email: whitpresby@mindspring.com
Resources on Iraq
Call
to Conscience
Of
the Interfaith Communities United For Justice and Peace
Whittier
Area Peace and Justice Coalition
Concerning
War Against Iraq
Interfaith Communities United For Justice and Peace (ICUJP), a coalition of over 80 religious, civil liberties and civic organizations, calls upon people of conscience to reject the Bush Administration’s call for a war against Iraq and to refuse its new foreign policy of endless, unilateral war as a solution to world conflict.
The 21st century’s first international crisis—the response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, of which the Iraqi campaign is one leg—has been labeled a war against terrorism, but it is a call for a return to barbarism. The World Wars of the last century taught the devastating cost of hate and the will to domination among nations. In the ashes of the firebombed cities, in the smoke of the crematoria, the nations of the world founded the United Nations, vowing to act in concert to resolve their differences and swearing never again to blacken the world’s skies with nuclear wind.
In the days after Sept. 11, the world stood with the United States and grieved for the citizens of all nations killed in the attack. “We are all Americans,” the foreign newspapers proclaimed: Those who seek to solve their differences by slaughtering the innocent, oppressing the powerless and misusing religious beliefs to demonize our fellow human beings threaten all peoples and nations.
Yet today, we stand close to squandering an historic opportunity to work together with the international community to contain and to disarm belligerent nations. If we, the richest and most powerful nation on earth, will not honor our treaties, then no other nation will consider itself bound. If we go to war to change the regimes or to control the resources of other nations, will not other countries follow our lead against their neighbors and us? Where can such bankrupt policies lead but to more devastation and to the unimaginable suffering of millions?
We categorically reject the assumption that violence is the necessary response to our loss or that “pre-emptive” strikes against other nations will guarantee the peace and security of our own. Our diverse faith traditions teach that human life is sacred, that security is the fruit of peace and terror the harvest of war; that the way to peace lays in the transformation of structures of injustice and the politics of exclusion; and that the earth and its resources belong to all its peoples.
Let us turn away from the false doctrines of the past and work together to find true solutions to the world’s problems. Let us be peacemakers in the council of nations and say “No” to war against Iraq.
