Veterans' Day 2003

2 November 2003

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

Prayer

For this Veterans’ Day, let us remember the sacred covenant we have with our soldiers.

As they promise to risk everything, to risk even their lives, we must promise that the cause for which we send them forth is worth the sacrifice of their lives.

We are humbled by the sacrifice they offer us. But our covenant binds both ways; we must meet their courage with our own.

Let us fight for those who fight for us.

Surely, there are causes worth the ultimate sacrifice. But just as surely, they are few and far between.

We must be able to say that the motives behind their war are worth the cost of their lives and the lives of the thousands of those we tell them to kill.

And if we do not believe that, then let us haved the courage to speak, to act, to make it right before it can never be made right again.

Times that call for soldiers call, as well, for our courage. Let us never forget our part in the sacred covenant with our soldiers. Let us have the courage and the will to fight for those who fight for us. That much courage, that much will, nothing less.

Amen.

SERMON: Veterans’ Day 2003

Veterans’ Day is always hard for me to translate into a sermon. I believe the covenant between a society and its soldiers is one of the most sacred covenants in the world. Soldiers do their part by being willing to serve, to fight, perhaps to die. Our part is to assure them that the reasons for going to war are worth the sacrifice of their lives, are worth robbing these young soldiers of the chance to marry, raise children, and grow old, illuminated by the glowing embers of a full life, well lived.

As a veteran of the Vietnam War, I know that soldiers carry more than just their weapons into combat. They also carry the political baggage of their war. If you can be in a Good War – and WWII is the only one we’ve had that is still considered a Good War – then soldiers carry the respect of their country and the approval of history. But if your turn comes up in a bad war, or a war fought for selfish or stupid reasons, then you carry that on your back, forever. Sometimes, the load seems to get heavier every day, as those who served in Vietnam during the early 1970s learned.

So, 36 years after my war, I can’t look at today’s soldiers without wondering what they are carrying on their backs as they go into their war. And you don’t have to be psychic to know that our soldiers in Iraq have a load on their backs. We’re already starting to see headlines like those that came mostly at the end of the Vietnam War. Here are just a few of the headlines from stories I’ve seen this week:

A Fiction Shattered by America’s Aggression

Assassinations Surge in Iraq

Rebel War Spirals Out of Control As U.S. Intelligence Loses the Plot

As Casualties Mount, Doubts Grow

18 Americans Dead, 21 Wounded, a Deadly Day in Iraq

How Many Body Bags?

When Will Bush Address Mounting Casualties?

Judge is Shot Dead as Iraqis’ Hatred of Occupiers Grows

Rage Erupts over Iraq War Profiteering

A High Price for a Hollow Victory

White House Ignored Iraqi Bid to Avert War

And yesterday (8 Nov 03), while I was attending a district meeting in San Antonio, military Families from across the state held a press conference in San Antonio demanding an end to the US Occupation of Iraq and the immediate return of all troops to their home duty stations. These families represented soldiers from all four of the military bases in Texas. And again, it’s very early in the war for this level of outrage and accusation to be surfacing.

You wonder how we got into this mess, and I think of the old story about how to cook a frog. If you drop a frog into hot water, it will devote all its effort to jumping out. But if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and gradually raise the heat, the frog doesn’t notice until it’s too late and it’s cooked. Mind you, I haven’t actually tried this with a live frog, I just trust the old story. And if you have tried this with a frog, I don’t want to know about it!

Oh, I can hear conservatives saying “There go those liberals again, always criticizing, never trusting their leaders. They’re not good Americans. Good Americans follow their leader and support the troops and the war.”

Here’s a quote I just read this week that seems to endorse this view, a quote from a fairly surprising source:

“The job of the President is to set the agenda and the job of the press is to follow the agenda that the leadership sets.” –

Those words are from Lawrence Grossman – longtime head of PBS and NBC News. When the head of NBC News believes the job of the press is to follow the leader rather than informing those who are being led, it’s easy to feel that these darned liberals are just out of touch.

But then I remember another quotation, which you have probably heard at least part of. It’s much older,

“It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt.” — John Philpot Curran: Speech upon the Right of Election, 1790. (Speeches. Dublin, 1808.) as quoted in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations

These two quotations seem to represent the options we find offered to us: conservatives preaching obedience, liberals preaching vigilance and critical inquiries into the motives of those who are now leading our country. These options are framed as though they were merely partisan political choices, where there are no truths beyond our individual opinions. Republicans are supposed to embrace obedience while Democrats try and awaken a country falling asleep in hot water.

But it isn’t that simple, now or ever. The families who protested in San Antonio yesterday came from both political parties, from conservative and liberal religions or no religions. They are among the voices saying that this is not about partisan politics. This is about the fate of America, and the dangers that are beginning to surround us.

I am one of those who believe we are being dangerously and unwisely misled, but I will no longer accept it as a partisan statement. It is a patriotic statement, the kind that must be made by all who realize that liberty is always given to us on the condition of eternal vigilance, that failing to be vigilant is failing to be patriotic, and that we have a sacred covenant with our soldiers.

I want to borrow some comments from two news articles and mix them with my own, to try and show you why some people fear that we are violating our sacred covenant with our soldiers, and with ourselves as Americans.

First, I want to provide a kind of historical background by sharing parts of an essay written by Thomas Hartman on March 23, 2003, on “When Democracy Failed: The Warnings of History.” These are the kind of historical parallels that some feel are unwarranted and rude. I feel they are honest, and timely – part of the eternal vigilance we owe ourselves and our great country. Reflecting on economic crises, terrorists and wars, Hartman says:

“It started when the government, in the midst of a worldwide economic crisis, received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings. The media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed.

“But the warnings of investigators were ignored at the highest levels, in part because the government was distracted; the man who claimed to be the nation’s leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn’t have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language – reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state – and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media. And, as a young man, he’d joined a secret society with an occult-sounding name and bizarre initiation rituals that involved skulls and human bones.

“When an aide brought him word that the nation’s most prestigious building was ablaze, he … called a press conference.

“He used the occasion – “a sign from God,” he called it – to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.

“Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation’s now-popular leader had pushed through legislation – in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it – that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wiretap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people’s homes without warrants if they thought the case might involve terrorism.

“Within the first months after that terrorist attack, at the suggestion of a political advisor, he brought a formerly obscure word into common usage. Instead of referring to the nation by its name, he began to refer to it as “The Homeland.”

“His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people that he was a deeply religious man and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity. He even proclaimed the need for a revival of the Christian faith across his nation, what he called a “New Christianity.” Every man in his rapidly growing army wore a belt buckle that declared “Gott Mit Uns” – God Is With Us – and most of them fervently believed it was true.

“Soon, he proposed a single new national agency to protect the security of the homeland…

“To consolidate his power, he reached out to industry and forged an alliance, bringing former executives of the nation’s largest corporations into high government positions. A flood of government money poured into corporate coffers to fight the war against the terrorists, and to prepare for wars overseas. … He built powerful alliances with industry…

“He then began a campaign to convince the people of the nation that a small, limited war was necessary. He claimed the right to strike preemptively in self-defense, and nations across Europe – at first – denounced him for it, pointing out that it was a doctrine only claimed in the past by nations seeking worldwide empire, like Caesar’s Rome or Alexander’s Greece.

The story, of course, is about Hitler and the rise of Nazi power seventy years ago. It looks to this writer, to me, and to many others like we are resolutely following the course that Hitler’s Third Reich followed in our ambition to establish an American empire – the German word for empire is “Reich.”

None of this is new information. The seeds were planted in essays going back to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, when some neoconservatives argued that it was time for America to gain immediate military and economic domination of the world: the Fourth Reich, if you like. Nor were they mincing their words. One 1989 essay by Charles Krauthammer was titled “Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar World” (National Interest 18 (Winter 1989), 48-49; Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70 (1991), 23.)

In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz, then-under secretary of defense for policy, supervised the drafting of the Defense Policy Guidance document, in which he outlined plans for military intervention in Iraq as an action necessary to assure “access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil” and to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and threats from terrorism.

He called for preemptive attacks and ad hoc coalitions but said that the U.S. should be ready to act alone when “collective action cannot be orchestrated.” The primary goal of U.S. policy should be to prevent the rise of any nation that could challenge the United States. When the document was leaked to the New York Times, it proved so extreme that it had to be rewritten. The first President Bush rejected these extreme ideas of Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney, who was Secretary of Defense in 1992. These concepts are now part of the new U.S. National Security Strategy.

That strategy follows the ideas in an earlier paper from September 2000 published by a group of called “Project for the New American Century.” The paper, called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” was the product of twenty-seven neoconservatives including Wolfowitz and Cheney. The report was called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” and was a product of the Project for the New American Century. Six of the key authors of that report now hold high positions in the Bush administration. Others, like Donald Kagen and Richard Perle, hold influential positions as unofficial advisors.

The 2000 paper on “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” directly acknowledges its debt to the 1992 document written by Wolfowitz.

If you believe these plans for an American empire of military domination of the world are the primary mission of the Bush administration, as many people do, then everything going on makes a new kind of sense where all the pieces seem to fit together.

(The following ideas taken from article by Jay Bookman for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 9-29-02, titled “The president’s real goal in Iraq”.)

It means “this war [in Iraq] marks the official emergence of the United States as a full-fledged global empire…. Once that is understood, other mysteries solve themselves. For example, why does the administration seem unconcerned about an exit strategy from Iraq once Saddam is toppled?

“Because we won’t be leaving. Having conquered Iraq, the United States will create permanent military bases in that country from which to dominate the Middle East, including neighboring Iran.

“And why did the administration dismiss the option of containing and deterring Iraq, as we had the Soviet Union for 45 years? Because even if it worked, containment and deterrence would not allow the expansion of American power. … The plan dismisses deterrence as a Cold War relic and instead talks of “convincing or compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities.”

Donald Kagan, a professor of classical Greek history at Yale and an influential advocate of a more aggressive foreign policy — he served as co-chairman of the 2000 New Century project — describes the new world order in cowboy-movie metaphors: “You saw the movie ‘High Noon’?” he asks. “We’re Gary Cooper.”

Kagan also acknowledges that we will most likely establish permanent military bases in Iraq. “We will probably need a major concentration of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time. … When we have economic problems, it’s been caused by disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will be no disruption in oil supplies.”

Paul Wolfowitz said in an interview a few months ago that the reason we cared about Iraq but not North Korea was because Iraq was “swimming in oil.” But even in his 1992 paper he had identified Iraqi oil as a major reason for ousting Saddam Hussein and taking effective control of the country. So if people actually claim it’s wrong to accuse the administration of murdering for oil, they either have not done their homework, or are being disingenuous.

To see who the new American empire would serve, you only have to look at the changes in economy and taxes since Bush was elected. It is to be an empire rewarding the corporations and the very wealthy and, as far as possible, eliminating the middle class to create the kind of two-tiered economy that has enriched the few and impoverished the many in Mexico.

Putting Americans out of work to be replaced by cheap foreign labor isn’t only happening at Wal-Mart; it’s happening in the high-tech industries too, as many of you know first-hand.

Corporations such as Cigna, General Electric and Merrill Lynch are already using a loophole called the L-1 Visa to import low-wage technology workers from India to replace their American employees, and have already brought some 325,000 computer ingineers, programmers, and other high-tech employees from abroad, mostly from India. (Jim Hightower, “A Loophole for Busting High-tech Wages,” September 23, 2003)

This is a full-scale drive toward the military domination of the world and the subjugation of anyone and everyone who could protest. That’s why civil rights are being curtailed as part of the “security for the Homeland.” It is also why it is likely that repressive forms of religion will gain both power and influence.

Here’s one more quotation from another important neoconservative named Richard Perle, who was Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, and is in another influential role with this administration, in case it seems like I’m overstating things:

“This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq, then we take a look around and see how things stand. This is entirely the wrong way to go about it… If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now.” (Go here for one source of this quote.)

These are the battles our soldiers are being used to fight. They are battles for a concept of empire so similar to the vision of Hitler’s Nazi party of sixty years ago that it’s hard to consider the similarities accidental. This is the ideology our soldiers are carrying into battle with them as they fight, kill and die not for freedom or the American way, but for greed, arrogance, and a murderous lust for power that seems terrifyingly insane.

As the water heats up, it is worth considering again some lessons of history from the 1930s and 1940s. Both America and Germany were deep into economic depression.

“Germany’s response was to use government to empower corporations and reward the society’s richest individuals, privatize much of the commons, stifle dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, and create an illusion of prosperity through continual and ever-expanding war. America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class, enforced anti-trust laws to diminish the power of corporations, increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security, and became the employer of last resort through programs to build national infrastructure, promote the arts, and replant forests.” (Thomas Hartman)

America’s leaders and America’s soldiers fought for democracy, which means a powerful middle class and rigorous controls on the natural greed of wealthy corporations and individuals. We’re still proud of those soldiers .

Germany’s leaders and soldiers fought for an economic and military tyranny that is the mortal enemy of democracy. They looted the working class and transferred money, power and privilege to their wealthiest individuals and corporations, while restricting the rights of ordinary people to protest. No one is proud of them today.

It is time to celebrate Veterans’ Day 2003, so it is time to ask about the sacred covenant we have with our soldiers. Can we honestly tell them that the mad dreams of a few dangerous leaders are worth their sacrifices, worth their lives, let alone the lives of more than 15,000 Iraqis estimated killed?

If our motives are indeed the motives of dominating the world, then these deaths, on both sides, are not casualties of war, but murders. And the actions of our current administration are, by the definitions we used at Nuremburg, war crimes.

Our soldiers carry into battle not only their weapons and supplies, but also the weight of the cause for which we are asking them to fight and die. Can we honestly look them in the face and tell them that we have honored our part of this sacred covenant with them?

This isn’t a question for our leaders, who seem beyond caring about such matters. It’s a question for those who understand that the price of liberty is always eternal vigilance. It is a question for us, and we must pursue the question wherever it leads. Our soldiers are counting on us.