, professor at Princeton Theological Seminary, cited approvingly the Nation's dismissal of the charge as "a catchy slogan to demonize Saddam in the popular American imagination." Meanwhile, Frank Griswold, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, derided prowar Christians for holding "simplistic views of good and evil."

Yet "evil" is the word that most often passes from the lips of newly liberated Iraqis to describe Saddam's regime. "If you only knew what this man did to Iraq," said an elderly man in Baghdad beating Saddam's portrait with his shoe. "He killed our youth. He killed millions." Day by day we learn more about the arbitrary arrests, tortures, and executions; the special prisons for children of dissidents; the diversion of food and medicine intended for needy Iraqis. None of it should surprise anyone: For years, the same facts had been uncovered by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the U.N. special rapporteur. Not since Cambodia's killing fields had a government terrorized so many of its own people.

Antiwar clerics remained silent about these facts, apparently in order to keep the faith about containing the Butcher of Baghdad: He had no serious interest, they said, in weapons of mass destruction. Seeing little evidence that Saddam was rearming, editors at the Christian Century rejected arguments for war as "extreme and unfounded." Jim Winkler, of the United Methodist General Board of Church and Society, complained of "an astonishing lack of evidence" to justify military intervention.

What's truly astonishing, however, was the clerics' willful neglect of Saddam's deception and defiance of U.N. weapons inspectors. Kenneth Pollack, a former Iraq specialist with the National Security Council and a scholar at the Brookings Institute, doubted that any inspections regime could prevent Iraq from developing the most deadly weapons. "Saddam is working to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction programs," Pollack wrote on the eve of war, "and the more time he has, the more lethal that arsenal will become." Even German intelligence services concluded in a December 2000 report that Iraq was close to producing a nuclear bomb. Yet church leaders said nothing when Secretary of State Colin Powell exposed Baghdad's "web of lies" with chilling clarity before the U.N. Security Council.

As to the conduct of the war, opponents were certain that a U.S. strike would devastate Iraq's infrastructure and foment a humanitarian crisis. The Church World Service, an association of faith-based relief agencies, expected "horrendous humanitarian consequences." Jonathan Frerichs of Lutheran World Relief complained bitterly that "we're attacking the government who's running the food distribution system for two-thirds of the country." The reality, of course, was that Saddam built lavish palaces and hijacked the country's oil-for-food program while 400,000 Iraqi children under the age of five died of malnutrition.

In fact, Pentagon planners engineered a brilliant military campaign that minimized the war's effects on daily life. Five months prior to the invasion, the State Department assembled emergency relief organizations at Iraq's border. Thousands of tons of food, water, and medical supplies were delivered within days after the conflict began. By quickly putting troops on the ground, coalition forces secured the nation's 600 oil fields, preventing an ecological disaster. Bombing raids, which focused intently on military targets, left bridges and power grids mostly untouched.