The Gulf war
McCarthy, Abigail
close. Even General Norman Schwarzkopf said in December that it was better to wait eighteen months in the desert than to lose a single life. It may be, as Larry Weiss, a member of the...
...The true aggression that caused the fighting will remain and has created an environment that promotes imperialism, injustice, and, very likely, future conflicts...
...Is this something to be proud of...
...The group would sing for awhile, then drink beer or soft drinks and eat and talk...
...That was murder, that was wrong...
...Under such procedures, it is hard to imagine any bar on any president waging any war in the future that he says is required to correct gross injustice...
...All is not well in either civil-war-torn Iraq or in Kuwait, where Iraqi torturers of Kuwaitis were succeeded by Kuwaiti tor- turers of Palestinians and unlucky Iraqi prisoners...
...A high-school senior asked about the war in my local diocesan paper was emphatic: "I did not support the war at all...
...The other members of the group were either single, or childless married people, and thus a little more portable...
...Our house was the usual location for the group's meetings because we were the only singers with young children...
...The church tends to be free of the obsessions that characterize much of the larger society...
...Where the war was to be waged was not so important as that it be one for which he could gain widespread domestic support...
...then--at the very flash point--the rush on Congress to approve it...
...This ridicule did not exclude me or Regina...
...What we had in common was a love of madrigals, of singing, and a tolerance for hearing both loves challenged by our often slipshod performance in the name of the higher love...
...Though we were a rel- atively young bunch, our youth was pretty relative, with a fifteen-year age spread between the oldest and youngest member...
...We will face the reality of the morning after...
...sup- port for freedom movements in the Soviet Union to ensure its forbearance...
...Perhaps our postgame euphoria will be succeeded by a postgame hangover...
...There is hope but the ques- tion still remains: What kind of people are we...
...We may come to question whether the cost in American arms and even the small cost in American lives was worth it...
...What did we win...
...But will we recover from our war-induced callousness...
...An enjoyment of the com- pany--a surprise in that enjoyment, con- sidering how diverse we were--also had a lot to do with it...
...At the chapel where we worship there are people of all 19 April 1991:249...
...It may be, as Larry Weiss, a member of the Minneapolis Pledge of Resistance, believes and wrote (Minneapolis Star-Tribune, March 20) that the resort to war was attributable to only one man, President Bush: "Bush had his own reasons for choosing slaughter when waiting would have worked...
...Now our leaders seem passive --even acquiescent--in the face of Saddam's slaughter of Kurds and Shiites...
...The goal Bush expressed in 1989 had only one practical meaning that from the time he came into office he was looking for a war to wage...
...The kids would hide under the piano and occasionally com- ment on the stupidities of one or another of the adults, though not to our faces...
...Surprisingly, hawkish columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, in a column acknowledging their prewar errors in prediction (Washington Post, March 8), also fault the president, not so much for his motives as his method: "We do continue to question the means chosen by Bush to go to war: mobilization and deployment eight thousand miles away of an immense military force without a sin- gle vote by Congress...
...John Garvey CHRISTIAN WHOLENESS NEVER WHAT WE EXPECT hen our children were young enough to hate it, my wife and I were members of a madrigal group which met regularly at our house to sing, rather badly, some truly beautiful music...
...Our bad singing was unintentional, but frequently apparent...
...I hope that true peace can be established and that all people are treated justly and given the respect due children of God...
...Was it because we could win this one...
...Perhaps not those in OF SEVERAL MINDS this adult generation, but Larry Weiss tells of a California fifth-grader interviewed on CNN who said, "I didn't know how many dead there were...
...We had almost nothing in common...
...He stated in his inaugural address in January 1989, that one of the objectives of his administration was to put an end to the 'Vietnam syndrome.' It was startling to hear...
...He was, however, only one out of five...
...Bush has now proved that the richest and most powerful nation on earth, by spending a decade suck- ing funds from the health, welfare, and edu- cation of its children and giving the money to weapons production, can annihilate a third-world country with a second-rate mil- itary...
...We also question mortgaging U.S...
...I am opposed to all forms of violence and am glad that the actual fighting is over...
...Clearly he was deadly serious...
...Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was the opportunity and Saddam Hussein was the perfect hatable enemy...
...What surprised us all, when we thought about it, was what a disparate group it was (and if you'd heard our singing you might call us desperate as well...
...If democ- racy and self-determination are only sec- ondary factors, the new world order is diminished...
...But why did Americans buy it...
...Among us were peo- pie of several religious traditions, some who had none, and one who was suffering through a juvenile rejection of his religious heritage--a young Jew, younger than his chronological age, who once thought he would shock us by eating a bacon sand- wich on Yom Kippur and succeeded only in irritating us...
...Was win- ning more important than the scores of thousands of lives that were unnecessarily taken...
...Remembering this I realize that there is a metaphor here for what the church means to a lot of us...
...We worked in a number of different fields...
Vol. 118 • April 1991 • No. 8
