On having the Armed Forces

[One of the blogs I frequently check is "staring into the distance" by the Rev. Dr. Paul Roberts, a priest of the Church of England from Bristol. He also joins with another priest from Bristol, the Rev. Simon Taylor, to do series of lectures on theology which are posted at virtualtheology.net. I find them personally enjoyable and recommend them highly.

[I found this article from Paul Robert's blog thought-provoking. I haven't heard of instances in the US such as he describes, but if we look back to Viet Nam, I think we'll find them. I think that, if military members have a duty to fight when the Administration of the day orders them to go, we have a duty to support them and their families. We seem to feel that more strongly over here. Remember this commercial from a few years ago?



I don't completely agree with his position on whether this is a just war, but his point of view is reasonable. I don't think it's a "slam dunk" either way. (Come to think of it, since that's the phrase the head of the CIA used to say that Iraq had WMD's, maybe I shouldn't use it...)

Anyway, here's an excerpt from Paul Robert's post. You can see the whole thing here.]

On having the armed forces

There’s an interesting, if badly-spelt, debate going on on the BBC Have Your Say website. This follows a recent news report of how personnel from RAF Wittering have been ordered not to wear uniform in the local town of Peterborough, following incidents of servicemen and women being insulted because of anti-war sentiment. The debate includes stories of similar incidents happening to forces personnel around the country (for example, staff from RAF Brize Norton denied entry to a petrol-station on the grounds that their uniforms would “offend the public”).

I find myself getting very angry at this for all sorts of different reasons. One reason is that it feels so unbelievably ungrateful to people who are putting their own lives at risk, and sometimes losing them, in the service of this country. The second is that ignorance on this scale always makes me angry. Because for me it is symptomatic of a deeper cultural, political and theological ignorance which is growing.

I deeply opposed the decision to go to war in Iraq and continue to believe that it did not fulfill the conditions for a Just War, so we should never have got in there in the first place. I believe that history since has borne those convictions out. BUT, once a war begins, the situation changes. We are years down the road now: the decision on whether and when to leave that country is an entirely different one - indeed it is a more difficult one, perhaps, than the decision ever to join war in the first place. So political voices raised in opposing the current occupation need to answer the question of how best to bring it to an end, and in so doing, must address the issue of the widest welfare for all human beings presently caught up in the situation.

And yet, none of these issues bear upon the morality or position of a single member of the armed forces, nor upon the armed forces themselves. These are political questions to be discussed in the wider context of public debate in Britain. They are particularly matters for the government of today. If people disagree with there being a single British soldier in Iraq, they need to bring that to the door of the people who are keeping them there - our government. They are there because we elected a government which decided to join war in Iraq. We also re-elected them afterwards. Maybe we made a mistake, but if so, then we need to own responsibility for that and exercise it in appropriate ways. Insulting service personnel is not an appropriate way.

But this raises the spectre of a much deeper ignorance which, sadly, I have encountered in Christian circles on occasions. Britain, like most nations, keeps a standing army, navy and air-force. Their responsibility is to follow the orders of our democratically-elected government and, when so ordered, to join conflict and in that arena to use a variety of methods demanded by it to bring about the wishes of our government according to rules of engagement set by our government. These include pursuasion, protection, coercion, and, where no other option remains, to kill. In the field of conflict, this also includes the real possibility of being killed in the process, since war is like that.

Having laid it out like that, we may feel revulsion at the prospect of war. Most civilized human beings normally do so, including members of the armed forces. War is a horrendous context to put any human being, but our armed forces have the duty, under the British constitution, to enter those contexts on our behalf and to carry out the will of our representatives in government. They are doing that right now, our our behalf, in Iraq. Wars are a bit like sewers: nobody wants to go into them, but someone in the end does so on everyone else’s behalf. Our armed forces are there and operating “in our name”. Whilst Britain maintains armed forces, they will continue to operate “in our name”.

***

About three or so years ago, some time after the start of the present Iraq conflict, I was sitting in a field at the Greenbelt Festival at a service of Holy Communion. An entire litany had been constructed, protesting about the war, with the response “Not in our Name”. I love the Greenbelt Festival, but I found this nauseating. Here we were, a crowd of mostly middle-class, western Christians, few of whom had ever seen a gun fire a bullet, nor heard the sound of rifle-fire in real-life, chanting this liturgical response whilst thousands of British soldiers were risking their lives and carrying out the ugly task of war for precisely that: “in our name”. The “Not in our Name” chanting bandwagon had begun earlier that year, but, crucially, it had begun after the conflict had begun, and troops were already engaged. It was the wrong sentiment, wrapped up in the wrong catch-phrase: wrong, because instead of arguing for a precise course of action (such as “troops out now”) which could be subject to a political and moral debate over its wisdom and practicality, it was seeking to dissociate the protesters from the link with the armed conflict, and therefore the armed personnel who are out there “in our name”. It was a woolly phrase, whose imprecision was at best insulting, and at worst, immorally abandoning people who we, through our democratically-elected government, had contracted to work on our behalf in a dangerous situation. That was bad enough, but at Greenbelt it wasn’t even being chanted to the government, it was being chanted to God. So what on earth was going on?

My conclusion now, which I had dimly been aware of through my anger at the time, but am now much more clear about, was that it was a large-scale attempt at pious guilt-avoidance, founded on ignorance of how politics, and therefore the world, works.

***

There are three aspects of maturity which sometimes come slowly. One is to realise that sometimes you bear responsibility for situations which you didn’t directly, but only indirectly, bring about. The second is to learn that the act of living brings inevitable guilt. The only thing that can be done about this is to do what we can to avoid incurring guilt whilst we can, but once it is too late then we need to ask for forgiveness, rather than wash our hands of responsibility. The third thing is to realise that ‘no man is an island’ - we work as a society, and we bear responsibility for the actions of that society, because we are part of it.

It’s the sad failure to realise these facts that leads to well-meaning Christians piously indulging in act of (un-)ethical “handwashing” in a Gloucestershire field, and to people insulting uniformed personnel in Peterborough. We don’t want the responsibility, we don’t know what to do with the guilt, and we’d rather the whole world just go away.