by Rev. Edgar Peara

While the number of our combatants killed in Iraq is in the news everyday, and occasionally the numbers of wounded are listed, those who return psychologically scarred is not publicized.   Military violence can be as corrupting and damaging to the soldiers who pursue it as it is pitiless to its victims.  Soldiers who actually kill others in a war tend to suffer more from psychological traumas than their comrades who don't resort to violence and killing.
While persons have to learn to be nonviolent and charitable it is a tribute to our culture and values that many of our soldiers in Iraq resist violence and killing.  Evidence during WWII showed that only twelve to twenty-five percent of their grandfathers who were combatants could bring themselves to shoot and kill in active combat.  (Men Against Fire, S.L.A.Marshall, William Morrow and Co. New York, 1947)
At present human nature still makes war possible, but it does not make it inevitable.  War is incompatible with respect for life which is foundation to civilization. War is no longer an intelligent or efficacious instrument of foreign policy.
The big majority of Americans who initially favored the Iraq war, and the large number who continue to approve of it, is evidence that too many are unaware that trust in military power and insensitivity to suffering, reduce our moral power and diminish our nation's praiseworthy reputation.
To enjoy peace, our foreign policy needs to develop, promote and work with a strong, active democratic United Nations while endeavoring to remedy poverty wherever it exists in the world.