Forgiveness in a Time of War

by Andrew Himes, executive director of Voices in Wartime Education Project

War and forgiveness. The two concepts seem mutually exclusive, don't they? How can they have anything to do with each other? We're told that we're at war, and that to win a war we must be resolute, we must be stalwart and certain of the righteousness of our cause, and we must be clear about our purpose, which is to defeat the enemy. I don't see how I can disagree with this set of assertions, which rest in turn on a set of assumptions based on a number of certainties about the way the world is shaped. Assuming there are some incorrigibly evil people out there in the jungle or desert or concrete canyon or wherever who hate me for some inexplicable reasons of their own and wish to act on their hatred by threatening my survival and my family and friends, then I would be utterly stupid not to try to kill them before they succeed in killing me. Forgiveness really doesn't enter this picture, except maybe after I've killed those evil people, and then only as a practical afterthought, with the purpose of helping myself to sleep better at night.

It strikes me, however, that this is the logic of the battlefield. From the point of view of survival for a soldier, it makes perfect sense to adopt such black-and-white categories. You take them out or they will take you out. Simple as that. Part of the problem, of course, in a place like Iraq, is that it is so difficult to know who the enemy is. Who do you target in order to remain alive? Who do you kill in order to protect yourself, defend the lives of your buddies, complete your deployment, and return to your family? Is it that 12-year-old kid aiming that AK-47 at your head on a street in Mosul, or is it that teenage girl with a suicide vest strapped to her body beneath her robe as she meanders up to a checkpoint, or is it the nameless, faceless murderer who staged a car bomb at the side of the road to be triggered by a lethal call to a cell phone as your Stryker vehicle trundles past, or is it a black-turbaned mullah in a Baghdad neighborhood exhorting a gathering of desperately poor and terminally unemployed youth to drive the American occupiers out of their country with all available blood and firepower?

Psychologist Robert Jay Lifton created the phrase "atrocity-creating situation” during the Vietnam War, and uses it to describe a “counterinsurgency war in which U.S. soldiers, despite their extraordinary firepower, feel extremely vulnerable in a hostile environment,” amplified by “the great difficulty of tracking down or even recognizing the enemy.” The built-in logic of being deployed to a place like Iraq during the current conflict seems tailor-made to confront soldiers with morally complex choices in ambiguous circumstances. Who do we blame when things go wrong and noncombatant civilians are killed? Who do we hold accountable when a soldier inadvertently sheds innocent blood in the midst of a firefight? Even more troubling, who is guilty of criminal misconduct when a soldier who has been told that "Islam is evil" commits an act of murder or rape, mayhem, torture or brutality against a randomly-selected civilian in a Muslim country?

Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the war itself, quite apart from whether it was smart or stupid, honorable or duplicitous, just or unjust to invade Iraq in the first place, no matter whether Saddam had or did not have weapons of mass destruction, it seems clear that prominent among the victims of the war will be tens and hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the US military.

Veterans will be paying the price for the service they undertook voluntarily, on behalf of the rest of us, for many decades to come. That price will be counted in millions of nightmares and wasted days, in broken marriages and orphaned children, in depression, alcoholism and suicide, in homelessness and poverty, in crushed hopes and failed dreams.

Is it possible that an alternative logic is available to those of us who have the luxury of not finding ourselves on a battlefield? At the risk of somebody calling me a fool -- a charge that would doubtless be well-deserved -- I'd like to propose a little mental exercise. Please join me in considering the words of General David Petraeus, current US commander in Iraq, quoted on March 8th of 2007 shortly after assuming his new position: "There is no military solution to a problem like that in Iraq."

I wonder if it might help us to search for the non-military solutions Petraeus implies are essential if we found a way to use the non-military technique of listening to our enemies? If Petraeus is right, we will have to expend a lot more energy and resources in conversing with those whom we have deemed enemies than in destroying them.

And if so, that old-fashioned notion of forgiveness will come in handy. After all, it's hard to engage in a sincere and mutual search for peaceful solutions if you haven't forgiven your conversation partner -- your sworn enemy -- in advance of the conversation.