The politics of terrorism:  Both depressing and absurd.  Since 9/11 the United States has been leading the war on terror and has struggled with how to lead this war.  It involves both state-sponsored terrorism (e.g., Iraq, Iran, and Syria) and the stateless terror of al Qaeda.  Over these last few weeks, the war on terror has become intensely political.  The Democratic Party and the critics of the Iraq war have been making arguments that are approaching the level of absurdity.  In this perspective I hope to bring some clarity to the politicizing of this war.

• First, a word about the charges concerning the war in Iraq.  Of late, the fundamental charge is that President Bush lied to the American people as to the reasons for the war.  He is being presented as a manipulator of facts to get support for the war.  How quickly people forget what those facts really are.  Almost everyone in the world believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and believed that Saddam was therefore a threat to our national security.  Saddam had defied 17 UN Resolutions and refused to cooperate in any significant manner with the UN inspectors.  No one trusted his word.  Listen to some of these statements from the past on Saddam and WMDs:  In 1998, President Clinton said, “Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions. . .  and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons.”  In 1997, Clinton’s defense secretary, William Cohen, went on national television and informed the American people that if Saddam has “as much VX in storage as the UN suspects” he would “be able to kill every human being on the face of the planet.”  Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright compared Saddam to Hitler and warned that he could “use his weapons of mass destruction” or “become the salesman for weapons of mass destruction.”  Clinton’s national security advisor, Sandy Berger, warned that “Saddam’s history of aggression, and his recent record of deception and defiance, leave no doubt that he could resume his drive for regional domination if he had the chance.  Year after year, in conflict after conflict, Saddam has proven that he seeks weapons, including weapons of mass destruction, in order to use them.”  In 2002, Al Gore declared that Saddam “has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.”  In 2001, the Clinton assistant secretary of state, Robert Einhorn, said in a Congressional hearing, “Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbors.”  Clinton National Security staffer, Kenneth Pollack, wrote, “The US Intelligence Community’s belief toward the end of the Clinton administration [was] that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program and was close to acquiring nuclear weapons.”   These statements do not of course leave out the strong convictions of British intelligence officers, European Union intelligence officers, and virtually everyone else, all of whom believed that Saddam was a threat and would use WMDs.  It is time for everyone to take a deep breath and to admit that everyone was wrong—Saddam had pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.  President Bush and Tony Blair were not lying.  In 2002, all evidence pointed to this conviction—Saddam was a threat!!!  See David Brooks’s satire in the New York Times (3 November 2005).

• Second, an important word about Joseph Wilson and his wife Valerie Plame.  Tragically and incorrectly, the indictment of Scooter Libby has added to the charge that President Bush lied about WMDs in Iraq.  What almost everyone forgets is how much Joseph Wilson has lied and how much the CIA botched his wife’s assignment within the agency. Allow me to review several salient facts:  (1)  The CIA sent Joseph Wilson [not VP Cheney as Wilson has claimed] to Niger to determine whether Iraq had attempted to purchase yellow-cake, an essential ingredient for WMDs.  It was Plame, not Wilson, who was the WMD expert.  Further, Victoria Toensing, former chief counsel for the Senate Intelligence Committee and former deputy assistant general, has argued that Wilson “had no intelligence background, was never a senior person in Niger when he was in the State Department, and was opposed to the administration’s Iraq policy.”  Wilson’s assignment, as the Senate Intelligence Committee has shown, came from Valerie Plame, his wife, not from the VP of the US as he claimed in a written op-ed piece in the New York Times.  (2)  Wilson was not required to sign a confidentiality agreement, a mandatory act for all who carry out CIA assignments or who represent CIA clients.  Toensing shows this was a huge CIA error.  (3)  When Wilson returned from Niger, he was not required to write a report, but rather to provide only an oral briefing.  That information was not sent to the White House.  If this mission to Niger were so important, would not the CIA require a thoughtful written assessment of this mission to Niger?  Neither the Vice President nor the President’s offices were informed of the results of Wilson’s visit.  (4)  Over a year after he returned from Niger, Wilson was permitted to tell all about this sensitive Niger assignment in an op-ed piece in the New York Times.  Toensing writes:  “For the rest of us, writing about such an assignment would mean we’d have to bring our proposed op-ed before the CIA’s Prepublication Review Board and spend countless hours arguing over every word to be published.  Congressional oversight committees should want to know who at the CIA permitted the publication of the article, which, it has been reported, did not jibe with the thrust of Wilson’s oral briefing. . .  Someone [at CIA] should have known that the agency never briefed the vice president on the trip, as claimed by Mr. Wilson in his op-ed.”  (5)  Finally, Toensing charges that the CIA bungled this whole situation.  If CIA did not want Valerie Plame identified, they should never have permitted Wilson to publish his op-ed piece.  Further when columnist Robert Novak called CIA to ask if Plame worked there, he was told she does.  Finally, “although high-ranking Justice Department officials are prohibited from political activity, the CIA has no problem permitting its deep cover or classified employee from making political contributions under the name of ‘Wilson, Valerie E.,’ information publicly available at the FEC.”  No intellectually honest person will believe that Joseph Wilson, Valerie Plame or the CIA are victims here.  They are all complicit in a bungled and completely vindictive attempt to distort the truth, and, in doing so, to harm the President.  See Toensing’s article in the Wall Street Journal (3 November 2005).

• Third, a word about terrorism in Europe.  About a year ago, the Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh, had his throat slit by Mohamed Bouyeri, a Muslim born in Holland who spoke fluent Dutch.  Together with the July 7 bombings in London (also perpetuated by second generation Muslims who were British citizens) and now with the riots, property destruction and chaos in France, Europe is waking up to the threat of radicalized Islam within its borders.  Francis Fukuyama has persuasively added much to what is occurring in Europe.  He writes, “We profoundly misunderstand contemporary Islamism ideology when we see it as an assertion of traditional Muslim values or culture.  In a traditional Muslim country, your religious identity is not a matter of choice; you receive it, along with your social status, customs and habits, even your future marriage partner, from your social environment.  In such a society, your identity is given to you. . . . This is not the case for a Muslim living as an immigrant in suburban Amsterdam or Paris.  Here your identity as a Muslim is up for grabs.  This identity problem is especially acute for second- or third-generation children of such immigrants.  They grow up outside the traditional culture of their parents, but . . . few feel truly accepted by the surrounding society.”  So, Fukuyama writes, “Contemporary Europeans downplay national identity, in favor of an open, tolerant, ‘post-national’ Europeanness.”  Further, a significant number of such immigrants are on welfare, meaning they do not have the dignity of contributing through their labor to the surrounding society.  They and their children understand themselves as “outsiders.”  Into this kind of situation steps an Osama bin Laden, who offers young Muslims a pure version of Islam that has been stripped of its local saints, customs and traditions.  Radical Islam tells them exactly who they are—respected members of a global Muslim umma to which they belong despite their lives in lands of unbelief.  In short, Europe must wake up to a new reality—radicalized young Muslims who are struggling with their identity.  What exactly does it mean to be a Muslim in a European context?  Osama bin Laden envisions a worldwide Islamic umma (community) that knows no boundaries.  For bin Laden, the nation state is irrelevant and an obstacle to his vision.  Radicalized Muslim youth are catching his vision—and they live in the heart of modern, democratic Europe.  See Fukuyama’s article in the Wall Street Journal (2 November 2005).

Elizabeth Marquardt, affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values and author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, has written, “Before the divorce rate began its inexorable rise in the late 1960s, the common wisdom had been that, where children are concerned, divorce itself is a problem.  But as it became widespread—peaking at almost one in two first marriages in the mid-1980s—popular thinking morphed into a new, adult-friendly idea:  It’s not the act of divorcing that’s the problem, but simply the way that parents handle it.  Experts began to assure parents that if only they conducted a ‘good’ divorce—if they both stayed involved with their children and minimized conflict—the kids would be fine.”  Marquardt demonstrates in her book that this conviction was a myth:  “No matter how happy a face we put on it, the children of divorce are now saying, we’ve been kidding ourselves.  An amicable divorce is better than a bitter one, but there is no such thing  as a ‘good’ divorce.”  As she argues, “the divorce debate has long been conducted by adults, for adults, on behalf of the adult point of view, but now the children of divorce are telling their own, very different stories.”

Marquardt and her colleague, Norval Glenn, sociology professor at the University of Texas, examined the first nationally representative study of the grown children of divorce.  Some of their findings include:

1. Children of the so-called “good” divorces often do worse than children of unhappy low-conflict marriages.  They told Marquardt and Glenn that divorce sowed lasting inner conflict in their lives even when their parents did not fight.  No matter how good their parents were after the divorce, the children of divorce were travelers between “two very different worlds, negotiating often vastly different rules and roles.” 
2. The children of divorce shared that the breakup itself made their parents’ worlds seem locked in lasting conflict.  Two-thirds said that their parents seemed like polar opposites in the years following the divorce.  Nearly half said that after the divorce they felt like a different person with each of their parents.
3. Children of divorce feel like divided selves, and at no time more so than when their parents get together amicably on special occasions. 
4. Our society still strongly wants to deny just how devastating divorce really is.  Too many people imagine that modern divorce is another variation on ordinary family life.  “Divorce divides and shapes children’s identities well into young adulthood.  It frees adults at the expense of forcing their children to grow up too soon.  It has lasting consequences even when divorced parents do not fight.”

Elizabeth Marquardt and her colleague have done a masterful study that forever demonstrates the devastating consequences of divorce.  They equally demolish the notion that there are “good” divorces and there are “bad” ones.  This is a false dichotomy and their research demonstrates that all divorces have serious consequences for children, even into adulthood.  No matter how much parents work at making divorce smooth and easy for the children, it does not work.  One could be very harsh and conclude that the selfish nature of divorce is just that—selfish and self-centered, with no concern for the children.  But this would probably not be helpful.  What is needed by society and especially by the church is a deep-seated conviction that when a divorce occurs, there is the realization that the children will suffer.  For the church, it must mean that those in the church will come alongside and do all that is possible to minister and to serve the children of divorce.  In so many ways, this is a whole new mission field of ministry.  Instead of ignoring the challenge, the church must embrace this as one of the most critical areas of need.  May God’s compassion, His grace and His mercy motivate the church to serve the children of divorce.

See Elizabeth Marquardt, “Just Whom is Divorce ‘Good’ For?”  Washington Post (6 November 2005)..