Ben Rhodes, who was Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting (whew!) from 2009 to 2017, was a close confidant to President Obama and a key foreign policy advisor. In his NY Times opinion piece last week, he regretted a lot of what he did.
He looked at Trump’s latest expenditure of bombs and laid part of the blame for it on the tepid and toothless response of Democrats. He imagines some Congressional logic for why they were generally feckless:
[W]hat if Mr. Trump bombs Iran, and the regime collapses and is replaced by something better? You could feel this calculation within the Democratic Party as the war began — a hedging that only dissipated when the war’s brutality and insanity became clear. Behind it is a perverse logic: Both Iranian strength and Iranian weakness can justify war.
To be fair, the blame for this dynamic extends far beyond elected officials, to commentators who are at turns jingoistic, credulous of fearmongering and inclined to cover any harm done to Americans or our interests around the world as a political crisis; to think tanks that cast events particularly in the Middle East as problems that can be solved by U.S. intervention; to an entertainment industry that often valorizes American military and intelligence operations; and to people like me who have filled the ranks of Democratic administrations.
We’ve all been in a world of “what if” since Covid, so we can probably relate to the skittish Dems. Anxiety rules.
But “what if” is not the only rule that leads the opponents of Trump to be less than furious — like I wish they would be. You can see those rules in Rhodes’ writing: “calculation…hedging…perverse logic…our interests…problems that can be solved…entertainment industry…intelligence operation.” When we host the 250th anniversary of the Declaration this year, those words could be the key words to describe the new American experiment – put them on a banner over a background of a Minuteman, perhaps, to achieve the appropriate irony. I suppose we could include “brutality” and “insanity,” too. That’s what the country has perfected and who knows what it might do next?
Where are the peacemakers?
I know there are a lot of Christians who are out on the front lines boldly harassing ICE and telling the truth about the world and Jesus. The aging clergy in Philly (and I can still be included in that group) have been out and getting arrested for their actions. At the end of March, twelve of them got in good trouble for blocking the ICE driveway at 8th and Cherry [Inquirer].
They are so loving, the officers smile at them when they help them get up off the street. Love will win if anything good wins.
But we could use some more furious love. Over 225 million people in the U.S. identify as Christians. That percentage used to be declining but apparently isn’t anymore. You’d think at least 100 million or so would actually be like Jesus. What if they were? That would be potent.
Paul says Jesus in our peace. That peacemaking got him killed. But a lot of people just make his peace an inner sense of peace with God and only as outer as getting along with others in whatever church they can manage to stay in.
Jesus is quite a bit more furious than that. Just read Matthew 23, where he tags people who preserve their own power with a perverted reading of the scripture as a “brood of vipers.” A bit later, he contrasts himself as a mother hen longing to brood over Jerusalem, to protect her children. There is nothing more furious than a mother separated from her children.
Or go back a few pages in Matthew to chapter 18, where Jesus says,
If any of you cause one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea. Woe to the world because of things that cause sin! Such things are bound to come, but woe to the one through whom they come!
That is furious stuff. He must be especially inflamed right now. How in the world could any Christian support the brutality and insanity of the Iran War and defend the sociopath president undermining the whole world with it? Jesus knows that sins are going to come, but his followers should do their best not to cause or cooperate with them! They certainly won’t be praying for them to occur with Pete Hegseth and his nationalist pastor/mentor!
Furious peacemakers are out there
I hope the Christians are catching up. Maybe they will be out in force for May Day Strong. In the meantime, other prophets are doing their duty. Here are two of my favorites, in case you don’t know them, yet.
Briefly, start with Matthew Cooke. Cooke is not a Christian; he’s more of a Star Trek, Jesus-adjacent humanist. But he still gives some of the best sermons I have heard about what needs to happen in the world today. He is a furious, filmmaking, philosophizing peacemaker. I don’t sign up for a lot, but I don’t want to miss what he comes up with [Survivor’s guide]. Take a minute to listen as he preaches about taking back the future.
An even better example of what a furious Christian peacemaker should probably sound like is the politician Ben Rhodes was writing about in the Times: Graham Platner of Maine. He’s lightly Jewish if anything more than atheist. But his morality is spot on.
As a 20 year old, Platner had his first epiphany when he was constructing a patrol base near Falluja. A mortar round fired by Iraqi opponents killed the families of the troop’s local co-workers. He said, “There’s this thing I often think about. Those kids were killed because we were spending money to build this base that probably doesn’t exist anymore. [I thought] ‘How horrifically wasteful this is.’”
I agree. Since Sep. 11, 2001 the U.S. has spent more than $6 trillion fighting wars that killed over 7,000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of civilians, inflicting trauma on innumerable people. The country is responsible for destruction which has displaced tens of millions of people. The refugees who sought safety in the Eurocentric countries fueled a right-wing backlash to democracy. And what was built in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and now Iran? What could have been built at home with those trillions of dollars? Just writing that burns me up.
Platner is with me. Visceral outrage infuses his opposition to the war in Iran: “Nobody is going to be able to convince me that what I did in Iraq and Afghanistan did anything for the people of Sullivan, Maine.”…“I don’t want other young Americans to go through what I’ve been through. And I don’t want to send other young Americans to inflict the horror that I had to inflict on people.”…“I don’t know a single guy I served with who thinks this thing in Iran is a good idea.”…[The reason] they were big Trump supporters — he was the antiwar or ‘America first’ candidate.”
“Here in the real world, most people get it,” Platner says of his campaign events. “Do you think this country should spend more on schools and hospitals and less on bombs? A lot of people are like, yeah, that’s pretty obvious.”
And yet the wars keep happening. The money keeps flowing to defense contractors. Traders, even in Congress, keep profiting from bets on the rise and fall of oil prices while the working class can’t afford to pay for a tank of gas [more here]. Insiders make ghoulish bets about the war on prediction markets while children are killed by American weapons in Iran and Lebanon.
Platner says, “We are so broken emotionally when it comes to our politics that we’ve literally created this story that it’s inherent in being a competent political leader to kill civilians. If you’re not willing to do some hard things and drop some bombs, then you’re not up to the task of power. I think it’s the opposite. You’re not up to the task of being in power if you do not think about the cost of violence. If that’s not at the front of your mind, then I don’t think you are morally in the right place to be in positions of power.”
Most of us know the forever war started by Bush has been destroying America from within, like an organism that must keep growing to survive. It fills the citizens with fear of outsiders and contempt for one another. War does the worst to societies. Once you normalize obliterating people abroad, people don’t value others at home, or even themselves.
They sound like Jesus
Cooke and Platner sound an awful lot like Jesus to me. They are rightly furious. Go back to Matthew 23. Isn’t the blindness and delusion of American leaders just what Jesus is talking about?
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and of the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and of the plate, so that the outside also may become clean.”
Just remember, Trump took the slavery placards off of Washington’s House on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful but inside are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of uncleanness. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.”
I would not say Jesus sounded like Graham Platner when he was facing off with the radical Pharisees who dominated the Sanhedrin. But I’m pretty sure Jesus would have called him out of the crowd to be a disciple. He’s kind of there already.
Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal, but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.