IRAQ IS A DOMESTIC SOCIAL-JUSTICE ISSUE: The bottom line of financial reality really is the bottom line: Spending one trillion dollars to destroy leaves very little left over to create.
IRAQ IS A DOMESTIC SOCIAL-JUSTICE ISSUE
At the March 7 interfaith peace witness at the U.S. Capitol, the last part of the service was a sharing of bread. I had arranged to buy one hundred loaves of bread –- many different sorts of bread –- and I was assigned the task of introducing the sharing and blessing the One through Whom the seed, the soil, the sun, the rain, and human endeavor unite to make this bread.
I made the point that in Hebrew (and also in Arabic and Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke) "bread" or "food" is "lechem" and that in Hebrew, "war" is "milchama." The prefix "mem" with which the word "milchama" begins can mean "away from" – so that war is what happens when people are "away from" bread, deprived of bread.
Not only the bread we eat with our mouths to sustain our bodies, but intellectual sustenance, emotional sustenance, spiritual sustenance. When we deny people the bread of dignity, of education, of community –- violence results.
And the inverse is also true. When we make war, the result is to take from people the many different kinds of bread they need.
Even before the US government invaded Iraq, The Shalom Center was warning that the war would have a disastrous impact on American society at home, depriving our own country of the sustenance we need, as well as deeply damaging our international relations and our security.
Five years later, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz believes the overall costs of the war will reach $3 trillion -- not just the immediate costs to taxpayers but also costs to our country of medical care for a generation of maimed veterans, interest on the immense national debt rolled up to pay for the war, etc. .
"For a fraction of the cost of this war," said Mr. Stiglitz, "we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more."
Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International -- hardly a flaming radical! -- joined Stiglitz in testifying to the war's enormous costs before the Congressional Joint Economic Committee: The money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.
EACH DAY.
(Much of this information about Stiglitz' and Hormats' analysis comes from Bob Herbert's column in the NY Times of March 4, 2008; some from Stiglitz' own writings. Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have just published a book called The Three Trillion Dollar War.)
Yet there are some social-justice organizations that will not deal with the war at all.
These groups do excellent work -- but limit not only their work but, it seems to me, the impact they can have on American society by defining social justice as stopping this side of the water's edge.
For of course spending a trillion dollars in Iraq (let alone three trillion) has meant massive shortfalls in desperately needed spending on this side of the water. It also sets up enormous federal deficits for the future, which will keep handcuffing other efforts to heal America. And this war (like most) has also handed much greater power to those who already held great power, and has greatly weakened civil liberties -- not the ingredients of social justice.
So it seems to me that the war will have to end before our country can address the deep needs of healing the wounded earth, creating decent schools, building railroads, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, treating immigrants and refugees decently.
And out of the history of the ineffective war-ending efforts of the last year, it seems clear that it will take the united efforts of all of us who care about social justice to bring about an end to the war.
In the world I know best - the Jewish community -- some social-justice groups have found it possible to address the war as well as domestic concerns: the Progressive Jewish Alliance in California and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice in New York City. PJA condemned the war plans from the beginning, on the basis of the illegality, immorality, wrong-headedness, and likely destructiveness of the war itself, even without examining its impact at home. JFREJ worked its way into opposition to the war by starting from a commitment to local needs of workers and the poor in New York, and then saw how damaging the Iraq war became to any effort to meet those needs.
Three national Jewish organizations have opposed the Iraq war since before the invasion, and three have come to oppose it during the past year or so.
The three veteran opponents are The Shalom Center, Tikkun (the magazine; the Tikkun Community did not address Iraq for several years), and the Workmen's Circle/ Arbeterring, a venerable heir of the Yiddish-speaking secular socialist tradition which is now in the process of rejuvenating itself, having merged with the magazine Jewish Currents and reached out to a new generation.
The three newer opponents are ALEPH Alliance for Jewish Renewal, the Union for Reform Judaism, and the National Council of Jewish Women.
All six of us are concerned with domestic social justice as well as the war.
Yet some Jewish social-justice organizations are keeping hands off the war. One reason is that they are seeking to avoid dealing with issues involving Israel and US foreign policy that might affect Israel, because they see those issues as "too divisive" among Jews who agree about education, civil liberties, corporate misbehavior, women's rights, gay rights, etc.
They are certainly right that raising the issues most directly related to Israel are indeed likely to bring on shouting matches and worse among their supporters. But at this point, that does not seem likely when the issue is Iraq.
For more than two-thirds of the Jewish community is now convinced that the war was a profound mistake, and wants to end it. There are still disagreements about how swiftly and on what terms, but those could be dealt with in the usual give-and-take of organizational policy-setting.
Even if these groups continue to avoid the war, they are doing valuable work. But it seems to me their work could become much more valuable than it is.
For here the bottom line of financial reality really is the bottom line: Spending one trillion dollars to destroy leaves very little left over to create.
Shalom, salaam, peace ---
Arthur
(Rabbi Arthur Waskow)
The Shalom Center www.shalomctr.org