Thou heardst me, truer than tongue, confess...

The Path to Peace

The interview by George M. Anderson, S.J., with Claudette Habesch, Obstacles to Peace, A Palestinian-Christian Perspective (11/17), demonstrates how the Israeli security wall is really a weapon of war. When completed, this wall, referred to by some as the apartheid wall, will be 220 miles long, 25 feet highthree times as long and twice as high as the Berlin Wall. Instead of guns, tanks and planes, cement and steel are used as weapons of dispossession and human brutality.

In the words of Neve Gorday, a teacher of politics and human rights at Ben-Gurion University, It will stand as the largest open-air prison known in the world. It will separate villages from water supplies, children from schools, farmers from their lands. Families will not have access to some of their ancestral cemeteries. Other Palestinian parents will even be cut off from their adult children. The tens of thousands of trees that are being removed in the process will have disastrous effects on the watershed.

This wall does not separate Israel from Palestine; rather it divides Palestine from itself, and will imprison more than 210,00 Palestinians, 76 villages, towns and cities, according to the Israeli human right group B’tselem. Bulldozers are building barriers between the sick and their hospitals. More than 10 Palestinian women have already been prevented from getting to hospitals to deliver their children. A human rights group reports that Israeli soldiers would not let an ambulance, just 10 meters away, transport a woman giving birth to the hospital. This resulted in her delivering the child at the checkpoint.

Does anyone really believe that this will add to the security of Israel or promote the waning road map of peace plan? Former President Reagan shouted: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall, referring to the Berlin Wall. President Bush and our elected officials raise little more than a whimper against this wall. Each day the media adeptly reports single acts of violence committed by the Israeli military or a Palestinian terrorist while failing to report the longer-term and far more severe human consequences of building this wall. Could it be that the blood and body count over so many years has rendered us too numb for any sensible reaction? Or worse, have we been conditioned to think that Palestinians are less than human and deserve such treatment? The silence of churches and citizens and governments is deafening.

This week the Red Cross announced that it will end its food program to the Palestinians, stating that it is now the responsibility of Israel. The United Nations declared that Israel has created an inhumane disaster. When will it stop?

Israel’s desire for security is understandable, but imprisoning the Palestinian people and degrading their human dignity will only prove a source of more violence. Only a just peace will provide security both for the Israeli and Palestinian peoples now, and for their children in the future. Only a sensible and sane plan that is based on a just solution will ensure a peace that will last.

(Rev.) Richard Broderick

The Housing Challenge

Your editorial Low-Income Housing Crisis (11/10), uncritically accepts the conclusions of a housing advocacy group, responding to a supposed crisis, that are based entirely on arbitrary standards. They state that minimum acceptable housing is a modest two-bedroom unit, and for that people should pay no more than 30 percent of their income. The authors say these standards require an income of $15.21 per hour. That would amount to more than $31,600 per year, not including benefits, even for entry-level workers.

While decent housing should be available at affordable prices, these are totally unrealistic standards. Why do you support them? Had I written such an article for my high school Jesuit teachers, they would have put my youthful idealism into realistic perspective. What would Jesus do? Surely he would help the truly needy. But might he not ask, for example, what is wrong with a one-bedroom apartment for a single occupant? Or for two or more roommates to share housing? Or for unmarried young adults to remain with their parents a while longer? What about living in a boarding house? (It would be useful for America to explore why boarding houses are virtually extinct, despite the apparent need.) Jesus might also ask married couples, what is wrong with both partners working and halving the housing percentage bite? Jesus might go further and ask whether high minimum wages help some people but result in fewer employed, and whether rent control laws help the needy or the savvy, while such laws play havoc with housing markets.

As a faithful subscriber for over 40 continuous years, I have become increasingly distressed over your leftward drift. While the church and faithful expect you to be an advocate for the poor, you have moved into the Looney Left, rarely tempering social concerns with those of individual responsibility. I just cannot bear any more of this addlepated thinking, so please cancel my subscription.

Larry Dacunto

Four years later his folksiness wears thinner than ever in his struggle to keep pace with the script on Iraq. It is hard not to be confused, considering the tangled array of rationales for the war. The administration has proffered an assortment of expedient explanations for its actions, each delivered with impatient disbelief that anyone could question its univocal and inevitable wisdom.

Keen to codify in the American imagination the link between the Iraq war and the war on terror, the administration has attempted to discredit its critics and assuage voters. Thus Vice President Cheney, who took the lead in the administration’s exaggerated equation of Iraq and terror: In Iraq, we took another step in the war on terror; Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz: Military and rehabilitation efforts now under way in Iraq are an essential part of the war on terror; Secretary of State Powell: This was an evil regime.... Hussein would have stopped at nothing until something stopped him. It’s a good thing that we did; National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice: This was a regime that pursued, had used and possessed weapons of mass destruction, twice invaded other nations, defied the international community and gave every indication that it would never disarm and never comply with the just demands of the world.

Why did we go to war? The administration’s answer has been a rationale du jour that reveals its disdain for the international community and for the very honor and integrity that candidate Bush touted. The link between terror and Iraq being tenuous at best, Donald Rumsfeld employs a favorite theme of the administration by justifying the war in terms of humanitarianism and freedom: Our mission is to help Iraqis so that they can build their own nation. Amazingly, the administration position is at once fixed and mixed: we went to war because of the safety and security of the American people; to topple an oppressive regime; because Saddam failed to fulfill United Nations sanctions; to give the Iraqis their country back; to combat terror; to bring peace and democracy to the Middle East.

The last is particularly sanguine, if not delusional. Citing U.S. attempts to transform societies in Central America and the Philippines, the historian Paul Kennedy urges Americans to have some humility about whether a Western-led crusade for democratization is a wise policy...in this troubled region.

The administration, however, with the subtlety of a Bill O’Reilly or Michael Savage, scorns humility in American foreign policy as feckless and effete. The way to lead is not by example but by force. The primary tools of this leadership style are pre-emptive war and the rhetoric of fear, tools best employed with a black-and-white, with-us-or-against-us brazenness.

Nicholas Lemann captured the administration’s dangerously oversized optimism in a recent New Yorker essay: The President’s rhetoric divides the world into those who have passion and courage and those who believe in nothing except a self-defeating caution. The willingness to make the gesture overwhelms whatever difficulties there are on the ground.

Such difficulties multiply daily. To increasing numbers of Americans it has become painfully obvious that national security needs did not require us to attack Iraq. Yet, ever more defiant and unrepentant, the administration has apparently learned nothing from the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. Trust us, they said before the war, and Trust us, they say now. We know what we’re doing. There’s a lot you don’t know. The lacuna left by such unsatisfactory arguments is staggering to all but the most partisan supporters, who dismiss all criticism as negativity.

This brash and blinkered optimism, along with half-hearted and ham-fisted diplomacy, got us into the war; manifestly poor planning makes the prospect of a satisfying outcome grim. The president egregiously rebuffed intelligence that did not fit his assumptions, repudiating the invaluable knowledge of the State Department’s Future of Iraq project, and seized upon reports that did. Whether one believes that the administration has been more hypocritical or deluded, on what basis should we take seriously its future pronouncements or dire warnings?

Ironically and tragically, terrorists are the biggest winner from the administration’s recklessly overconfident foreign policy. As Benjamin Barber, author of Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism and Democracy, puts it: Pursuing preventive war at a growing cost in American lives and money against regimes the Bush administration doesn’t like or countries that brutalize their own people may appeal to American virtue, but it undermines American security.

The wishful thinking that got us into the war persists. No one is happy about this except our sworn enemies. Allowing arrogance to pass for leadership and fiction to pass for fact only exacerbates the problem.

We do know, with absolute certainty, that he [Hussein] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon.