Brian McLaren on the Iraq Problem

Over on Sojourner’s Blog,  Brian McLaren has made a good suggestion:

In his July 20 commentary, James W. Skillen of the Center for Public Justice struck a non-partisan note of honesty and balance that I wish I heard more often.

He summarized the basic narrative of the Iraq War that both our president and his party and many Democrats seem to share:

… first, America liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein; second, we returned sovereignty to the Iraqi people; third, sectarian violence tragically increased; and now, in the fourth phase, we are “deploying reinforcements and launching new operations to help Iraqis bring security to their people.”

The elegant word Skillen chooses to describe this narrative is “delusional.”

He counters:

U.S. forces did not liberate Iraq; they wiped out its government, and the Bush administration then failed to exercise American responsibility to govern the country so it could be rebuilt and eventually governed by Iraqis themselves. We opened the floodgates to chaos, civil war, the death or flight of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and a continuing influx of terrorists whom our ‘war’ was supposed to destroy. That is not liberation.

He follows with a withering critique of both the “stay the course” proposal of the executive branch and the quick withdrawal plans increasingly popular in Congress. Both lines of reasoning, he says, lay the blame for our dilemma on “the nearly powerless Iraqi government for not climbing out fast enough from the hole we dug for it.” We may well criticize the Iraqi government for taking a long summer vacation in the midst of its crisis, but that doesn’t negate our culpability for them being in this particular crisis in the first place.

He chooses another elegant word to describe a nation that creates a crisis and then blames the victims for it: “immoral.”

Delusional and immoral are strong words. Whether you believe the invasion was an ill-conceived and badly-planned mistake or you believe that the invasion was justifiable but the problems have been in the execution, either way, we’re in a mess. We need a way out.

A friend of mine says that we’re only as sick as our reactivity. If our reactivity to Sept. 11 played a part in getting us into this terrible situation, we will not be well served by reacting to the status quo with still more reactive behavior.

For those of us who supported the war, and for those of us who opposed it but failed to stand up and speak up strongly enough, this is not a time for reactive behavior. It’s an opportunity, as Senator Obama recently said, to be as in careful planning our next steps as we were careless in planning our steps in the past. With more foresight and forethought, with less blame-gaming and partisanship and more deliberate collaboration, we can take the next steps—whatever they will be—with more honor, intelligence, sanity, and responsibility, and less reactivity than we have employed so far. Voices like Skillens’ can slow us down to indulge in second and third thoughts, perhaps breaking the cycle of unwise and destructive reactivity into which we have plunged the Iraqis and ourselves.

http://blog.beliefnet.com/godspolitics/2007/08/reactivity-and-iraq-by-brian-m.html

Brian McLaren (brianmclaren.net) serves as board chair for Sojourners/Call to Renewal. His next book, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope, will be released in October.

What’s In God’s Name?

 I thought this was interesting: (from Radio Netherlands Worldwide)

 Let’s call God Allah

by Mohammed Abdelrahman & Nicolien den Boer*

14-08-2007

The Bishop of Breda, Tiny Muskens, wants people to start calling God Allah. He says the Netherlands should look to Indonesia, where the Christian churches already pray to Allah. It is also common in the Arab world: Christian and Muslim Arabs use the words God and Allah interchangeably.

Speaking on the Dutch TV programme Network on Monday evening, Bishop Muskens says it could take another 100 years but eventually the name Allah will be used by Dutch churches. And that will promote rapprochement between the two religions.

Muskens doesn’t expect his idea to be greeted with much enthusiasm. The 71-year-old bishop, who will soon be retiring due to ill health, says God doesn’t mind what he is called. God is above such “discussion and bickering”. Human beings invented this discussion themselves, he believes, in order to argue about it.

More than 30 years ago Bishop Muskens worked in Indonesia and, there, God was called Allah, even in Catholic churches. The Dutch should learn to get on spontaneously with different cultures, religions and behaviour patterns:

“Someone like me has prayed to Allah yang maha kuasa (Almighty God) for eight years in Indonesia and other priests for 20 or 30 years. In the heart of the Eucharist, God is called Allah over there, so why can’t we start doing that together?”

In the Arab world God is called Allah. The long history of Christianity in the Arab world led to the development of a rich Christian-Islamic theological vocabulary, which makes God a normal equivalent to Allah. Both Muslims and Christians use the word in the Middle East.

ar-Rabb
Apart from Allah, the term ar-Rabb (the Lord) is also widely used, although this appears far more often in the Arabic version of the Bible than in the Qur’an. In the Islamic context, references to ar-Rabb are normally found in the possessive form, such as Rabbi (My Lord). Interestingly, the word Allah was already in use by Christians in the pre-Islamic period.

Bishop Muskens proposal will undoubtedly receive a warm welcome from the Islamic community in the Netherlands. Particularly as it follows last week’s remarks by Geert Wilders about banning the Qur’an and, shortly before that, former Muslim Ehsan Jami’s comparison of Muhammad with Osama bin Laden.

Attention
Perhaps this is the reason Bishop Muskens’ remarks have received so much attention in the Dutch press. The bishop actually said exactly the same several years ago. He also suggested abolishing Whit Monday as a national holiday in favour of an Islamic religious day.

In the past, Bishop Muskens has offended many Muslims. In 2005 he said Islam was a religion without a future because it had too many violent aspects. The bishop is also responsible for a number of controversial remarks. He caused uproar in the Netherlands when he said the poor had a right to steal bread if they were hungry. And he put the Vatican’s back up with an appeal for the use of condoms in the fight against AIDS

http://www.radionetherlands.nl/currentaffairs/ned070814mc

 Well? What do you think?