A conversation with John Buehrens reflecting on his visit to Iraq

The Rev. Dr. John Buehrens, former President of the Unitarian Universalist Association and currently minister, First Parish in Needham, MA, was part of a delegation of religious and humanitarian aid leaders who visited Iraq under the aegis of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S., December 27, 2002 -January 3, 2003. We talked with him on January 10, 2003.

What made the biggest impression on you during the trip?
The impact of the sanctions, of course.
It's twofold: I realized how, just as with the U.S. embargo of goods to Cuba, the state government has strengthened...so in Iraq, the dictator has become bound to the people through the pressure of the sanctions.

And on the humanitarian front, while it's easy to blame the situation on Saddam, the truth is that the sanctions regime has left the Iraqi people in a very weakened condition ...and the situation is particularly severe on children. 24% of all Iraqi children are being born prematurely; half a million are malnourished, the spread of infectious disease is endemic.

In addition, there is an arbitrariness concerning the administration of sanctions that is troubling. Our government vetoes importation of many things, claiming possible dual use: they are things like incubators, chemotherapy drugs for patients, things which could help the Iraqi people. The country has very well-trained physicians -- before the war, 20,000 of them - and they know what can and should be done, but they don't have the wherewithal to do it.

What are the key learnings from this journey, for you and for all UUs?
I didn't understand the way in which this secular nationalist regime has, like Marshall Tito did in Yugoslavia, succeeded in keeping a lot of ethnic religious factions living side by side in relative harmony, albeit at the cost of some control, particularly over the Muslim community...making sure the government appoints heads of mosques, shrines, etc. The Christian community is less controlled and quite diverse.

And I learned a lot about the relationship of religion and the state in Iraq, and this reminded me of my visit to China some years ago, where religious freedom doesn't exist, but the government manages relationships so that civil order can be preserved.

I wish people could have seen us on New Year's Eve at a potluck supper in an evangelical church in Baghdad. If Americans in conservative communities thought they would dropping bombs on children singing praisesongs to Jesus, they might think more about the human face of the Iraqi community, and not just about their leader...

It was good to have several people in the delegation who are experts in hunger relief work and who have done surveys of needs in other countries. I spent an afternoon with several of them and the Islamic relief agency...one of the few independent NGO's in the country: because it is international, it has a degree of independence, even though there is no authentic NGO sector.

Probably the most repulsive visit we had was with the head of the nominal NGO about peace and solidarity ...we were fairly hard with some of these people. Tariq Aziz is a smooth diplomat. When we challenged him on human rights issues, he pointed out that they had emptied their prisons. When we asked how many people had been imprisoned, he responded that there had been 62,000 in prison!

How do the Iraqis seem to be feeling about the U.S. and about the threat of war?
One thing to be said is that they make a great distinction between the American government and the American people. Many Americans would worry about anti-Americanism. We were welcomed warmly, very personally; we were reassured by many we talked to that [the Iraqi people] had no animosity toward the American people, but a grave sense of foreboding about the American government, and a sense of persecution about the American government, not to mention large differences about the American government position in the Mideast. Much of it is seen as neo-colonialism regarding oil, and not necessarily their own oil. Our policies about Iraq are much more about the fragility of oil supply from Saudi Arabia and the regimes there...and frankly, I think the administration has a plan to cut the cost of oil as a way of reviving the economy.

What do you think we, as people of faith, can do about the threat of war in this region?
There are always people who are against any military action, and there are always people who have some interest in it occurring, or whose ideology supports it. The historic peace churches and many liberals will be opposed to military force...then you will have others who will be chauvinistic. If we are to shift American opinion in regard to this policy, it will be shifted by people like some of the United Methodist leaders who led this group, and by UUs actively and assertively reaching out to neighbors and friends, and speaking out.

On the pragmatic level, we need to be concerned about the consequences of this policy. [Our delegation] came back convinced that this policy will not make us more secure but less; foment terrorism; radicalize people throughout the middle east; and expose us as a heavy-footed imperial power. We should tread more lightly than this. We can't understand why the containment of a weakened regime, even one with nasty weapons, is ignored, and we need to talk about principle...the principle of preventive war is dangerous pragmatically and morally. As tough-minded a statesman as Bismarck called preventive war suicide for fear of death.… The U.S. government's policy is catastrophic, and as Robin Hoecker (the other UUA delegate making this trip) said, her generation would have to prosecute a war and also clean up after it. I don't think the planning for a post-Saddam Iraq is realistic, and I dread the enmeshment an American attack would involve.

I encourage us to talk to Middle America, and to argue about consequences, and then say, besides, it's immoral: there is no justification for this war policy, religiously, theologically, ethically, but we need to talk about consequences first.

One of the things we're trying to do is put a human face on the issue. The indifference of so many Americans to foreign policy in general is the biggest thing that we are up against...the default position of Americans with foreign policy is isolationsist...they don't think about the wider world and our relations in it. It's the biggest flaw in our policy making. And it's the responsibility of religious leaders to help people have civil discourse on these matters.

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