In the last few weeks I have spent a lot of time on airplanes and sitting around in airports. During these interminable hours, Thomas E. Ricks’ Fiasco has been my constant companion. As a devoted military man, Ricks is far more sanguine about the U.S. military than I am, but his basic thesis is sound: America fought the war it knew how to fight (blowing away a hapless enemy with overwhelming firepower and the weapons of intimidation)-not the war for hearts and minds the situation required. Faced with a rapidly evolving insurgency and mounting casualties, the American army panicked. In its pell-mell pursuit of “actionable intelligence” American soldiers burst into private dwellings, sticking their automatic weapons into the faces of Iraqi men, women and children, and hauling off entire neighborhoods of young men to detention facilities like the notorious (and soon grossly overcrowded) Abu Graib.

“In the spring and summer of 2003,” Ricks writes, “few U.S. soldiers seemed to understand the centrality of Iraqi pride, and the humiliation Iraqi men felt to be occupied by this Western army. Foot patrols in Baghdad were greeted during this time with solemn waves from old men and cheers from children, but with baleful stares from many young Iraqi men.” (Fiasco, p.192)

In the course of two long chapters Ricks calls “How to Create an Insurgency,” he discusses directives from senior command calling for “the gloves to come off” so that the insurgency could be “broken”. One young commander with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment responded with enthusiasm.

“I firmly agree that the gloves need to come off.” With clinical precision, he recommended permitting “open-handed facial slaps from a distance of no more than about two feet and back-handed blows to the midsection from a distance of about 18 inches . . . I also believe that this should be a minimum baseline.” He also reported that “fear of dogs and snakes appear to work nicely.”

America is confronted with poor, drug infested neighborhoods marked by high crime rates and a growing disrespect for the rule of law. We have responded with policies predicated on threats and intimidation. Doors are kicked in. Scores of officers flashing firearms sweep into an apartment. Babies scream for their mothers and elderly women are brusquely pushed aside. The f-word abounds. The young men are thrown to the floor and handcuffed while the apartment is ransacked. Maybe the police find illegal drugs; maybe they don’t. Maybe they got the right apartment; frequently they don’t. But it doesn’t matter. “The only language the bad guys understand is fear,” police officers tell one another.

The residents of poor neighborhoods tell me they are tired of being humiliated and disrespected by law enforcement and the criminal justice system. They are tired of being called “mother f&%*#@s”. They are tired of the sneers and the dismissive glances. They are tired of being suspects.

Like American soldiers in Iraq, police officers working poor neighborhoods have a hard time distinguishing the “good guys” from the “bad guys”. In both cases, the solution is the same: treat everyone like bad guys. If a few innocent people wind up doing long stretches in prison, that’s just the price we have to pay. No one in a poor neighborhood is ever innocent. Not really. They are suspect because they are poor. If residents are poor and black, the suspicion deepens.

But Thomas Ricks notes that not all military officers embraced the policy of intimidation and humiliation. An officer with the 501st Military Intelligence Battalion responded quite differently to the new call for neighborhood sweeps and brutal interrogation.

“It comes down to standards of right and wrong-something we cannot just put aside when we find it inconvenient, any more than we can declare that we will ‘take no prisoners’ and therefore shoot those who surrender to us simply because we find prisoners inconvenient.” This officer also took issue with the reference to rising U.S. casualties. “We have taken casualties in every war we have ever fought-that is part of the very nature of war . . . That in no way justifies letting go of our standards . . . The BOTTOM LINE,” he wrote emphatically in conclusion, was, “We are American soldiers, heirs of a long tradition of staying on the high ground. We need to stay there.”
Ricks finds it significant that this soldier’s signature block ended with a reference to Psalm 24:3-8, “Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart.” (Fiasco, pp.197, 198)

When we respond to our fear with the instruments of terror we forfeit our souls. We lose our religion. We lose our Bibles. In our unquestioning support for military misadventures and tough-on-crime policies, American Christians have been forced to jettison large portions of the Bible. Like desperate sailors on a sinking ship we toss our precious cargo overboard.

First, we lose the prophets, then the Psalms, then the teachings of Jesus. Finally, we find ourselves in the water clinging to the wreckage: a few bits from Proverbs, a passage or two from the Epistles, a few scraps from the Gospel of John. Not much of a Bible.

Ricks’ Bible-quoting soldier became a voice of protest crying in a wilderness of fear and hysteria because he hadn’t tossed his Bible overboard, he still possessed a moral compass. The young man valued “clean hands and a pure heart” because his Bible told him to. Any military directive that forced him to sully his hands and corrupt his heart was simply unacceptable.

At a rally in Jena on June 13th, I met a fifty-one year-old gentleman who had grown up in LaSalle Parish. “Don’t think that all white people are hateful,” he told me. “I used to play football for the Jena Giants, right over yonder. And sometimes after practice I’d be tired, and I didn’t have a car to drive. And some of those white boys would tell me, “Here, duck down in the back seat so nobody can see you, and we’ll give you a lift.”

When it was his turn to speak at a protest rally on the steps of the LaSalle Parish courthouse, this gentleman held up an old Bible and said, “We are going to win this fight because we have the only weapon that counts, this Bible right here.”

Then he told us that his 80 year-old Sunday school teacher had approached him at our church meeting the night before. “I can’t come to the rally tomorrow,” she said, “But I want you to read from Psalm 82. That’s the message these folks need to hear.”

 

Then he opened his Bible and started to read:

How long will ye judge unjustly,

and accept the persons of the wicked?

Defend the poor and fatherless:

do justice to the afflicted and needy.

Deliver the poor and needy:

rid them out of the hand of the wicked

Policing poor neighborhoods is like entering a war zone-but like the war in Iraq, it’s a battle for hearts and minds. Our knee-jerk resort to flashing firearms, mind-numbing profanity, and physical intimidation has created an insurgency in poor black neighborhoods. Police officers are viewed as an army of occupation. The idea that law enforcement is there “to serve and protect” sounds like a bad joke.

We need a new respect-based approach to law enforcement. When you can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, you treat everybody like a good guy. The Gestapo tactics routinely employed in poor neighborhoods would never be tolerated in prosperous communities. Before we condemn the actions of poor young men (whether in Iraq or in these United States) we have to understand what Thomas Ricks calls “the centrality of pride.” Deprive entire neighborhoods of their pride and you will soon have an insurgency on your hands.