Jim Winkler of the United Methodist Board of Church and Society has made the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq the special target of his ire over the last three years.  Winkler’s agency has a $5 million annual budget and a staff of two dozen people.

From his perch in the prominently placed Methodist Building on Capitol Hill, sitting right across the street from the U.S. Capitol and the U.S. Supreme Court, Winkler routinely denounces Bush and fellow Methodist Vice President Cheney for their “unjust and illegal” war.

Whether making statements in the nation’s capital, or delivering speeches to liberal church activists around the country, Winkler is consistent in his conspiratorial allegations and assumption of the worst motives of the United States. 

“High crimes have been committed against the people of the United States and Iraq,” Winkler told a gathering of liberal United Methodists meeting in Kentucky last November.  “We were led into war under false premises.  The manipulation of intelligence is staggering.  The stench is so great; Bush has distanced himself from Vice President Cheney, another United Methodist.  So much for unity.”

Winkler told the approving crowd, “The Bush White House systematically ignored the highest levels of Iraqi intelligence, and there are now more than 2000 plus troops dead.” 

Repeating the usual canard that a supposedly secular Saddam Hussein would not align with radical Islam, Winkler drew this comparison: “This is like saying Timothy McVeigh [perpetrator of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing], who served in the U.S. Army, was connected to President Clinton.”  He also opined, “As bad as Saddam Hussein was, he was not threatening.”

 “The war is about oil,” Winkler charged, simplistically.  “We would not have gone in there if the chief export was artichokes.”  He explained, “If you are an American consumer, you are caught up in a system that perpetuates injustice.” 

Last March, Winkler addressed another liberal Methodist caucus group, this time in Portland, Oregon, insisting that the “war in Iraq remains a disaster despite the seemingly good news of the election.” 

“To date, I cannot think of a single person who has been held accountable for this illegal war of aggression,” Winkler complained, faulting the U.S. for 100,000 Iraqi war deaths  and additional hundreds of thousands of victims under U.S. supported sanctions by the United Nations.

Winkler decried the “numerous atrocities perpetrated by our nation in Iraq.”  He told of an ostensible conversation with a “young Marine” who described his unit’s massacring surrendering Iraqis.  Faulting the U.S. led occupation for Iraqi suicide bombers, Winkler offered this scenario:  “Imagine if such attacks took place very single day across the United States while a foreign military invasion force occupied our major cities, arresting and torturing Americans.”

In February 2004, Winkler slammed the Iraq War as “based on a series of lies,” in a speech at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington.

“We now know that plans to invade Iraq were afoot more than a decade ago by a far right band of Washington insiders known as neoconservatives,” Winkler described.  “Their plans were not to remake the Middle East into a bunch of democracies - they really have no objection to several of the royal autocracies and dictatorships in the region - but to ensure Israel could continue to act with impunity against the Palestinian people.”

Winkler faulted Israel and the United States as the causes of strife in the Middle East.  “The starting place, the beginning point, the central, undisputable, inescapable, absolutely necessary foundation of a Middle East peace is the end of the twin illegal occupations maintained by the United States and Israel of Iraq, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.  All else flows from there.”

In an April 2003 speech, given in the immediate wake of Saddam Hussein’s overthrow, Winkler explained further:  “The Cheneys, Rumsfelds, Perles, Wofowitzes and Feiths see this as just the ‘first war.”  Already they are busy issuing warnings to Syria and Iran.  Their dream is to violently re-make the map of the Middle East.”  He hoped that the administration of post-war Iraq would be turned over “within a matter of weeks” to the United Nations.  “We have no business running Iraq,” Winkler insisted.   

In March 2003, immediately before Saddam’s ouster, Winkler shared this scenario with liberal United Methodist activists, in which he compared the impending U.S. led liberation of Iraq with a hypothetical overthrow of the U.S. government: 

“Imagine if the most powerful nations in the world concluded that the United States government had to be overthrown by force and replaced with outside rule because we produced and possessed vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction, had an unelected leader, were the greatest destroyers of the  global environment, consumed far more of the world’s resources than was our due, engaged in covert actions, resulting in the overthrow and destabilization of sovereign nations, carried out capital punishment against minors, aggressively redistributed our wealth to the rich at the expense of the poor and was a violent, racist society.” 

Of course, Winkler never produced such a searing critique of Saddam Hussein’s regime, whose crimes apparently did not equal those of the Bush regime.   Through the UN sanctions, Winkler surmised that the United States had “contributed” to the deaths of more Iraqis than Saddam had ever killed.

With typical sophistication, Winkler concluded that the Iraq invasion was about oil, to “avenge George W. Bush’s Daddy,” and in pursuit of “our unquestioning support for Israel” and “schemes cooked up by senior Bush officials in cahoots with Israeli leaders.” 

In January 2003, Winkler was part of an NCC delegation that went to Baghdad and met with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz to offer help in stopping a U.S. led invasion.   The NCC also organized delegations of anti-war U.S. church officials to visit the British prime minister, the German chancellor, the Pope and the Russian president. “The only leader who refuses to meet with [anti-war] church leaders is our own,” Winkler sarcastically noted about President Bush at a February press conference in Washington, D.C.  

Speaking to the directors of his own United Methodist Board of Church and Society in October 2002, Winkler admitted that many members of his own 8.2 million member denomination disagreed with his anti-war stand:  “Today, we find sometimes our opposition to war is met with anger, even from some of our own people.” But he insisted that his efforts were “not unpatriotic, politically partisan or anti-American. We recognize the terrible nature of Saddam’s regime. We are pro-peace, and we are not naïve about the world."

But few of Winkler’s statements provide assurance that he has great affection for his own country.  In his Puget Sound speech of February 2004, he uncharitably declared, “the United States was born, in a sense, of war.  How can it be otherwise for those of us who live in a land stolen from its native people and built on the backs of slaves?”  Indeed, Winkler urged Americans to confess to the myths that guide them:  “male superiority; white supremacy, [and] Western, particularly American, exceptionalism.”

Nor is Winkler’s insistence that he is not naïve about the world particularly persuasive.  In his February 2004 speech, he described the Free World’s decades-long confrontation with the old Soviet bloc this way:  “Some $13 trillion dollars was spent on the military and intelligence agencies from 1945 to 1989 in a Cold War against a phantom superpower.”

Alas, according to Winkler, the U.S. fantasy about the Soviet threat prevented the world’s return to Eden. “Imagine what a world we could be living in if this treasure had been spent on a world with health care and education for all and a clean environment. I daresay we would be approaching paradise today.”

Divorced from the realities of historic Christian teachings, dramatically out of touch with the members of his own denomination, and mostly disregarded by the Congress he is supposed to lobby, not to mention the Administration headed by communicants of his own church, Winkler is largely ignored in Washington, D.C.

Winkler’s shrill protests, conspiracy theories, and anti-American bias notwithstanding, he still heads America’s largest church lobby office and is arguably the Religious Left’s chief spokesman in the nation’s capital.  Like much of the Religious Left, he seems more preoccupied with building an imaginary human utopia than contributing to the eternal Kingdom of God.

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