Trying to revise the history of the build-up to the Iraq War – the subject of my last Blog – is doomed to failure because propaganda does not have a long shelf life.
But in a real sense not even that is true. The Bush administration didn’t fail to grasp the facts about Saddam’s relationship to Al Qaeda or his weapons of mass destruction. They chose to ignore them.
This is not conjecture. It is the only honest conclusion to which all the research on this issue over the last twelve years leads. Any defense of what was done is based on politics, not evidence.
Which brings me to raise an issue I wrote about months ago, the fact that people of faith cannot and should not separate their beliefs from their politics. To suggest that religion and politics should not mix is to fail to understand the nature of religious convictions.
People of faith cannot avoid having what they believe about God influence how they think politically, if they take their faith seriously. The question is, what kind of influence does that faith has?
Here is where I cannot fathom how any religious person, and certainly any Christian, can still support the invasion of Iraq.
It was bad enough that so many people of faith believed the propaganda used to win public support for the invasion in 2002. But to continue to find excuses for what happened, or to pretend that the only problem was the faulty information the CIA gave Bush at the time, is to betray the most basic tenet of any credible faith – a commitment to truth.
Simply put, to join the chorus of voices trying to scapegoat the intelligence community and let Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the like off the hook for starting a war that should never have been fought is to choose politics over faith.
That is the kind of choice diehard Republicans have made, but it cannot be the choice of sincerely religious Republicans. They have a higher commitment to maintain the integrity of their faith, making criticism of the war imperative.
No Republican presidential candidate should have a reason to believe the Christian Right base of the Party wants to hear a justification for the Iraq War. Just the opposite. Like all people of faith, religious Republicans should want nothing but the truth about it.
As tragic as the consequences of the Iraq War have been for Americans and Iraqis, to pretend it was anything other than an intentional, albeit, miscalculated effort is to add insult to injury.
Sadly, though, there is a tendency for conservative Americans, including religious ones, to support politicians who do not want our nation to acknowledge mistakes or take responsibility for them.
But a mature nation understands that to deny the truth about its actions, especially when it comes to war, is to invite more bad decisions. Only when truth is more important than saving face is it possible to learn from mistakes.
The Iraq War proved that we missed that opportunity after Viet Nam. Ironically, it now offers us that same opportunity again.
If this time around Republicans who are genuinely people of faith demand their Party face the truth about that war, it might reduce the likelihood that anything like it will ever happen again.
linnposts.com 