Passion of the Christ followup

I've said pretty much all about The Passion of the Christ that I want to say, except for this post. The front part of this post is a slightly edited email from Joseph Spiezer. I comment afterward.

A couple of points on the "Passion." Beliefnet has an interesting and well written article by Steven Waldman, the point of which is that Jews and Christians are watching two different movies when seeing the film. Jews see centuries of antiSemitism, Christians see an opportunity to experience God’s love. As a Jew, I really do understand the emotional bond that the movie seeks to convey for Christians. But let me explain my concerns about the movie:

1. Anti-semitism. Mel Gibson belongs to a church which rejects Vatican II. Vatican II said that Jews were not to blamed for the death of Jesus, and that antiSemitism was to be contrary to Catholic teaching. After Vatican II, the Church went so far as to say Jews were not to be targeted for conversion. After centuries of antiSemitism, in which normative Christianity viewed Jews as having murdered and rejected Christ, Vatican II is quite literally a Godsend to my fellow Jews and me. Since Gibson rejects Vatican II and all that followed, the natural concern is that he believes that the ideas that Jews are fundamentally evil and followers of Satan and therefore that is the message of the movie.

2. Anti-Judaism. Nothing is more important to me than my children. They represent the continuity of my life, the passing of my ideals. To the extent that missionaries of any religion try to change the values and religion of my children, they are violated me in the most gruesome and painful way possible. This idea, that Judaism is somehow inauthentic, since it does not accept the truth of the movie, is what I am most afraid of. The notion that missionaries will become reinvigorated not to seek to encourage fellow Christians to develop a more spiritual relationship with God, but to seek to convert my children to their religion. It is not so long ago, in the history of time, that the conversions were not through argument, but through force. The story of Pope Leo XIII, and the kidnaping of Edgardo is well known to Jews.

3. Not a concern, but my hope for the future. The difference between is really much more fundamental than Jesus. The basic difference is Christians believe in Original Sin, which breaks the relationship between man and God, a break which is only mended through the life and death of Jesus. For Jews, there is no break, hence no need for a Messianic Savior in the sense that Jesus is for Christians. Thus, Jews could not have rejected Jesus, because the whole concept of repairing a break doesn’t make any sense. If we can understand that basic concept, that really we have different starting points, that it makes no sense to try and convince each other of the logic of our arguments since we have different axioms, then perhaps we can get to the point where we can appreciate each other’s insights and beauties with being afraid of each other.

Joe, thank you for these thoughtful and indeed collegial points, which I am happy to post for everyone to consider. I'd like to make a few points.

Your observation that Christians and Jews seem to be viewing two different movies on the same screen is a good one. From my conversations with a few other Jews, it is obvious to me that Jews almost instinctively identify many threads of anti-Semitism that pass right by most Christians. I have either posted or linked to identifications of many of these elements in past posts.

I should say that few American Christians will pick up on the latent anti-Semitism. Some Jews have said they are much more concerned about the movie's effects on overseas audiences than domestic ones. The relevant images and dialogs will be much more evident to Euro audiences than American. European Christians have a deeply-rooted anti-Judaism that few Americans can understand.

See, for example, Jared Keller's review (via Bill Hobbs) of The Passion in which Jared writes,

My appreciation for His sacrifice - for His willingness to suffer physical torture, and inconceivable spiritual torment for the sake of my salvation - is now visceral, thanks to Mel Gibson. I put Jesus on that cross. He bore my sin, and lowered Himself for me - for humanity. Had I lived in that place, at that time, I would likely have been one of the throng shouting for his death.

But Jared is entirely blind to the anti-Semitic scenes of the movie:

What about anti-semitism?

There is none to be found. Caiaphas is certainly portrayed as amoral, but his corruption springs from his lust for political power - not his ethnicity, or his religion. During Jesus' first appearance before the Sanhedrin, there is a great deal of disagreement among the priests, with many storming out in protest over Jesus' treatment. The Jews are never portrayed as some sort of monolithic group.

What Jared does not see is the caricaturist portrayal of the High Priest, the overdone robes of the priests, the money-grubbing-on-his-knees Judas (not a biblical scene), how Judas is driven to suicide by demon-children dressed as Jews, the priestly elite bribe the people to denounce Jesus, the near-total absence of Jewish clothing worn by Jesus, and so on. Yet Jared, and I think a large majority of American Christian viewers don't recognize these things and focus less on such aspects of characterizations and dialog, and more on the deep meaning for Christian faith of Jesus' suffering and death.

Hence, the primary reason Christians and Jews see two different movies on the screen is that Christians tend to see the movie as a theological drama while Jews tend to see it as an historical drama. The vast majority of Christians I have discussed the movie with can identify at least a few of the anti-Semitic scenes, but are by far struck much more strongly by the soteriology of the movie. As I have written, the movie's most powerful effect on me was a demand that I examine my life through the lens of the Christ's teachings and their relationship to his death.

As for Original Sin - I don't think that many Christians actually do believe in it, though it remains a doctrinal point of the Roman Catholic and many other churches. The Augustinian theory of O.S. simply is not tenable in this age. Hence, most Christians argue that the reconciling work of God is not really repairing a break due to O.S., but is understood in other ways.

That being said, the earliest proponents of Original Sin were actually Jews, not Christians, especially Paul. What many Jews (IMO) fail to recognize is that the New Testament writings of the apostles are Jewish writings, for all the apostles were Jews before they followed Jesus, and remained Jews until they died. In fact, no kind of decisive break between Judaism and Christianity occurred until after the destruction of the Temple in 70, long after the apostolic letters had been written.

Furthermore, a nascent backing of O.S. is found in the Jewish Scriptures, Psalms 51:5 for example, "Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me."

My point is that I don't think that Jewish and Christian thought about the human condition is quite as far apart as I think Joe is indicating. If the fundamental issue is human sin - as the long line of Hebrew and Jewish prophets all agree, as did Jesus - then only real point of departure of Christianity and Judaism is how sin is overcome.

For Jews, at least throughout the biblical eras (I am not as well acquainted with modern Jewish theology) the answer was Covenant. Beginning with Noah, God had made covenants with human beings. The covenants with Abraham and much later with the children of Israel at Sinai focused divine covenant upon the Hebrew people. By faithfully keeping the covenant the nation would be saved.

Christians also see their salvation as coming through divine covenant, except it is through neither the Sinai covenant or the Mosaic covenant, but the new covenant prophesied by Jeremiah (see Jer. 31). It is arguable that Jeremiah was trying to invigorate the Sinai covenant rather than foretell a successor or refinement to it. But in either event Jesus specifically tied his death to the new covenant at the Last Supper.

So for the Jews, the covenant of salvation is something akin to an agreement, a sort of meta-contract. But Christians understand the covenant of salvation is a person, Jesus the Christ, the Son of God. Hence, said the Pharisee Paul, whomever believes in his heart Christ was raised by God from the dead and confesses with his mouth that Jesus is Lord, shall be saved. For this faith is accounted to us as righteousness.

For Jews, Passover commemorates not merely an historical event but a deeply theological one. The Exodus was the principal way the YHWH identified himself to the children of Israel: "I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery" (Exod 20:2) is how God began the Ten Commandments, which are the very heart of the law. And while Christians understand the importance of the Exodus and deliverance, very few can comprehend the deep meaning of the Passover commemoration that Jews attach to the holy day.

Similarly, even Jews who understand the soteriology and christology of Christian faith really don't grasp the deep meaning to Christians of the person of Christ, whom we profess to be "one and the same" with God, "For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form."

Now, having gone through that stemwinder, I have some closing thoughts about the movie again. I find that as more time passes since I saw the movie, I am more disappointed in it. Part of this disappointment no doubt comes from the fact that a lot of the scenes come from Catholic traditions that are rather opaque to me. That's not Gibson's problem, though; it's his movie, not mine.

Rather, there is nothing in the movie that cuts to what I believe is the crux of the unjust execution of the innocent Jesus: that it was Roman law and Jewish religion conspired at some level to deliver Jesus to the cross. For in all the world until that time, the Roman legal code was the best the world had ever seen, and across the entire ancient world Judaism was highly respected even by pagans as the finest of religious faith there was.

Jesus was put to death not by the worst that humanity had to offer, but by the best. The movie, though, concentrates on Christ's suffering without delving into the suffering's broader context. Furthermore, it is Jesus' death, not his suffering, that is the central element of the passion story, yet the movie so overwhelms with scenes of torture that Jesus' death is presented practically as an afterthought.

Yet the movie does seem to edify most Christian believers who see it, including me, so I still assess it as a worthy experience. There are many sequences that are exalting and deeply moving. But there are so many places where the movie is deeply flawed, and some, in fact, where it outright contradicts the Gospels. All this is to say that my disappointment is that The Passion of the Christ could have been a contender for something truly extraordinary, but sadly falls short.

My review of "Passion of the Christ"

My senior year in college I took a one-month, concentrated English course on movies and movie criticism. We watched four or five movies every day, including mandatory viewing of every Alfred Hitchcock film ever made (except his final one, which he had not yet made) and had to write scholarly papers on two movies. Most of the films were silent, many of them very obscure, including some Eastern European silent flicks.

Despite all this training, I confess that I am not a skilled movie reviewer. Roger Ebert's job is safe from me. So what follows about The Passion of the Christ is less a real review, really, than my impressions and thoughts.

I tried hard to dismiss all the buzz, pro and con, that we've been force fed for months, especially in the last two weeks. Maybe I succeeded. So here goes:

Jesus' mother, Mary, is a meta-narrator of the movie. In fact, the events are almost told through her eyes. She is present at every moment of Jesus' suffering. She is also the only character except Jesus who knows, theologically, what is going on. Hence, she alternates between shock and grief at what is happening to her son, and acceptance of its necessity. I found very powerful and moving a scene when Jesus falls while carrying the cross, evoking a flashback memory of Mary. At the end, when Jesus is lowered dead from the cross into her arms, Gibson reproduces Michelangelo's Pieta, one of the most sublime works of sculpture in Western art.

Is it anti-Jewish? Well, neither my son nor I (he is 18) left the theater angry at Jews or thinking that "the Jews" were - or are - responsible for Jesus' death. Anger simply is not an emotion I experienced during or after the movie, and I saw and heard no indication that any other viewer did.

That being said, the Jewish hierarchy is presented almost uniformly flat-charactered. In Jesus' arraignment just after he is arrested, two or three members of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish high council, protest vehemently that the proceeding violates both Jewish law and common sense. They are quickly marginalized by the others. After some reflection, I have to agree substantially (not completely) with one of my former professors, Dr. Susan Bond, who told The Tennessean, referring to the visual presentation of Jews in movies,

Historically, Jesus movies have done a very bad job of this by caricaturing the Jews. One of the ways you know who the bad guys are is that you see the guys with the big hats, guys with too many jewels on their robes. Mel managed to make the religious leaders in this movie even more grandiose than in other movies, which I would interpret as an anti-Jewish spin on it. He made the additional artistic decision of giving them all bad teeth, and making them less physically attractive as a distinct group. ...

OTOH, these are also stock ways that movie makers help the audience identify the antagonists to the hero; the Jews who sympathize with Jesus or who attempt to show him compassion are visually more appealing than those who oppose him. The Roman soldiers are visually as repulsive as Jesus' Jewish foes - except for one who is compassionate toward Mary. He's a handsome fellow.

It also needs to be recognized that Jesus himself is not visually presented as a Jewish man - he wears no fringes that I saw (as the Gospels explicitly say he did), no headcovering, has no phylacteries, worn by every male Jew more than 13 years old.

While I see why critics claim anti-Judaism on Gibson's part, I think it is just as likely that he simply used a stock movie-maker's paradigm to help the audience keep track of the sides, even if a little crudely or insensitively done. Does that mean he thinks the audience is too stupid to keep track on its own? Well, yeah. Directors generally think that. (Alfred Hitchcock said that actors and the audience alike were "cattle.")

(However, a writer in Christianity Today, an evangelical magazine, observes, "... concerns about The Passion stirring anti-Semitic attitudes in the American movie-going public have been largely misplaced, but I do not for a minute hold these fears to be misbegotten or disingenuous." Read the whole thing.)
 

Is the movie accurate to the Gospels? On the whole, yes, in the main events: Jesus was arrested, tried, condemned, probably flogged, condemned and crucified. But the movie conflates the Gospel accounts together and dramatizes them strongly. Gibson tried to make a single, coherent film narrative out of four accounts that don't always match.

Gibson obviously picked some scenes and not others from the Gospels. The result is a movie that, while generally according with the Gospels, isn't really a movie of the Gospels. Gibson is Catholic, as critics have endlessly reminded us, and Catholic tradition about the passion influences the screenplay quite a bit: the Gospels, for example, do not relate Mary following Jesus along the Via Dolorosa but some Catholic tradition does. Again, it makes for some compelling drama and I have no problem with it, but it is not in the Gospels. Neither do the Gospels relate that Caiaphas the high priest himself went to Golgotha as he does in the movie. The scene where Caiaphas personally accosts Jesus on the cross is not in the Gospels, although Matthew says other priests were there:

41In the same way the chief priests also, along with the scribes and elders, were mocking him, saying, 42‘He saved others; he cannot save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down from the cross now, and we will believe in him.a 43He trusts in God; let God deliver him now, if he wants to; for he said, "I am God’s Son."

However, one authority of the Jewish practice of the day whom I trust emailed me that the presence of Caiaphas himself at the cross was quite unlikely because the high priest was never to contact corpse uncleanness (even by accident, I might add),

In addition to including scenes in the movie that aren't in the Bible, Gibson does omit some things that are: Judas does hang himself, but does not fall and burst open upon the rocks, for example, and the centurion at the crucifixion does not proclaim, "Surely, this man was the son of God" (a really curious omission, I think). At Jesus' death we do see the earthquake that splits the veil in the Temple, but the Gospels do not say the Temple itself was wrecked as the movie shows. Nor do see the dead of Jerusalem come forth from their tombs. The crowd around the cross disperses before Jesus cries out to Elohim, but in the Bible the crowd debates the meaning of what Jesus is saying.

So IMO, the quote attributed to the Pope about the movie, "It is as it was," is problematic because it presumes we know with certainty exactly how it was in the first place.

I personally did not care for the satanic figure who hovered over many of the scenes, though I know what Mel was trying to do dramatically with it. There are a lot of other invented sequences, a necessity since a movie made strictly according to the Gospels' narrative would be pretty short. Hence, this movie is not a documentary of any kind. It is Mel Gibson's imaginative retelling of the passion story.

The movie ends with a very brief resurrection scene. While I found the scene very powerful, it is not biblical. So as not to ruin its impact for you, I'll not describe it here. It is a wonderfully imaginative scene, but strays from the book.

The flogging scene was overdone and dramatically overshadows even the crucifixion. Three Gospels say Jesus was flogged but provide no details. In the movie, Jesus' beating begins with rods, severe enough in themselves, but they are discarded at a count of 32. Then the Roman flagellum is used, which shreds his flesh. However, the Gospels don't agree on the context of the flogging. If the flogging was done after Jesus was condemned by Pilate, then using the flagellum would have been expected, because the Romans generally wanted prisoners to die quickly on the cross. The scourging alone would half kill a man.

But if a man was not condemned, just sentenced to be punished, a flagellum would not have been used because it was potentially lethal itself. Matthew and Mark agree that Jesus was flogged before being sentenced to die, but John says he was condemned after being flogged. Gibson's movie goes along with John, but he has to account for the discrepancy of the Gospels. Hence, when the soldiers see that Jesus isn't properly subdued by the rods, they turn to the flagellum. The centurion enters and halts the flogging precisely because Jesus was not condemned. By then, however, Jesus has been flogged to a bloody rag of a human being.

Luke says, though, that Pilate said he would have Jesus flogged, but the crowd insisted he be crucified. So Pilate caved and sent him straight to die without being flogged.

A longstanding Christian tradition says Jesus received 39 lashes. The precision of the figure springs from the fact that Jewish law (Deut. 25:3) forbade more than 40 lashes; by stopping the count at 39, the possibility of a missed lash was accounted for. But Jesus was flogged by the Romans, not the Jews. Roman law had no count limit. We do not really know how many lashes Jesus really received; in the movie it is close to 100.

David Whidden wrote that this movie badly needs a prequel. I somewhat agree. It does appear to me that Mel presumed that viewers would know Jesus' story before the point his movie begins. Yet this assumption is not justified, I think. Huge numbers of Americans do not.

What viewers never discover within the movie is just why some Jews were so enraged by Jesus as to call for his death at Roman hands, apart from Jesus claiming he is the son of God - but this happens after he is arrested, not before. Clearly, the Sanhedrin (most of it, anyway) believes he has committed blasphemy, but crucifixion for that? Even Pilate rolls his eyes at that one.

In fact, Jesus had a substantial record of challenging the Jewish power structure of the day; he called some Pharisees, a socially powerful laity group, children of hell one day, certainly not something that would make them feel kindly toward him. Jesus drew large crowds as well; Pilate had sent cavalry to ride into other leaders' crowds with swords swinging. The details of all that are more than I want to go into in this post, but there is reason to believe there was a fear on the part of the high priest and others that Pilate would see Jesus as an insurgent leader and falsely think he was sponsored by the hierarchy. They seemed to fear that Pilate's well-known bloodthirstiness would fall upon them and the people because of Jesus. (John's Gospel is clear that a large number of ordinary Jewish people, not just the hierarchy, were hostile to Jesus because he claimed divine identity. Luke 4:18-29 relates that even the people of his own synagogue tried to throw him off a cliff - because he promised God's blessings not only for Jews but equally for Gentiles.)

Again, though, none of this presents in the movie, and I believe that lack is a major shortcoming. Just why do they want Jesus dead? We aren't really told. (Pilate kills him just to placate the Sanhedrin.)

Remember, though, that Gibson is emphasizing not the historical explanation for Jesus' death but a theological one. Jesus' death is presented more as a self-sacrifice than a murder. He is undergoing his passion deliberately. Arising from the ground along the road to Golgotha he tells Mary, "Behold, I am making all things new." However, this saying of Jesus comes from Revelation 21:5, not the Gospels, and refers to the coming again of Christ into the world. This isn't a criticism per se, just a clue that the historical question is not of primary interest to Gibson. A theological interpretation of Christ's suffering and death is.

I found the use of flashbacks very effective. Several times in his suffering, a glimpse of something reminds Jesus of an event in his ministry. A Roman sandal, for example, takes him back in memory to his foot washing of his disciples recorded in John's Gospel. Some of the flashbacks are of Jesus' moral teachings, such as to love one's enemies, not just friends. Others are of his teaching about himself. I thought the sequencing and selection of the flashback scenes were exquisitely well done; they deeply moved me.

About the violence: apart from the overdone scourging, there are scenes where Jesus is beaten by Temple police en route to the Sanhedrin, they even throw him off a bridge and Jesus is painfully stopped just short of the ground by his chains. Neither the blows nor the fall are biblical, although it's believable that his captors struck him since Jesus' disciple Peter had offered armed resistance. But the bridge toss isn't credbile at all and serves no purpose other than to bring Jesus face to face with a disciple hiding under the bridge. What's the point? None. Gratuitous violent scene? Unquestionably.

Jesus is struck and spat upon at the Sanhedrin hearing. That's biblical. Roman soldiers strucks and whipped him along the Via Dolorosa, en route to die. Not specifically biblical but completely credible. These blows are not very graphic. The crucifixion is graphic and indeed illustrates why even Roman political leaders worked for decades to abolish the practice. Said Seneca,

Can anyone be found who would prefer wasting away in pain dying limb by limb, or letting out his life drop by drop, rather than expiring once for all? Can any man by found willing to be fastened to the accursed tree, long sickly, already deformed, swelling with ugly wounds on shoulders and chest, and drawing the breath of life amid long drawn-out agony? He would have many excuses for dying even before mounting the cross (Dialogue 3:2.2).

What the movie does not show, though, is just why crucifixion was so, well, excruciating. Painful with the nails and all, no doubt, but why were even its ancient advocates agreed it was the worst death a person could suffer?

The crucified person could not exhale properly and this eventually would lead to painful muscle cramps. Furthermore, adequate exhaling required the crucified to lift his body by pushing up on the feet and rotating his elbows. This, of course, resulted in searing pain in both feet and hands. ... On the cross every breath would be an agonizing affair and finally in combination with exhaustion would lead to asphyxia. This also explains why the legs of the crucified were often broken, as was the case with the two robbers who were crucified with Jesus (John 19:31-33;). ... Without the support of their legs, the crucified were unable to raise up their bodies, which in turn made it impossible for them to exhale properly thus greatly speeding up death, often within minutes. All of this means that the seven sayings of Jesus were uttered with great difficulty, for speaking takes place during exhalation. [link]

There can be no question that hanging on the cross was the greatest suffering Jesus endured, yet the movie mostly glosses over his cross agony. Yet, as Gibson has said, unblinkingly showing Jesus' suffering is a major dramatic intention of the movie.

Roger Ebert says that the movie is the most violent film he has ever seen. I simply don't see how. Saving Private Ryan was by far more violent and more graphically, revoltingly violent in my view; Ryan had a far more powerful effect on me emotionally than The Passion. In fact, I think Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) was considerably more violent. Other commentators have mentioned last year's Kill Bill as more gratuitously violent than The Passion, but I have not seen it.

Where does the movie leave me? One day in class, Dr. Bond told of a classmate in her undergraduate days who had never been to church, never read the Bible. She loaned him a Bible and advised him to start with the Gospel of Mark, it being the shortest and simplest to read. She said that he told her later that he opened Mark not long before bedtime and became so engrossed in it that he couldn't put it down. He read through the passion with increasing dismay at what was happening to Jesus.

When he read of Jesus' death on the cross, he said he was too shocked to continue. He put the book down and went to bed.

But, he said, he discovered the story did not end there. The next morning he learned that death did not conquer Christ.

Tonight, as the credits rolled (we stayed until they ended) I was filled with a deep sadness - indeed, shame - at the profound deficiency of my own discipleship. Gibson has said that the movie's answer to the question, "Who killed Jesus?" is, "We all did." That is not what I felt at the end. Instead, I felt a deep sense of having betrayed the great trust given me by Christ, a enormous awareness of my own sin and sinfulness and my total reliance on God's gracious mercy.

Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended,
that we to judge thee have in hate pretended?
By foes derided, by thine own rejected,
O most afflicted!

Who was the guilty? Who brought this upon thee?
Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee!
'Twas I, Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee;
I crucified thee.

Lo, the Good Shepherd for the sheep is offered;
the slave hath sinned, and the Son hath suffered.
For our atonement, while we nothing heeded,
God interceded.

For me, kind Jesus, was thy incarnation,
thy mortal sorrow, and thy life's oblation;
thy death of anguish and thy bitter passion,
for my salvation.

Therefore, kind Jesus, since I cannot pay thee,
I do adore thee, and will ever pray thee,
think on thy pity and thy love unswerving,
not my deserving.

"Ah, Holy Jesus," Johann Heerman, 1630

Update: I meant to include this little episode: As my son and I entered the theater, we met a classmate of his coming out. She had just seen the movie. She told my son that she had read the Gospels but did consider herself a Christian. But she said the movie made her understand for the first time what Jesus' story meant.

Update: The United Methodist Church's General Board of Discipleship has published a special web site devoted to issues related to The Passion of the Christ. The GBOD's site is called, "The Passion - Opportunities for Discipleship." A review published by the UMC's communications agency is here.

Why I will vote for Joe Lieberman

The Tennessee primary is next month. Tennessee has an open primary; voters may vote in any party's primary without reference to how they are registered. I am a registered voter, naturally, but have no party affiliation. Both parties have, at one time or another attempted to enlist me in local politics, but I always refuse to affiliate myself openly with any party.

(You will search my site in vain for any endorsement of re-election of President Bush, or the election of another contender. I have been asked more than once to join "Blogs for Bush" but I always decline.)

I'll vote for Lieberman in February's primary. And no, I am not endorsing him for the office of president here. I well recognize that he has no chance of being nominated. I see no point in voting in the Republican primary because I cannot - even on secret ballot - put my stamp of approval on the Bush administration, which is what a vote in the uncontested Republican primary would do.

I will vote for Lieberman to protest both the Bush administration and the un-impressiveness of the rest of the Democratic field. As much as the prospect of a second Bush terms disturbs me, the prospect of any of other party's present frontrunners occupying the White House gives me insomnia.

Take Dennis Kucinich, for example, who was interviewed by Sean Hannity on his radio show as I was driving today. Kucinich accepted Sean's invitation to be on Hannity and Colmes tonight.

Kucinich said that we are fighting the Taliban in Iraq.

He said last year that President Bush has revoked President Ford's Executive Order 12333, which forbids assassination of heads of state, but when pressed about it by Hannity, Kucinich said he would have to check to see whether it was true. (Maybe he should have checked on it before saying it?)

Kucinich said that the US Declaration of Independence obligates a president to defend America but then said that it forbids America from taking the offense against another country, even one that has made war against us.

He said that President Bush directed the bombing of civilians in Afghanistan but the only example he could cite was the accidental aerial attack of a wedding party that killed about three dozen people - a tragedy, to be sure, but hardly proof of a presidential order to bomb civilians.

When asked forthrightly whether he would have ordered the actions against Afghanistan and al Qaeda the US began in October 2002, Kucinich said that because Osama bin Laden was a "non-state actor" the situation was "complicated," and that instead of the course of action the US took, he would have sought an "international coalition" to track down those responsible for the attack.

To his credit, Kucinich unambiguously denounced the idea, broached by his rival Howard Dean, that President Bush was warned in advance by some Saudis about the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Of course, Kucinich isn't a frontrunner, for which the Republic may be eternally thankful.

Update: John Cole's words resonate with me pretty well:

... I refuse to let this administration and Karl Rove treat me the way the Democratic party treats African-American voters. I DO have options. I have a lot in common with moderate to conservative Demorats ...

... I feel like I have been sold down the river when it comes to this hideous spending. The Farm Bill? The Education Bill? Medicare prescription drug plan? Marriage Promotion? Drug Testing in Schools? Faith Based Initiatives?

You know, when Bill Clinton pandered, he at least had the decency to be straight forward about it. And, I might add, Bill Clinton, despite what you may think his role was in the process, did sign a balanced budget at the end of the day. Chew on that, Mr. Delay.

Yep.

Brutalities of the Confederate Home Guard

 I never read the book Cold Mountain, so I went to the movie last night with an uncluttered mind, knowing only that the story line was of a Confederate soldier who deserts to make a long trek home to his beloved. This man is named Inman, played by Jude Law. Nicole Kidman plays the heroine, Ada Monroe, who loves Inman and waits faithfully for him to return. The movie opens on July 30, 1864, with the Battle of the Crater at the Union siege of Petersburg, Va., which Cold Mountain accurately presents as an unmitigated disaster for the Union side. 

As a result of the battle, his own near-death experience from a nasty neck wound, and of Ada's letters explaining how difficult life is for her, Inman deserts to make his way back to Cold Mountain, NC, and Ada. There is a lot to like about the movie and a lot I found to scorn, but this is not a movie review post.

The dramatic conflict of the movie revolves around the heroine's antagonist, Marshall Teague. Teague heads the local Home Guard, a paramilitary outfit empowered by the state government to deal with Confederate army deserters and civilians who gave them aid, even their family members. Desertion was the huge problem, especially in 1864 and 1865. More than 13,000 North Carolina Confederate soldiers deserted during the war. The privations of the war on the home front put many soldiers' families in truly desperate circumstances. All in all, tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers deserted to care for their loved ones. (Many returned to their units, however, and were generally forgiven once they did.) 

Teague and his small band of enforcers, chartered by the state, ruthlessly track down deserters. For selfish reasons, Teague leans hard on Ada. At one point Teague and his men saber to death a man in his own front yard for suspicion of harboring deserters. They torture his wife, expose the deserters and shoot them down on the spot. Such killings continue in the movie. 

I am sort of a stickler for historical accuracy in movies that derive the context from history. I found the Home Guard portrayals very offputting. (Other Home Guard detachments of the state hound Inman as he makes his way home.) I had never read of such brutalities being done by during the war by Confederate states to their own people, and reacted to this part of the move - and a major part it is - with scorn. This, I thought, was a fatal flaw of the story. While I had no doubt that Confederate authorities did try to capture deserters, I dismissed the idea that Home Guard "brownshirts" ever had the authority simply to shoot down deserters on the roadside or savage Southern civilian families. So I Googled "confederate home guard" today. And discovered Cold Mountain is accurate. Consider:

Allen Lowery was born 1795 in Robeson County, NC. He died 9 Mar 1865 in Robeson County, NC from Shot to Death by the Robeson County Home Guard and was buried in Lowery family cemetery near Pembroke, NC. ... Allen and his son (William) was killed by the Robeson County Confederate Home Guard, because they where believed to have helped Union soldiers during the Civil War.

According to historian Milton Ready of the University of North Carolina-Asheville,

To help enforce conscription, find deserters and collect taxes, the "Guard for the Home Defence" was formed. The Home Guard, as it came to be known, is depicted in [Cold Mountain] as a sort of Confederate Gestapo ... "A lot of the people in the Home Guard belonged to extended families and a lot of the people who didn't want to pay or who harbored deserters were in different families," Ready says. "They used the Civil War to settle personal debts that went back years."

And not just in North Carolina. In the northern Alabama hill country there remained strong pro-Union sentiment throughout the war in . (Not just in Alabama, of course; my own state of Tennessee was highly pro-Union in the east.) With the advent of Confederate conscription in 1862, the men there were subject to arrest by the Home Guard for not responding to the callup. Large numbers fled to the hills, leaving their families behind. But the Home Guard persecuted the families. The family of John Phillips, for example, suffered severely. Phillips related,

“They commenced robbing my family of the support I had left for them, they drove off my cattle and took my horses and mules, also my corn. They event went so far as to pour what meal my family had out in the floor and fill the sacks with meat. They event took their cups, saucers and plates, not leaving anything for their sustenance.”

Such brutalities led many of the men to make their way to Union lines and enlist in the Union Army. One such man was named Henry Tucker, who rather foolishly decided when on leave from Union service to visit his family in Alabama.

Henry Tucker ... was arrested by the Home Guard at his home in Marion County and tortured to death. He was tied to a tree, castrated, his eyes removed and his tongue cut out before he was literally skinned alive. He is buried at Hopewell Cemetery, south of Glen Allen, Ala. But Tucker’s vicious death was avenged. Home Guard leader Stoke Roberts who personally directed the torture of Tucker, was eventually caught by a group of unionists near Winfield. They took a long iron spike and drove it through his mouth and out the back of his head and nailed him to the root of a big oak tree.

Alabama men who remained hiding in the hills were tracked down and often killed on the spot.

Three sons of Solomon Curtis were all killed in Winston County. Joel Jackson Curtis was killed in 1862 for refusing to join the confederate army. George Washington Curtis, home on leave from the union army, was killed by the home guard in his yard while his wife and three children watched. Thomas Pink Curtis, the probate judge of Winston County, was arrested near Houston by confederate authorities in 1864 and taken to a bluff on Clear Creek where he was summarily executed with two shots to his right eye.

This is a repellant aspect of Southern history that is underreported. I wish a competent historian would undertake a disciplined study of the Home Guard. Some historians estimate that 100,000 white Southerners served in the Union Army; with brutalities committed by the Home Guard against many of their families, it seems that the war was a civil war not merely between North and South, but just as much between Southerners.

Should we nuke Mecca?

The calculus of revenge: if the terrorists surpass 9/11, how should we respond? 

Dean Esmay was not the first one to suggest American strike catastrophically against the Arab world in revenge for another 9/11-type, or worse, attack against America. But Dean’s proposal is probably the bluntest I’ve seen: 

U.S. Sister City Program
It works like this: You bomb one of our cities and we unleash 10,000 times the explosives on our "sister city" as a response.

Sister Cities:

New York City - Mecca
Washington D.C. - Medina
Los Angeles - Riyadh
Chicago - Damascus
San Francisco - Tehran
Seattle - Tripoli

And so on... You get the idea.

I simply do not understand why this seems acceptable to some people. It is a shockingly immoral proposal. Simply making war is never the purpose in itself of war. That is, simply inflicting destruction upon the enemy or the enemy’s people is never a just end in war.

Some may respond that I invoke just conduct of war only upon our own side, that the Islamists reject our Just War model and feel no compunction or moral restraint in the wholesale slaughter of American noncombatants.

Their objections are correct. We are self-restrained, our enemy is not. That’s what makes them terrorists. But we are not to become terrorists in response.

(I recognize that Islam is uniquely vulnerable to the kinds of attacks Dean proposes. Unlike Christianity (or Judaism, too), Islam is a religion of place. One of the five fundamental duties of all Muslims is to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once. If Mecca was atomically removed from the earth, would it even be possible to be a faithful Muslim? Perhaps Muslims would adapt in the same way the Jews adapted to the multiple destructions of their Temple in Jerusalem.)

Nonetheless, with the domestic threat alert is at its highest since May. Sober warnings have come from the mouth of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge that al Qaeda is " ‘anticipating near-term attacks that they believe will either rival or exceed’ the events of Sept. 11."

So let us accept Dean’s first premise, that an American city might suffer a catastrophic strike by al Qaeda that would kill many, many thousands of citizens. Imagine an atomic truck bomb in an American metropolis. Imagine 30,000 dead and 60,000 injured, or more.

What should America do in response?

I reject a nuclear response that seeks simply to lash out at presumed enemies and make Arabs suffer for suffering’s sake. Killing just to kill would not be warranted even under such grievous circumstances.

Such an attack must evoke a severe American response, but the first question is whether al Qaeda’s attack would mean that we should change our basic strategic aims, the foundation upon which everything else depends: 

... to inculcate far-reaching reforms within Arab societies themselves that will depress the causes of radical, violent Islamism. This task shall take a generation, at least; President Bush has said on multiple occasions that the fight against terror will occupy more presidencies than his own.

I say that a K-strike against America would make this objective more urgent, not negate it ("K-strike" being shorthand for "catastrophic strike," borrowing from old military abbreviations). 

Therefore, the American response to such an attack must do two things: 

1. Dramatically reduce, hopefully eliminate, the possibility of such an attack being repeated, 
2. At least not harm the furtherance of the basic American strategic goal in the Middle East. 

There are a lot of  measures the US could and should take if we are attacked by an attack of 9/11's destruction or worse. But draining the swamp that breeds Islamist alligators will remain the foremost goal, even as we intensify efforts to kill the alligators. 

Update: A correspondent responds that Mutual Assured Destruction is moral and he wonders whether I even understand it, which I found rather amusing since I was trained as nuclear target analyst at the height of the Cold War. 

For anyone who thinks that a nuclear attack by the US, even in response to one against us by terrorists, could possibly be sane, much less proper, I tell you bluntly: you aren't thinking at all and I am profoundly grateful you aren't setting national defense policy. 

Do you think that nuking any Arab city would make al Qaeda stop attacking us with every destructive means at their disposal? How many millions of innocents are you prepared to immolate before you try something else? Except then there will be nothing else to try. 

No one anywhere in the world would take our side on this. No one would rationalize the destruction of a third-world city and its people as their getting just desserts. There is no act we could take that would isolate us more, enrage the entire world at us more, make more uncountable new enemies, and convince billions of ordinary people around the world, not just Muslims, that America must be destroyed. 

I add that the correspondent, like me, professes Christian faith and I have to wonder whether he has considered how America's use of nukes against an Arab city would harm the cause of Christ in the world. Far from convincing the Muslims that their faith is bankrupt, it would cause untold millions of people in the second and third world to abandon the Church altogether. Christians in the third world, already under severe persecution in many places, would suffer immensely and the Church would be outlawed in places it is now gaining converts. 

People need to take off their blinders and try to think strategically. A nuclear response by us would completely destroy countless innocent lives - or do you actually condemn all Muslims, of any age or disposition? It would also destroy every alliance we have in the world. NATO would dissolve. The UK would withdraw all support wholly; Blair's government would fall immediately, to be replaced by the most virulent anti-Americans in England. We would lose all basing rights in every country in the world - Japan, Korea, Europe, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Turkey, Central Asia, all the rest. Americans across the world, including Europe, would be dragged from their homes or attacked on the streets and killed; scores of our embassies gutted. Muslim populations in Europe and the Americas would riot relentlessly. 

Every Iraqi would turn completely against us; our forces there would come under constant attack from everyone, and in Afghanistan also. Pakistan would turn wholly Islamist. The entire Muslim world, not just Arabs, would be convinced that what bin Laden has been claiming is indeed true - that the US wishes either to colonize or destroy Muslim nations and destroy Islam itself. Tens of millions of new fanatics would sign up for al Qaeda's jihad against us. 

I can't begin to list the nations that would sever diplomatic relations with us and expel our diplomatic staff, even the UK. All the intelligence relationships with the UK and other European nations - the most valuable we have - painstakingly built up since World War I would be aborted instantly. Same with Asia-Pacific countries. China would begin militarizing faster than ever. Russia would re-target American cities because its people would demand it. 

The world's economy, including America's, would plunge into the deepest depression in history with the consequences too horrific to imagine - social dislocations, fall of governments (their replacements rabidly anti-American), civil wars on every continent except, maybe, North America and Australia. 

Not only is MAD today a "strategy" of failure, it would be the means of our self destruction.

Why planned economies cannot succeed

In 1964, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was Leonid Brezhnev. He promised that year that the USSR would achieve "true communism" by 1980. In Marxism-Leninism, true communism was a state in which material production was so great that all human needs were met without shortage. Greed would therefore disappear and the inherent but capitalist-suppressed natural nobility of men and women would emerge. They would be transformed into true communists - altruists who worked each day for the good of the people, not for crass, selfish profit. 

Yes, the idea of true communism is just plain crazy, but it held huge numbers of the world’s people in its iron grip for many decades. Soviet Army officer Viktor Suvorov wrote in his book, The Liberators, of how the fatal flaw in the theory was exposed to him. 

One day as a cadet, as punishment, he was made part of a work detail to service a set of dachas in the countryside near Kiev. The dachas, country estates, were owned by the people, that is by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is to say they were owned personally by the party officials who used them. Suvorov and the others of his work detail were taken under armed guard inside the huge, guarded park where the dachas were.

We all suddenly stopped dead in our tracks without any order being given, we were so staggered by the unprecedented picture before us.

In a woodland clearing surrounded by the young fir trees, buildings of amazing beauty were scattered about in picturesque disorder. Never before or since, either in any fairy tale film, nor exhibition of foreign architecture, have I ever met such a turbulent, passionate and rapturous fantasy of colours, such an amazing intermingling of nature, in light, colour, elegance, taste, simplicity and originality. I am no writer and it is beyond my powers to describe adequately the sheer beauty of that place. . . .

The personal dacha of former Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev

It was winter and snow covered the land. The punishment detail was taken to a cesspool full of raw sewage from the dachas. They were ordered to spend the day carting the sewage in wheelbarrows to an orchard and spread it as fertilizer.

The work was cold, wet and very dirty. They found themselves covered in the sewage. Suvorov tried to explain to an artillery cadet that class differences were only a temporary, albeit necessary, condition of the transition to a true communist society, in which human generosity would flower and selfishness would disappear.

"Listen, artillery, life is hard for us now, but the time will come when we too will live in paradise, like this - under communism. That will be the life! Eh? . . .

"What I am saying is that the time will come when we too will live insuch heavenly gardens, in the same beautiful towns with lakes, surrounded by hundred-year-old pine trees, and apple orchards."

But the artilleryman is unimpressed with the vision (I might point out that the native intelligence and common sense of artillerymen around the world is head and shoulders above others’). He responds:

"And who, in your view, will carry the sewage under communism?"

The question [wrote Suvorov] was so simple and it was put in such a mocking tone, it was like being pole-axed. . . . Before, everything had been absolutely clear: everyone works as he wants and as much as he wants, according to his ability, and he receives whatever he wants and as much as he wants, i.e., according to his needs. . . .

You want to be a teacher? Right then, every kind of work is honored in our society. You want to be a wheat farmer? What work can be more honourable than to provide the people with bread? You want to be a diplomat - the way is open!

But who will be busy in the sewers? Is it possible that there will be anybody who will say, ‘Yes, this is my vocation, this is my place, I am not fit for anything better?’

Finally, Suvorov hit upon the answer: "Everyone will clean up after himself!" The other man responded, "Take Kiev, for instance, and see how much of its one and a half million inhabitants arranges his own sewerage system, in his free time, and cleans it and maintains it in good order." He continued,

"Who, under communism, will bury the corpses? Will it be self-service or will amateurs carry out the work in their spare time? There is plenty of dirty work in a society and not everyone is a general or a diplomat. Who will carve up the pig carcasses? And who will sweep the streets and cart off the rubbish? . . . Will there be any waiters under communism? . . .

"And finally, for someone who at present has not the slightest idea about how to set about sewage-cleaning, like Comrade Yakubovskiy himself for instance [the owner of the dacha - DS], has he any personal interest at all in the arrival of that day, when he will have to clean up his own crap all by himself? . . .

"What, exactly, does an ordinary, run-of-the-mill Secretary of the District Party Committee stand to gain from this communism? Eh? Plenty of caviar? But he’s got so much caviar already that he can even eat it through his [rear end] if he wishes. A car? But he has two personal Volga cars and a private one as well. Medical care? Food, women, a country house? But he already has all these things. So our dear Secretary of the most Godforsaken District Party Committee stands to gain bugger-all from communism!

"And what will he lose? He will lose everything . . . . He will lose his country house, his personal physicians, his hirelings and his guards. [So for party officials] communism has long since ceased to be of any interest to them at all."

And that is precisely why planned economies cannot work: when the people of the society are serfs to be told what to do (and they have to be, otherwise the economy cannot be "planned") the directors always keep hold of their power. There is no reason to give it up.

If the sewers are to be shoveled, and the other necessary but dirty jobs done, it can only be done by compulsion or by offering a reward high enough to make it worth someone’s while. That doesn’t mean that the voluntary worker will be paid a lot; I know that the garbage collectors in my town are not driving new Lincolns. It does mean that a true free-market the wage offered will have to be raised until there are takers.

The Soviet state never eliminated poverty. Until its end enormous numbers of its peasantry, the kulaks, lived in conditions barely materially better than under the Czar’s reign. And they were no more free, since the communist government forbade them to leave the land.

Endnote: The federal minimum wage is $5.15 per hour. Would there be any sewer shovelers who would voluntarily accept that wage if true free-market forces prevailed? I am wondering - and some smart readers please leave a comment - whether the federal min-wage law actually keeps the poor down because it sets a legal wage ceiling, not a floor, above which employers don’t really have to pay.

Donald Rumsfeld vs. the Army

You may recall that a few months ago the position of SecDef Donald Rumsfeld was that the invasion of Iraq could be successfully conducted with a much smaller force than was used in the Gulf War. The Army, led by then-SecArmy Thomas White and Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, demurred. In fact, when asked by a Congressional committee about the size of the forces required, Shinseki answered that the war and the occupation following would require hundreds of thousands of troops.

Rummy went ballistic and told the media that Shinseki "misspoke." He dispatched Deputy SecDef Paul Wolfowitz to Capitol Hill to, basically, call Shinseki a nitwit. The Rumsfeld plan for force strength was used (minus the 4th Mech, it must be noted, whose absence from the battle was not Rummy's fault) and now we've occupied Iraq since May 1, the date President Bush declared the end of offensive operations against Iraqi forces.

White left office not long ago, driven away by the ever vindictive Rumsfeld, who has a well-deserved reputation for wreaking vengeance on those whom he thinks have crossed him. (White, however, seems no paragon of virtue in his own right, so there's plenty of ego and anger all around.) Then White was interviewed two days ago by USA Today:

Former Army secretary Thomas White said in an interview that senior Defense officials "are unwilling to come to grips" with the scale of the postwar U.S. obligation in Iraq. The Pentagon has about 150,000 troops in Iraq and recently announced that the Army's 3rd Infantry Division's stay there has been extended indefinitely.

"This is not what they were selling (before the war)," White said, describing how senior Defense officials downplayed the need for a large occupation force. "It's almost a question of people not wanting to 'fess up to the notion that we will be there a long time and they might have to set up a rotation and sustain it for the long term."

Bill Quick said that White's piece was "sour grapes" and wondered what White's point was, especially considering (I presume Bill meant) now that White is out of office and can't affect policy any more. Specifically, Bill asked, "So what is White's point? That we shouldn't have taken out Saddam?"

This sparked a lively 13-comment debate in which Howard Veit and I both pointed out that neither White nor Shinseki ever argued against the war itself. The minor point of Shinseki's testimony was that a larger invasion force would be better than the one envisioned. The major point was that post-war occupation would require enormous personnel and material resources for a long time. Events since the end of offensive action show that Shinseki was more right than Rummy, though Rummy was correct that the invasion force could be substantially smaller than the Army seemed to want.

Phil Carter sums up the the status quo nicely. Pay particular attention to how the active-duty force is badly strained by the postwar commitment in Iraq:

The problem today is that we built a nation-building plan with insufficient flexibility to react to a changing situation on the ground. America has no more "9-1-1" force it can rush to Iraq to add combat power on the ground. Fully 50 percent of the Army's combat power is already devoted to Iraq. Add in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Korea, and other missions, and you soon have an Army stretched to the limit. We do have reserve formations capable of nation-building. However, those troops require extensive time to mobilize and deploy -- on the order of 3-6 months. We needed to call these troops up months ago to make a difference today. The right plan would have called these soldiers up as a contingency force, just in case. I realize that would have meant hardship for thousands of reservists like me. But it would've been the prudent strategy for America to pursue.

Phil's prescription? A much larger mobilization of reserve components is needed, especially of the National Guard. The stakes are too high in Iraq to try to do the job on the cheap. Get NATO involved. And come clean with the American people that the tasks before us are critical but will require much more resources and personnel than we have so far counted on.

I wrote in October 2001 (no longer online) that the job ahead was huge:

We and our western allies must lead the way out for those people. It will take a new kind of national commitment. It will cost a fortune. It will require new kinds of armies, armies not of soldiers but of engineers, agriculturalists, financiers, administrators and educators. It will take decades and there are no guarantees. But the alternative is to fight culture and religious wars generation after generation.

And yes, I still stand by "decades" overall. My grandchildren will be coping with these issues in some way, and I don't yet have a child out of high school.

Rumsfeld v. the Army

 You may recall that a few months ago the position of SecDef Donald Rumsfeld was that the invasion of Iraq could be successfully conducted with a much smaller force than was used in the Gulf War. The Army, led by then-SecArmy Thomas White and Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, demurred. In fact, when asked by a Congressional committee about the size of the forces required, Shinseki answered that the war and the occupation following would require hundreds of thousands of troops.

Rummy went ballistic and told the media that Shinseki "misspoke." He dispatched Deputy SecDef Paul Wolfowitz to Capitol Hill to, basically, call Shinseki a nitwit. The Rumsfeld plan for force strength was used (minus the 4th Mech, it must be noted, whose absence from the battle was not Rummy's fault) and now we've occupied Iraq since May 1, the date President Bush declared the end of offensive operations against Iraqi forces.

White left office not long ago, driven away by the ever vindictive Rumsfeld, who has a well-deserved reputation for wreaking vengeance on those whom he thinks have crossed him. (White, however, seems no paragon of virtue in his own right, so there's plenty of ego and anger all around.) Then White was interviewed two days ago by USA Today:

Former Army secretary Thomas White said in an interview that senior Defense officials "are unwilling to come to grips" with the scale of the postwar U.S. obligation in Iraq. The Pentagon has about 150,000 troops in Iraq and recently announced that the Army's 3rd Infantry Division's stay there has been extended indefinitely.

"This is not what they were selling (before the war)," White said, describing how senior Defense officials downplayed the need for a large occupation force. "It's almost a question of people not wanting to 'fess up to the notion that we will be there a long time and they might have to set up a rotation and sustain it for the long term."

Bill Quick said that White's piece was "sour grapes" and wondered what White's point was, especially considering (I presume Bill meant) now that White is out of office and can't affect policy any more. Specifically, Bill asked, "So what is White's point? That we shouldn't have taken out Saddam?"

This sparked a lively 13-comment debate in which Howard Veit and I both pointed out that neither White nor Shinseki ever argued against the war itself. The minor point of Shinseki's testimony was that a larger invasion force would be better than the one envisioned. The major point was that post-war occupation would require enormous personnel and material resources for a long time. Events since the end of offensive action show that Shinseki was more right than Rummy, though Rummy was correct that the invasion force could be substantially smaller than the Army seemed to want.

Phil Carter sums up the the status quo nicely. Pay particular attention to how the active-duty force is badly strained by the postwar commitment in Iraq:

The problem today is that we built a nation-building plan with insufficient flexibility to react to a changing situation on the ground. America has no more "9-1-1" force it can rush to Iraq to add combat power on the ground. Fully 50 percent of the Army's combat power is already devoted to Iraq. Add in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Korea, and other missions, and you soon have an Army stretched to the limit. We do have reserve formations capable of nation-building. However, those troops require extensive time to mobilize and deploy -- on the order of 3-6 months. We needed to call these troops up months ago to make a difference today. The right plan would have called these soldiers up as a contingency force, just in case. I realize that would have meant hardship for thousands of reservists like me. But it would've been the prudent strategy for America to pursue.

Phil's prescription? A much larger mobilization of reserve components is needed, especially of the National Guard. The stakes are too high in Iraq to try to do the job on the cheap. Get NATO involved. And come clean with the American people that the tasks before us are critical but will require many more resources and personnel than we have so far counted on.

Chaplains bearing arms in combat - is it ever permissible?

The Battle of Moe, Larry and Curly

A battalion-size task force of the 3d Infantry Division found itself embroiled in what was probably the bitterest fighting of the Iraq war when it entered Baghdad to take three objectives on April 7. Known for the nonce as the Battle of Moe, Larry and Curly (after the code names of the three objectives), a long and highly read-worthy account of the battle appeared in the Telegraph, which gave this account of fighting at the task force's tactical operations center:

The moment they arrived they were set upon by up to 600 fanatical, well-dug-in fighters. Supply sergeants, who never imagined they would fire their weapons in anger, found themselves shooting back for hours on end. Even the battalion chaplain, Steve Hommel, ended up shouldering an M16 rifle.

The Toronto Star adds more detail:

Chaplains aren't even issued firearms but this one, Steve Hommel, had the foresight to order his assistant to carry two M-16 rifles, just in case. And this was that case.

"He did what he felt he had to do," Maj. Denton Knapp was saying yesterday, as his platoon rested on ornate settees inside the Baath party museum in a now-secured sector command post codenamed China. "He did what was necessary to protect himself and his soldiers."

The chaplain helped kill the enemy - . . .

MSNBC cameraman Craig White was in the thick of the fighting and took compelling video of the fighting close up. White said on camera two days later that the chaplain had manned a .50-caliber machine gun during the fighting. (White said he almost picked up a rifle himself.)

The issue is this: is it permissible for chaplains to fight, even in extremis?

Regulations and policies of the US armed forces

The question is more than academic. Chaplains are specially categorized, along with medical personnel, under the Geneva Conventions. The US Army's Field Manual 16-1, Religious Support Fundamentals, states,

The Geneva and Hague Conventions give the chaplain noncombatant status, and the policy of the Chief of Chaplains forbids chaplains to bear arms. If captured, the chaplain is not a prisoner of war, but a "detained person" for the purpose of ministering to prisoners of war.

Field manuals are not law, but an Army-level policy, such as this one, has the force of law. Furthermore, Army Regulation 165-1, para. 4-3c states,

Chaplains are noncombatants and will not bear arms.

That's as clear and unambiguous statement as I have ever seen in an Army Regulation. Violating an Army Regulation is punishable under the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Department of the Navy's policy is stated thus:

Chaplains are forbidden to carry weapons. (SECNAVINST 1730.7; OPNAV 1730.1, Religious Ministries in the Navy; MCO 1730.6, Command Religious Programs in the Marine Corps; and the Marine Corps Manual) This restriction arises from the provisions of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 that accord a special protective and noncombatant status to chaplains. Pursuant to the Geneva Conventions, chaplains are exempt from being treated and retained as prisoners of war, and they are permitted to carry out their religious duties after falling into enemy hands. To be entitled to this immunity, chaplains must at all times, both in time of war and in time of peace, be engaged exclusively in religious duties; and they must always abstain from hostile acts. The Department of the Navy's policy is that bearing arms is incompatible with a chaplain's religious functions and spiritual duties. An individual chaplain who violates this policy endangers the noncombatant status of other chaplains. [emphasis added]

The chaplain in the Baghdad battle was an Army chaplain, not a Navy one, but it's clear that the principle is the same.

It seems unarguable that the intention of the services is that chaplains will not bear arms or use weapons in combat under any circumstances.

Provisions of the Geneva Conventions

Under the provision of Article 6 of the US Constitution, the Geneva Conventions are US law, being treaties ratified by the US Senate. (See my long explanation of the legal status of treaties in relation to the Constitution.) And the Conventions state,

Members of the armed forces of a Party to a conflict (other than medical personnel and chaplains covered by Article 33 of the Third Convention) are combatants, that is to say, they have the right to participate directly in hostilities [emphasis added].

The Conventions in the cited article thereof exclude chaplains from the category of combatant, and under the provisions of the Conventions, only combatants have the right to bear arms and fight. The American armed forces do not consider this distinction academic, either, because chaplains are issued military ID cards specifically identifying them as noncombatants, which is different than cards for other personnel. And though not a legal opinion, an article in Soldiers magazine (an official publication) says, ". . . the Geneva Convention precludes chaplains from bearing arms . . . ."

Some theological considerations

Clergy have accompanied military forces of Western nations for many centuries. In fact, by the end of the fourth century AD, probably 10 percent of the Roman army was Christian, a fact which made the government's final and fiercest persecution of Christians finally unsupportable, and which eased the ability of General (later Emperor) Constantine to proclaim openly his Christian faith.

Classical theology's fullest fruition came with Thomas Aquinas, who wrote extensively on the use of military force by civil authorities. According to Prof. Darrell Cole in "Good Wars," Aquinas reasoned that

. . . bishops and clerics cannot be soldiers because these occupations cannot "be fittingly exercised at the same time." Aquinas offers two reasons why. First, warlike pursuits keep clergy from their proper duties. In other words, their participation is unlawful, not because war is evil, but because warlike pursuits prevent them from doing their jobs.

(Note the Navy's requirement, above, that chaplains "must at all times, both in time of war and in time of peace, be engaged exclusively in religious duties.") Cole continues:

Second [according to Aquinas], it is "unbecoming" for those who give the Eucharist to shed blood, even if they do so without sin (i.e., in a just war). Unlike Calvin, then, Aquinas finds the duties of clergy to be more meritorious than the duties of soldiers. However, this does not mean that, in Aquinas' view, the soldier's duties have no merit. Rather, he employs an analogy to make quite the opposite point: it is meritorious to marry but better still to remain a virgin and thus dedicate yourself wholly to spiritual concerns. Likewise, it is meritorious to fight just wars and restrain evil as a soldier, but more meritorious still to serve as a bishop who provides the Eucharist to the faithful.

Here is one root of the custom against, later the prohibition, of chaplains bearing and using arms: to wield the sword in a just cause, justly employed, was no sin, but for clergy both to wield the sword and to offer the Eucharist (Lord's Supper) meant that the chaplain had abandoned his particular calling as a disciple of Christ. Both Reformer John Calvin and Aquinas (and for that matter, Martin Luther), held that soldiering justly could be considered a form of the Christian ministry of charity. But at least in Catholic theology, the battlefield forces a choice: the same person may not offer the Eucharist in ministry and also fight as a soldier. The two ministries were not contradictory, but they were incompatible in the same person.

My own thoughts

I am a former career artilleryman, now an ordained Methodist minister. I can easily envision that were I a chaplain in an intense battle that I might want to pick up a weapon to protect the lives of American soldiers. After all, although the Conventions are clear, the enemy faced that day was notorious for having no regard for the Conventions.

I'll never face that situation as I cannot re-enter active duty as a chaplain. But I have pondered Chaplain Hommel's dilemma and have asked myself what I would have done in his shoes.

The question for me would be this: Where would my greatest duty lie? I am more than sympathetic with Aquinas' concerns about the difference between the mutually exclusive soldiers' ministry of charity and a chaplain's ministry of bread and wine, although I am not sure that other Protestant chaplains would be very worried about it. Probably as a rule all clergy would consider their greatest loyalty must lie to God and the vows of ordination they took. The moral and legal conundrum is a highly personal one that can hoist a chaplain on the horns of a dilemma: shall he permit other soldiers to die in order to preserve an Army policy or his personal sense of piety? What is the greater good?

The question is not as simple as it seems. There is a bigger picture than the 50 feet surrounding soldiers in battle (50 feet being about the "give a hoot" circle soldiers in battle tend to have). In his book, Band of Brothers, Stephen Ambrose told of an attack in Normandy by 101st Airborne infantry against well-emplaced Germans. Several American soldiers were shot on a narrow road, down which a German machine gun had a clear field of fire. The chaplain with the 101st men went from wounded man to another on the road, ministering to them as best he could with water, prayer, while German bullets flew down the road. The chaplain was not hit and he was awarded the DSC for this action.

But I wonder: did the Germans gunners miss him on purpose, seeing his paraments and recognizing his protected status? Ambrose does not say. But I think it is likely.

The special status of chaplains under the Conventions is intended as a measure to ameliorate the cruelty of the battlefield and captivity and allow, even in war, for the spiritual care of combatants and POWs. If this status is violated by chaplains bearing and using arms then the enemy would have reason to target all chaplains as potential combatants and deny them their status as a detained persons, rather than POWs, under the GC if captured. The GC's rules are not for the chaplains' benefit, but for the troops and POWs. The Conventions recognize that the spiritual care of POWs and soldiers in battle is an obligation of warring parties that must be respected.

Is this concern a higher good that must be preserved, even at the cost of a chaplain's own life? I think that Christian chaplains (I would not presume to speak for other faiths') would answer, "Yes." We would remember that, like St. Paul, we have already died with Christ and that we will also live with him. So were I a chaplain, I would not arm myself to prevent my own capture or death.

The harder question is whether the greater good is to be preserved at the expense of other soldiers' lives, whom a chaplain could save by wielding arms. Or put another way: Would the potential abandonment of the overall benefits of chaplain noncombatancy be outweighed by a chaplain using arms to save a single soldier's life? A dozen soldiers' lives? A hundred? More?

For myself, were I a chaplain, I not sure that in extremis I could allow American soldiers to die when I could protect them by using arms. I am not sure that in good faith I could maintain my personal piety at the cost of other's lives. But I also don't think the question of "is it worth it" is simple, nor is my own personal piety the only issue. If chaplains generally discard or lose their status due to their own frankly unlawful acts, that loss would be terrible not only for chaplains, but for the Army at large.

What cost in lives should the Army be prepared to accept in order to preserve that status? In policy, the US armed forces say, "any cost." A cruel fact of war is that it necessarily forces value judgments about human life. Paul Fussell, an infantry commander in World War II, wrote that the enlisted ranks are material of war whom he said must be "used up" to gain the objectives desired. (But officers have historically suffered much higher casualty rates than the ranks.) If the Army is willing to expend its soldiers' lives to take Objective Moe, it's not such a leap to be willing to expend their lives to preserve law or the ideals of Western civilization, from which the Conventions spring. If that seems heartless, it is, and I don't like it myself. But there it is.

The fundamental duty of a soldier is obey the orders he is given, even at great risk to his own life. The Army's policy and regulation are clear: chaplains may not bear or use arms. I called the US Army Chaplain Center and School April 17 and spoke to an instructor what is taught to chaplain students there about the subject. He said chaplains are taught they may not bear or use arms "under any circumstances" (his words). The grim calculus of combat is that obeying any orders in battle carries the risk of dying or seeing your soldiers die. The prohibition of chaplains fighting is really just one of many orders that might be hard to obey in battle, or cause blood to be shed that might not have been shed otherwise.

I conclude that the prohibition must be maintained, even in extremis. But I would not want to be a chaplain speaking to a child whose dead soldier-father might have lived had I picked up a rifle at a critical moment.

Sometimes all courses of action are undesirable.

Chaplains bearing arms in combat - is it ever permissible?

The Battle of Moe, Larry and Curly

A battalion-size task force of the 3d Infantry Division found itself embroiled in what was probably the bitterest fighting of the Iraq war when it entered Baghdad to take three objectives on April 7. Known for the nonce as the Battle of Moe, Larry and Curly (after the code names of the three objectives), a long and highly read-worthy account of the battle appeared in the Telegraph, which gave this account of fighting at the task force's tactical operations center:

The moment they arrived they were set upon by up to 600 fanatical, well-dug-in fighters. Supply sergeants, who never imagined they would fire their weapons in anger, found themselves shooting back for hours on end. Even the battalion chaplain, Steve Hommel, ended up shouldering an M16 rifle.

The Toronto Star adds more detail:

Chaplains aren't even issued firearms but this one, Steve Hommel, had the foresight to order his assistant to carry two M-16 rifles, just in case. And this was that case.

"He did what he felt he had to do," Maj. Denton Knapp was saying yesterday, as his platoon rested on ornate settees inside the Baath party museum in a now-secured sector command post codenamed China. "He did what was necessary to protect himself and his soldiers."

The chaplain helped kill the enemy - . . .

MSNBC cameraman Craig White was in the thick of the fighting and took compelling video of the fighting close up. White said on camera two days later that the chaplain had manned a .50-caliber machine gun during the fighting. (White said he almost picked up a rifle himself.)

The issue is this: is it permissible for chaplains to fight, even in extremis?

Regulations and policies of the US armed forces

The question is more than academic. Chaplains are specially categorized, along with medical personnel, under the Geneva Conventions. The US Army's Field Manual 16-1, Religious Support Fundamentals, states,

The Geneva and Hague Conventions give the chaplain noncombatant status, and the policy of the Chief of Chaplains forbids chaplains to bear arms. If captured, the chaplain is not a prisoner of war, but a "detained person" for the purpose of ministering to prisoners of war.

Field manuals are not law, but an Army-level policy, such as this one, has the force of law. Furthermore, Army Regulation 165-1, para. 4-3c states,

Chaplains are noncombatants and will not bear arms.

That's as clear and unambiguous statement as I have ever seen in an Army Regulation. Violating an Army Regulation is punishable under the provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Department of the Navy's policy is stated thus:

Chaplains are forbidden to carry weapons. (SECNAVINST 1730.7; OPNAV 1730.1, Religious Ministries in the Navy; MCO 1730.6, Command Religious Programs in the Marine Corps; and the Marine Corps Manual) This restriction arises from the provisions of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 that accord a special protective and noncombatant status to chaplains. Pursuant to the Geneva Conventions, chaplains are exempt from being treated and retained as prisoners of war, and they are permitted to carry out their religious duties after falling into enemy hands. To be entitled to this immunity, chaplains must at all times, both in time of war and in time of peace, be engaged exclusively in religious duties; and they must always abstain from hostile acts. The Department of the Navy's policy is that bearing arms is incompatible with a chaplain's religious functions and spiritual duties. An individual chaplain who violates this policy endangers the noncombatant status of other chaplains. [emphasis added]

The chaplain in the Baghdad battle was an Army chaplain, not a Navy one, but it's clear that the principle is the same.

It seems unarguable that the intention of the services is that chaplains will not bear arms or use weapons in combat under any circumstances.

Provisions of the Geneva Conventions

Under the provision of Article 6 of the US Constitution, the Geneva Conventions are US law, being treaties ratified by the US Senate.  And the Conventions state,

Members of the armed forces of a Party to a conflict [other than medical personnel and chaplains]covered by Article 33 of the Third Convention are combatants, that is to say, they have the right to participate directly in hostilities [emphasis added].

The Conventions in the cited article thereof exclude chaplains from the category of combatant, and under the provisions of the Conventions, only combatants have the right to bear arms and fight. The American armed forces do not consider this distinction academic, either, because chaplains are issued military ID cards specifically identifying them as noncombatants, which is different than cards for other personnel. And though not a legal opinion, an article in Soldiers magazine (an official publication) says, ". . . the Geneva Convention precludes chaplains from bearing arms . . . ."

Some theological considerations

Clergy have accompanied military forces of Western nations for many centuries. In fact, by the end of the fourth century AD, probably 10 percent of the Roman army was Christian, a fact which made the government's final and fiercest persecution of Christians finally unsupportable, and which eased the ability of General (later Emperor) Constantine to proclaim openly his Christian faith.

Classical theology's fullest fruition came with Thomas Aquinas, who wrote extensively on the use of military force by civil authorities. According to Prof. Darrell Cole in "Good Wars," Aquinas reasoned that

. . . bishops and clerics cannot be soldiers because these occupations cannot "be fittingly exercised at the same time." Aquinas offers two reasons why. First, warlike pursuits keep clergy from their proper duties. In other words, their participation is unlawful, not because war is evil, but because warlike pursuits prevent them from doing their jobs.

(Note the Navy's requirement, above, that chaplains "must at all times, both in time of war and in time of peace, be engaged exclusively in religious duties.") Cole continues:

Second [according to Aquinas], it is "unbecoming" for those who give the Eucharist to shed blood, even if they do so without sin (i.e., in a just war). Unlike Calvin, then, Aquinas finds the duties of clergy to be more meritorious than the duties of soldiers. However, this does not mean that, in Aquinas' view, the soldier's duties have no merit. Rather, he employs an analogy to make quite the opposite point: it is meritorious to marry but better still to remain a virgin and thus dedicate yourself wholly to spiritual concerns. Likewise, it is meritorious to fight just wars and restrain evil as a soldier, but more meritorious still to serve as a bishop who provides the Eucharist to the faithful.

Here is one root of the custom against, later the prohibition, of chaplains bearing and using arms: to wield the sword in a just cause, justly employed, was no sin, but for clergy both to wield the sword and to offer the Eucharist (Lord's Supper) meant that the chaplain had abandoned his particular calling as a disciple of Christ. Both Reformer John Calvin and Aquinas (and for that matter, Martin Luther), held that soldiering justly could be considered a form of the Christian ministry of charity. But at least in Catholic theology, the battlefield forces a choice: the same person may not offer the Eucharist in ministry and also fight as a soldier. The two ministries were not contradictory, but they were incompatible in the same person.

My own thoughts

I am a former career artilleryman, now an ordained Methodist minister. I can easily envision that were I a chaplain in an intense battle that I might want to pick up a weapon to protect the lives of American soldiers. After all, although the Conventions are clear, the enemy faced that day was notorious for having no regard for the Conventions.

I'll never face that situation as I cannot re-enter active duty as a chaplain. But I have pondered Chaplain Hommel's dilemma and have asked myself what I would have done in his shoes.

The question for me would be this: Where would my greatest duty lie? I am more than sympathetic with Aquinas' concerns about the difference between the mutually exclusive soldiers' ministry of charity and a chaplain's ministry of bread and wine, although I am not sure that other Protestant chaplains would be very worried about it. Probably as a rule all clergy would consider their greatest loyalty must lie to God and the vows of ordination they took. The moral and legal conundrum is a highly personal one that can hoist a chaplain on the horns of a dilemma: shall he permit other soldiers to die in order to preserve an Army policy or his personal sense of piety? What is the greater good?

The question is not as simple as it seems. There is a bigger picture than the 50 feet surrounding soldiers in battle (50 feet being about the "give a hoot" circle soldiers in battle tend to have). In his book, Band of Brothers, Stephen Ambrose told of an attack in Normandy by 101st Airborne infantry against well-emplaced Germans. Several American soldiers were shot on a narrow road, down which a German machine gun had a clear field of fire. The chaplain with the 101st men went from wounded man to another on the road, ministering to them as best he could with water, prayer, while German bullets flew down the road. The chaplain was not hit and he was awarded the DSC for this action.

But I wonder: did the Germans gunners miss him on purpose, seeing his paraments and recognizing his protected status? Ambrose does not say. But I think it is likely.

The special status of chaplains under the Conventions is intended as a measure to ameliorate the cruelty of the battlefield and captivity and allow, even in war, for the spiritual care of combatants and POWs. If this status is violated by chaplains bearing and using arms then the enemy would have reason to target all chaplains as potential combatants and deny them their status as a detained persons, rather than POWs, under the GC if captured. The GC's rules are not for the chaplains' benefit, but for the troops and POWs. The Conventions recognize that the spiritual care of POWs and soldiers in battle is an obligation of warring parties that must be respected.

Is this concern a higher good that must be preserved, even at the cost of a chaplain's own life? I think that Christian chaplains (I would not presume to speak for other faiths') would answer, "Yes." We would remember that, like St. Paul, we have already died with Christ and that we will also live with him. So were I a chaplain, I would not arm myself to prevent my own capture or death.

The harder question is whether the greater good is to be preserved at the expense of other soldiers' lives, whom a chaplain could save by wielding arms. Or put another way: Would the potential abandonment of the overall benefits of chaplain noncombatancy be outweighed by a chaplain using arms to save a single soldier's life? A dozen soldiers' lives? A hundred? More?

For myself, were I a chaplain, I not sure that in extremis I could allow American soldiers to die when I could protect them by using arms. I am not sure that in good faith I could maintain my personal piety at the cost of other's lives. But I also don't think the question of "is it worth it" is simple, nor is my own personal piety the only issue. If chaplains generally discard or lose their status due to their own frankly unlawful acts, that loss would be terrible not only for chaplains, but for the Army at large.

What cost in lives should the Army be prepared to accept in order to preserve that status? In policy, the US armed forces say, "any cost." A cruel fact of war is that it necessarily forces value judgments about human life. Paul Fussell, an infantry commander in World War II, wrote that the enlisted ranks are material of war whom he said must be "used up" to gain the objectives desired. (But officers have historically suffered much higher casualty rates than the ranks.) If the Army is willing to expend its soldiers' lives to take Objective Moe, it's not such a leap to be willing to expend their lives to preserve law or the ideals of Western civilization, from which the Conventions spring. If that seems heartless, it is, and I don't like it myself. But there it is.

The fundamental duty of a soldier is obey the orders he is given, even at great risk to his own life. The Army's policy and regulation are clear: chaplains may not bear or use arms. I called the US Army Chaplain Center and School April 17 and spoke to an instructor what is taught to chaplain students there about the subject. He said chaplains are taught they may not bear or use arms "under any circumstances" (his words). The grim calculus of combat is that obeying any orders in battle carries the risk of dying or seeing your soldiers die. The prohibition of chaplains fighting is really just one of many orders that might be hard to obey in battle, or cause blood to be shed that might not have been shed otherwise.

I conclude that the prohibition must be maintained, even in extremis. But I would not want to be a chaplain speaking to a child whose dead soldier-father might have lived had I picked up a rifle at a critical moment.

Sometimes all courses of action are undesirable.