missing explosives, the military, and christianity

I am going to try to pull together a few threads here and leave you folks with some questions that I can't answer -- I hope some responses from my legions of faithful readers will help me to clarify some things. This is a long post, so have patience please.

First, Stephen has a very good response in the comments section to my last post regarding the missing explosives. His key point seems to be that the timing of the removal is the most important issue, and that is still an open question -- therefore, we can't blame the Bush Administration if the weapons were removed before the invasion. (Correct me, Stephen, if I summarize your point inaccurately). And I call his response "very good" because it seems to rely on an assessment of what is known, and not just on cherry-picking evidence for partisan purposes.

Here are a couple of updates posted since Stephen wrote his comments last night: The Times has an article on the looting of the site which provides some insight, but doesn't seem to clarify the timeline.

In his blog Informed Consent Juan Cole has several insightful postings. And Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo keeps updating the story.

And then there is this story from Eyewitness News in Minneapolis:

A 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew in Iraq shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein was in the area where tons of explosives disappeared.

The missing explosives are now an issue in the presidential debate. Democratic candidate John Kerry is accusing President Bush of not securing the site they allegedly disappeared from. President Bush says no one knows if the ammunition was taken before or after the fall of Baghdad on April 9, 2003 when coalition troops moved in to the area.

Using GPS technology and talking with members of the 101st Airborne 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS determined our crew embedded with them may have been on the southern edge of the Al Qaqaa installation, where that ammunition disappeared. Our crew was based just south of Al Qaqaa. On April 18, 2003 they drove two or three miles north into what is believed to be that area.

During that trip, members of the 101st Airborne Division showed the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew bunker after bunker of material labelled explosives. Usually it took just the snap of a bolt cutter to get in and see the material identified by the 101st as detonation cords.

"We can stick it in those and make some good bombs." a soldier told our crew.

There were what appeared to be fuses for bombs. They also found bags of material men from the 101st couldn't identify, but box after box was clearly marked "explosive."

In one bunker, there were boxes marked with the name "Al Qaqaa", the munitions plant where tons of explosives allegedly went missing.

Once the doors to the bunkers were opened, they weren't secured. They were left open when the 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS crew and the military went back to their base.

"We weren't quite sure what were looking at, but we saw so much of it and it didn't appear that this was being secured in any way," said photojournalist Joe Caffrey. "It was several miles away from where military people were staying in their tents".

Officers with the 101st Airborne told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that the bunkers were within the U.S. military perimeter and protected. But Caffrey and former 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS Reporter Dean Staley, who spent three months in Iraq, said Iraqis were coming and going freely.

"At one point there was a group of Iraqis driving around in a pick up truck,"Staley said. "Three or four guys we kept an eye on, worried they might come near us."

5 EYEWITNESS NEWS e-mailed pictures of the material we found to experts in Washington Wednesday to see if it is the same kind of high explosives that went missing in Al Qaqaa. They could not make that determination.

The footage is now in the hands of security experts to see if it is indeed the explosives in question.

Click on the link and you can see their pictures and video. The important point here is the date -- April 18th -- well after the fall of Baghdad.

But, the larger issue has nothing to do, I think, with the timing of the removal of the weapons. The weapons were under seal by the IAEA before the war. They left before the bombs started dropping and the U.S. was fully aware of the facility, where it was, and what it contained. And the Bush Administration did nothing to make sure these weapons did not fall into enemy hands. And this wasn't the only site left unguarded. We all know about the Culture Ministry and the museums containing irreplacable artifacts of the birth of civilization, but how many of you know that seven nuclear sites were also looted? This leads to the larger question of the general incompetance of the war plan. And I am not convinced that this incompetance is merely incompetance. To plan something inadequately is to make decisions about what is important. And bringing freedom to the Iraqis and ensuring a stable country do not seem to have been central or even peripheral to the war plan. So what were they trying to accomplish?

Several Times' readers address some of the larger issues cogently in the letters section today.

My questions to readers, especially those who concern themselves foremost with our military, have to do with your thoughts on how this Administration's war plan undermined our military, leaving it exposed and in danger. Does it make you mad that when generals asked for several hundred thousand troops for the war, Rumsfeld offered 40,000? Does it anger you that the soldiers were sent into battle without the proper equipment? Do you care about the Administration's attempts to cut veterans' benefits and combat pay? Does the backdoor draft and "stop-loss" policy bother you? Are you worried that our military is overstretched at a point in history when they may be called upon to defend us against real threats out there -- and there are many? Do you worry that the military which once seemed invincible now may not put the fear into our enemies worldwide? Do you resent seeing Tommy Franks reduced to misleading the public in order to help Bush win reelection?

I want to ask similar questions to Christian readers. There is a very interesting op-ed in today's Times that explains to me more convincingly than any other single article I have read how Bush's faith guides his decision-making. In Faith, Hope and Clarity, Robert Wright writes:

[...] Every morning President Bush reads a devotional from "My Utmost for His Highest," a collection of homilies by a Protestant minister named Oswald Chambers, who lived a century ago. As Mr. Bush explained in an interview broadcast on Tuesday on Fox News, reading Chambers is a way for him "on a daily basis to be in the Word." [...]

[...] There's a kind of optimism in Chambers, but it's not exactly sunny. To understand it you have to understand the theme that dominates "My Utmost": committing your life to Jesus Christ - "absolute and irrevocable surrender of the will" - and staying committed. "If we turn away from obedience for even one second, darkness and death are immediately at work again." In all things and at all times, you must do God's will.

But what exactly does God want? Chambers gives little substantive advice. There is no great stress on Jesus' ethical teaching - not much about loving your neighbor or loving your enemy. (And Chambers doesn't seem to share Isaiah's hope of beating swords into plowshares. "Life without war is impossible in the natural or the supernatural realm.") But the basic idea is that, once you surrender to God, divine guidance is palpable. "If you obey God in the first thing he shows you, then he instantly opens up the next truth to you," Chambers writes.

And you shouldn't let your powers of reflection get in the way. Chambers lauds Abraham for preparing to slay his son at God's command without, as the Bible put it, conferring "with flesh and blood." Chambers warns: "Beware when you want to 'confer with flesh and blood' or even your own thoughts, insights, or understandings - anything that is not based on your personal relationship with God. These are all things that compete with and hinder obedience to God."

Once you're on the right path, setbacks that might give others pause needn't phase you. As Chambers noted in last Sunday's reading, "Paul said, in essence, 'I am in the procession of a conqueror, and it doesn't matter what the difficulties are, for I am always led in triumph.' " Indeed, setbacks may have a purpose, Chambers will tell Mr. Bush this Sunday: "God frequently has to knock the bottom out of your experience as his saint to get you in direct contact with himself." Faith "by its very nature must be tested and tried."

Some have marveled at Mr. Bush's refusal to admit any mistakes in Iraq other than "catastrophic success." But what looks like negative feedback to some of us - more than 1,100 dead Americans, more than 10,000 dead Iraqi civilians and the biggest incubator of anti-American terrorists in history - is, through Chambers's eyes, not cause for doubt. Indeed, seemingly negative feedback may be positive feedback, proof that God is there, testing your faith, strengthening your resolve.

This, I think, is Mr. Bush's optimism: In the longest run, divinely guided decisions will be vindicated, and any gathering mountains of evidence to the contrary may themselves be signs of God's continuing involvement. It's all good. [...]

People unfamiliar with a certain strain in evangelical tradition may have trouble seeing the point of Chambers's emphasis on utter surrender. But in the Baptist churches of my youth, it went without saying (though it was often said) that surrender was in no small part about self-control. Because human nature is subtly corrupt, with every temptation concealing a slippery slope, complete commitment was the only path to virtue. Chambers stresses this binary nature of devotion more than some contemporary evangelicals, and that may explain his appeal for Mr. Bush, who became a born-again Christian when he quit drinking and has stayed off the bottle ever since.

Some people who find moderation easy can't understand why for others abstinence is necessary - and still less why it would demand a spiritual framework. I don't find moderation easy, and, even leaving that issue aside, I find being human so deeply challenging that I can't imagine it without an anchoring spirituality in some sense of the word. So I respect Mr. Bush's religious impulse, and I even find Chambers's Scottish austerity true and appealing in a generic way.

Still, it's another question whether Chambers's worldview, as mediated by Mr. Bush, should help shape the world's future. People who take drastic action based on divine-feeling feelings, and view ensuing death and destruction with equanimity, have in recent years tended to be the problem, not the solution.

Chambers himself eventually showed some philosophical flexibility. By and large, the teachings in "My Utmost for His Highest" were written before World War I (and compiled by his wife posthumously). But the war seems to have made him less sanguine about the antagonism that, he had long stressed, is inherent in life.

Shortly before his death in 1917, Chambers declared that "war is the most damnably bad thing," according to Christianity Today magazine. He added: "If the war has made me reconcile myself with the fact that there is sin in human beings, I shall no longer go with my head in the clouds, or buried in the sand like an ostrich, but I shall be wishing to face facts as they are." Amen.

My questions to Christians: Do you think George Bush has hijacked Christianity in this country, espousing only one version which seems to give short shrift to certain of Christ's teachings? Does being a Christian mean you have to vote for Bush? Are there other aspects of the Christian tradition that you personally emphasize that lead you to oppose Bush? What do those of you who hold another faith think?

These are really open questions on my part, even if I write them in a leading way. I hope readers will respond to the spirit of open inquiry in which I mean to express my questions. I hope people will avoid the temptation to one-up the opposition and give me some thoughtful reponses to difficult questions. I look forward to hearing from you.