Called “An Ethical Way to End the War in Iraq,” Campolo and Lerner want America to give up in Iraq immediately and pay reparations for her crimes. So far, they have collected the signatures of such enlightened luminaries as Harvard's Cornel West, radical nun Joan Chittester, Glen Stassen at Fuller Seminary, and former Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) moderator Rick Ufford Chase. Left-wing “people’s” historian Howard Zinn has also signed on, even though he could not endorse the document's every “nuance.”

Many leftists are being encouraged to sign, even if they are “uncomfortable” with its religious language. Religious talk to palatable to some secular leftists, so long as it’s a rhetorical weapon against the United States. 

Campolo, a sociology professor at Eastern University in Philadelphia, was a spiritual counselor to Bill Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Lerner, the publisher of Tikkun, was famously a guru to Hillary Clinton until his radical politics made him politically unpalatable to the First Lady.

The Campolo/Lerner coalition is exasperated that “toothless” congressional Democrats are not willing to cut off funding for U.S. troops. So, they are introducing an “ethical and spiritual vision of how America could change the way it acts and is perceived in the world.” = Surprise, surprise:  their ethical and spiritual vision demands that America retreat, surrender, apologize, and pay reparations, regardless of the consequences -- the constant refrain of the Religious Left for nearly 40 years.

“The remedy for wrongdoing begins not only with the act of changing the path (stop funding the war) but also with apology and repentance (In the Biblical sense repentance conveys a return to one’s highest self after one has gone astray and betrayed one’s highest values),” the manifesto opens. Campolo and Lerner want President Bush or congressional representatives to personally apologize to the United Nations for America’s complicity in the deaths of “hundreds of thousands of innocent people.” Indeed, President Bush should ask for “forgiveness on behalf of himself and the American people who overwhelmingly supported this great wrong.” 

But the apology would not just cover the war in Iraq, naturally. There are so many American sins that need confessed! The president “should acknowledge that this entire society has mistakenly adhered to the view that safety and security can be achieved through domination or control of others….” Campolo and Lerner advocate that Bush announce a new U.S. policy that is based on “generosity, kindness and genuine concern.”

As the U.S and Britain beat a hasty retreat from Iraq, Campolo and Lerner suggest that “volunteers” from Muslim and non-Muslim countries come forward to provide “protection” for Sunni, Shia and Kurdish interests. It is not clear why such volunteers would be necessary. If the U.S. is to blame for the conflict in Iraq, then surely its exit will only facilitate widespread celebration, not any need for “protection.” It apparently is also important that these “volunteers” not be Christian. Campolo and Lerner explain that U.S. forces are perceived as “modern-day imitators of the Crusaders who once devastated Muslim countries.”

In his own separate explanation for Jim Wallis’ Sojourners, Campolo described how Americans and Brits are “defined by many Muslims as a Christian army that has invaded a sacred Islamic land. Our army’s presence is perceived by many in the Muslim world as a rebirth of the medieval crusades.”

Let’s assume that, according to the Campolo/Lerner plan, Jewish “volunteers” would also be equally unwelcome. So, the new “volunteer” force will apparently be comprised of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Shintoists, and perhaps a smattering of animists, Wiccans and Scientologists, none of whom will be confused with “Crusaders.”

Campolo and Lerner also want a plebescite in Iraq to determine its future. But hasn’t Iraq already had several free elections? Since the resulting elected representatives consented to the “crusader” army, apparently those votes do not count.

The apology by itself will not be enough, the leftists emphasize. “True repentance requires the works of repentance.” Thus, the U.S. must commit the “hundreds of billions” of dollars needed to fully rebuild Iraq. At the same time, the U.S. must commit one percent of its Gross Domestic Product for the next 20 years towards “eliminating global and domestic poverty, homelessness, inadequate health care, inadequate education and repairing the environment” around the world. This kind of reparation will be “key to rebuilding trust in the United States.” If every global evil could be eliminated so cheaply, how amazing that we have not already done it!   

Campolo and Lerner’s proposed global welfare state would win America lots of new friends, they are convinced. But in the entire history of mankind, have long-term mandatory transfer payments by a government, whether domestically or internationally, ever purchased “trust,” appreciation or good will? Campolo is a Christian and Lerner is a Jew. Yet both of them prefer to ignore considerable Christian and Jewish teachings about human avarice, resentment and concupiscence. For them, as for the Religious Left, every human ill can be relieved by a check from the U.S. government.

And as for the Campolo/Lerner plans for U.S. reparations to Iraq, to whom would they be paid if Iraq collapsed into complete anarchy in the wake of an immediate U.S./British withdrawal?

Assuming that the “volunteer” force of Muslims-Hindus-Buddhists-animists-Wiccans-Scientologists cannot safeguard the money, perhaps they can simply be held in a trust fund until the new Iraq, free of all U.S. and Christian influence, will be ready for the new U.S. policy of “generosity, kindness and genuine concern.”  

No doubt to the discomfort of some leftist signers, the Campolo/Lerner manifesto quotes some Scripture, from II Chronicles 7:14: “If My people, which are called by My name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

This Scripture is a summons to Christians and Jews to repent and turn to the Lord their God. But in the new “sacred” and Islamic Iraq that Campolo and comrades advocate, where Christians and Jews will apparently be forbidden, or at least unwelcome, this Scripture would be unheard and perhaps even illegal, like all other Christian and Jewish literature. Tragically, the Religious Left, in its unending political jeremiads, ends up disdaining not only its own nation and culture, but even its own supposed religious traditions.

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