Iraq today suffers the devastating consequences of an air war that was fought to destroy not only the military, but the entire economic infrastructure of the country. The results of some 114,000 bombing sorties over six weeks killed between 100,000 and 200,000 people and injured several times that number. Electrical, water, sewage, and communication systems, food production plants, roads, bridges, and government buildings were mostly destroyed, and hospitals, schools, and even mosques heavily damaged. A member of a UNICEF fact-finding team spoke of the destruction as having "bombed Iraq back to the preindustrial era."
An April UNICEF report called particular attention to the threats of disease and malnutrition to small children, 3.25 million of whom are under 3 years old. Baghdad and other major cities lack electricity, clean water, and medical supplies and suffer critical food shortages. All this greatly hampers efforts to help the injured and to prevent outbreaks of communicable disease, such as typhoid, hepatitis, malaria, and cholera. Food rations of less than 1,000 calories a day make the weakened population increasingly vulnerable to these diseases borne by contaminated water.
The carnage, needless to say, has not ended with the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait, but continues in the form of devastating civil war fought between government troops and dissident Shiite and Kurdish groups. After having virtually called on Iraqi people to rebel against their government, the Bush administration declares its neutrality in these civil conflicts, and only after an international outcry was persuaded to extend help to the refugees (see "An American Disgrace," this page).
We need to examine critically the hidden American agenda in this war -- an agenda that dictated, almost from the outset of the crisis last August, the preference for a massive military solution, the refusal of the slower process of sanctions or the flexibility that might have allowed negotiated solutions, and an air war strategy aimed at massive destruction of the military and economic infrastructure of the country. This agenda went beyond the Iraqi relinquishment of Kuwait. It aimed at two major goals: the control of oil through creation of a permanent U.S. base in the Gulf, allied with Kuwait; and the destruction of Iraq as a rival military power to Israeli-U.S. hegemony in the region.
There are "linkages" of the Gulf war to several festering issues: Israeli hegemony in the region -- its occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, the Golan Heights, and southern Lebanon; Western neo-colonial control of Middle Eastern oil; the maintenance of wealthy autocratic regimes as go-betweens of this Western control; and the impoverishment of the Arab masses in this misuse of Middle Eastern wealth. All of these issues were present in the conflict from the beginning. Saddam Hussein didn't create these linkages, nor was he any authentic representative of solutions to them. He did make them visible.
Hussein's tyrannical methods of government are not exceptional, but are of a piece with the sort of tyranny we tolerate all the time when it is seen to be in our interest. Indeed, we tolerated and built him up militarily for five years as our ally against Iran. We turned against him not because we had suddenly noticed his human rights violations, but because after his victory over Iran in 1988, Israel, with the United States and Britain, decided Iraq had become too strong and might become a nuclear power. At present Israel is the only nuclear power in the Middle East and also has a large stock of chemical weapons.
IN POSTWAR KUWAIT, in the three weeks after American troops took it over, 400 workers, under the supervision of a Kuwaiti engineer and the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, worked 16 hours a day to refurbish the sumptuous palace of the Emir, Sheik al-Sabah. Hundreds of gold-plated bathroom fixtures and door knobs were installed, Italian marble and Moroccan tile floors cleaned and repaired, and walls hung with silk brocade. Hot and cold water ran freely.
Meanwhile, not a single government ministry was open, oil fires burned out of control awaiting equipment to put them out, markets were not open, and water and electricity had not been restored to the rest of the city.
In addition, in the month after "liberation," at least 2,000 foreign Arab nationals in Kuwait, mostly Palestinians, were detained and tortured by the Kuwaiti army, and some 30 to 40 Palestinians were rounded up by Kuwaiti vigilantes and summarily executed. In cases that have been examined, there is no evidence that these Palestinians were collaborators with the Iraqis. Moreover, there is ominous suspicion that this policy of targeting the Palestinians is actively condoned by the American forces. Several of those tortured reported American observers standing by.
Now consider the situation of Palestinians under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. During the six weeks of the war, the entire population of some two million Palestinians in these regions was under almost continuous curfew. Even the most minor violations, such as going out on a balcony or roof, or into a courtyard, were severely punished. Several children were beaten and shot as they attempted to play near homes, and a young mother, Lubna Nasser Said Kadah, was shot in the heart in the enclosed courtyard of her home holding her 1-month-old baby.
Since the end of the war, this policy of extreme restriction of Palestinian economic and social movement continues. Selected curfews are imposed on various areas of up to two weeks. In addition, a pass system has been imposed that prevents Palestinians from entering Israel, or moving from place to place within the Occupied Territories, without special work and travel permits (see "When a Nation Is Homeless").
The pattern of these policies is one of fundamental destruction of the economic and social infrastructures of Palestinian society. The goal is to make daily life intolerable, in the hope that eventually Palestinians can be persuaded to vacate the area to be replaced by immigrant Jewish settlers. There is new insistence in Israeli leadership that there is no need for a Palestinian state, since Jordan is the Palestinian state. And despite some bold words from President Bush that he intends to turn now to settling the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, whether the American political will exists to do that is in question.
HAVING NAMED SOME OF the basic realities in these three critical regions, I would like to look at the resources of our religious traditions for the promotion of truth, justice, and peace. Why is it that the three monotheistic traditions -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- seem to have such a poor track record in promoting moral good in the region of their birth?
All three faiths, it seems to me, harbor a basic problem of identification of divine exclusivity with ethnic-religious exclusivity. Each sees the oneness of God standing in a special relation to a favored people or religious community, whether on an ethnic basis, as in Judaism, or a multiethnic basis in the case of Christianity and Islam. This pattern of thought sets them in negative relation to all non-monotheistic faiths, but also in tension with the other two monotheistic faiths that are seen as posing rival claims to be the one true people of the one true God.
These rivalries are exacerbated precisely in the territory of the births of these three religions, for this territory is also filled with sacred sites that incarnate these rival claims. The Old City of Jerusalem has, at its center, a rocky outcropping which is both the third holiest site for Islam, the place where Mohammed went on his mystic night journey, and also the Temple Mount for Judaism, where Orthodox Jews and many Western Christians believe that the Jewish temple must be rebuilt in order to usher in the reign of God. Such rival interpretations of the same rocks turn places of holiness into sites of massacre.
In the light of these realities, how can we rescue our traditions as means to speak truth in pursuit of justice and peace? We must categorically refuse to allow governments, media, preachers, or any other public leaders to continue to exploit the culture of Manichaean conflict between good and evil, identified with one side of any conflict against the other, to claim that one group of people are the people of God and their opponents are the brood of Satan.
This does not mean that there is not better and worse in human affairs, but better and worse can never be truthfully assessed by such polarization. Rather we need principled assessment of the evils of military dictatorship, torture as an instrument of state terrorism, monopolization of wealth by oligarchies, and the impoverishment of the vast majority of the people. These patterns of behavior must be critically judged on all sides, whether in Iraq, Kuwait, Israel, the Soviet Union, or the United States, and national and international opinion mobilized to question these patterns wherever they exist.
It is here that the positive potential of our three religious traditions must come in. Let us set as our goal not the reign of God, the millennium, or some other symbol of the victory of absolute good over absolute evil in the near or distant future. Rather let us take as our paradigm of hope a more modest idea of the Hebrew scripture, that of the Jubilee year. In the Levitical laws, it was recognized that humans continually drift into injustice, confiscate and exploit land, and enslave one another. This tendency to the evil impulse can't be totally eradicated within history, but it can be continually corrected by periodic repentance and rectification, thus allowing societies to restore workable relations between humans and humans, and humans and the environment.
Each Sabbath works to restore this balance on a weekly basis. Every seven years this balance should be restored in more profound ways. Every seven times seven years the great Sabbath, or Jubilee, calls for a fundamental renovation that can set us anew on a basis of justice and sustainable relations.
There is no doubt that the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 - although intended to rectify past evils of Europe and set an afflicted people free -- has, in fact, released a train of new evils in the Middle East, because each side has shaped their relations to the other on the basis of mutual exclusion rather than inclusion. Is it far-fetched to imagine groups of Jews, Christians, and Muslims who might work together over these next seven years to make the year 1998 a Jubilee for the Palestinians and Israelis, and for the many peoples of the Middle East?
Dare we declare, "Let each return to their former lands and villages; let the ruined cities be rebuilt, let the imprisoned in the cells of Israel, Iraq, Kuwait, Syria, and elsewhere go free; the oppressed be liberated; alienated land be restored"? "Let a new basis of just relations between peoples flower."
Dare we imagine a Great Jubilee for the Middle East on the 50th anniversary of the founding of the state of Israel? Only in this way, I suggest, lies peace.
Rosemary Radford Ruether, a Sojourners contributing editor, was Georgia Harkness professor of applied theology at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, when this article appeared. This article is adapted from her speech on April 13, 1991, at an "After the War: Just Peace?" teach-in, sponsored by the Association of Chicago Theological Schools.
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