It is almost springtime back in their hometowns stateside, but right now the sun blazes down, blistering already like days lost in California’s Death Valley. Similarities to this place: there are many like hell itself, descriptions of old lifeless places of Old Testament severity. The Tigris, Euphrates, Babylon, oh yes the King of Tire, Gog and Magog. Names familiar to those from the US Bible-Belt. Weaned on nationalism and, “In God We Trust”, these soldiers, many of whom were last year USA's kids, line up to sup on the blood of Christ, for their country’s sake.

Young US soldiers line up for communion at Camp Bullrush, south of Baghdad in Kuwait. Image courtesy of US Defense.

Yes the religious card is being played from both sides of this crisis. Yet each week even more disturbing reports emerge. Like from the National Religious Broadcasters Convention where US President George W. Bush was described as “God's chosen man”. Bush sat, listened, then stood up empowered and proclaimed that the imminent American attack on Iraq will be one of Christian morality, that this attack would be, "in the highest moral traditions of our country [the USA]".

But let us not be blinded by the rhetoric of religion, the politicizing, nor by the blind nationalism that springs en masse from the aggressors in this crisis. A healthier position would be to question ourselves on whether the willful and calculated slaughter of human beings is spiritually ordained, politically justified, or representative of the nations we each live in. For within this crisis, there is no middle ground to be crafted.

In so many ways children will be the victims on both sides if this US-led unilateral war begins.

Let’s not beat around the bush, thousands of children, little girls and boys, their mothers too are in train to feel the pain of hot lead ripping through their flesh, they will soon know what it is like to scream as if in silence while the roar of warfare smothers their voices. Searing projectiles, gases, petrochemical weapons, bombs figuratively of apocalyptic proportions raining down on their humble homes, burning skin from limbs, melting eyes, causing horrors that Hollywood movies cannot replicate. Then there is the smell, hair burning, fingernails, digits, limbs, bodies, and the perishing stench of the dead. Flies, disease, famine all brought about by mankind. By us all.

Horrific, isn’t it? It is an understanding of this reality that motivates millions of the globe’s citizens to demand that a diplomatic resolution be achieved.

For more... See... The Diversion of Rhetoric Over Reason