(Here's an example of Pastor Long's writing from 1991. Is this a prophetic example of today's situation? You be the judge.)

LEARNING FROM THE LEFT HAND OF GOD WHAT THE WAR WITH SADDAM TEACHES CONFESSING CHRISTIANS ABOUT IMPOTENCE AND VIOLENCE IN MODERN AMERICAN CULTURE

By the late Philip D. Long, former pastor of East Liberty Lutheran Church, Pittsburgh, PA.

Written Feb. 2, 1991 for the Confessing Synod News.

From what we have been told Saddam Hussein is an evil man who must be stopped. If it takes a bloody war to stop him, then there will have to be a bloody war. If we don't want him dominating the Middle East as an imperial tyrant with an ever growing arsenal of weapons including nuclear war heads, then we must stop him. There is no choice.

I. First Lesson. We are in a situation where we have no choice. How come? A few months ago hardly anybody knew who this guy was, then all of a sudden, in August, we were presented with the announcement that he had invaded Kuwait and that U.S. troops were on their way to stop him. Before we could find Kuwait on the map we were told that the president was sending in more troops. At that point there was no real choice but to support our country and our troops who were already facing the evil enemy. But although the nation has dutifully rallied to the support of government and troops, there has been a lingering suspicion that there never really was a choice, that somehow things were determined by processes ordinary people could never participate in or affect in any way.

A feeling of helplessness has settled over us during these first weeks of the war. While planes continue to dump billions of dollars worth of bombs on Iraq daily many Americans huddle around their TVs uncertain what to think or feel about the whole thing. One moment it seems as remote from real life as a Nintendo game. But every now and then we are struck with the terrible fact that real people are being blown up.

The only choice we have is whether or not to trust the president. Either way, what can a person do? If we decide to trust, what can we do, wave a flag, put on a yellow ribbon? If we decide not to trust, what is there to do, follow some ivory-tower intellectuals or middle-aged hippies from the Sixties in a protest march? Neither seems really to have anything to do with the actual conduct of this war. That must be left in the hands of the experts who are the only ones who really know what is going on. So, most opt for supporting the president. This is at least a patriotic action which seems all the more important when we have deep, vague worries about the future of our country.

Even Congress seems to suffer from the same feeling of helplessness. Caught off guard by the initial deployment of troops in August, both parties supported the President in his "defensive" move to save Saudi Arabia. Then in November nearly a half-million troops were sent, the United Nations security council authorized force and the president called on congress for support, arguing that a vote for war on Hussein was a vote for peace. After the Geneva gesture failed, what could members of congress do but vote for war or look like wimps afraid of a petty tyrant? Congress was as much out of it as were the American people - equally unaware of what was really going on, equally impotent.

II. Second Lesson. Our feeling impotent is due to the fact that we sense we are being controlled in subtle ways that we do not even want to think about. Our feeling impotent only gets worse, for example, when we try to get solid information about this war. We cannot escape the fact that the government is controlling what is reported to us about this war and no matter how much newspeople complain the military is keeping the press under firm control. And there is the suggestion in the air that a truly patriotic American would not want to know or question the government's actions. We are being encouraged subtly to do as one woman who called a talk show recently urged and pleaded with Americans to trust the president just as we trust doctors when undergoing surgery. She said we let everything in doctors' hands in the operating room and we wouldn't think of asking for detailed explanations. So, she said, we should just let the government do its job and not be so disloyal as to question superior, expert judgement. I am sure she did not intend any irony, but the suggestion that we should numb our minds as though under anesthesia is easy to pick up, if not easy to believe.

Others react to a sense of being controlled by lashing out in more violent ways. The rhetoric of the political right has suddenly become much harsher against the liberals, the feminists and peace protestors. It seems that feeling out of control or impotent in regard to one's own life and destiny leads to violent rage toward any person or group that can possible be considered an enemy. The heart-land of simple America, those folks who have not been able to figure out what's going on since Korea, the people who have been suffering under declining economic fortunes and left in the dust by foreign competition, they are tired of being controlled and put down, they are ready to KICK BUTT! And it doesn't matter if that butt belongs to Saddam or to some local, pin-headed protestor. It just feels like it's time to straighten things out and get rid of all those evil forces that have been making our lives tougher.

III. Third Lesson. Just as individuals, nations also get the urge to destroy what they cannot control, especially nations suffering from a lose of authority. President Bush told an audience of religious broadcasters (January 28) about his plans for Iraq "when the war is over and our credibility is restored..." In this comment lies the kernel of an American problem - lose of authority among the people of the world, especially the people of the Muslim East. Those people just don't respect us, in fact, they hate us!

Add to this the embarrassing fact that the bully, Saddam Hussein, is a creation of the Western nations which they fully expected to be able to control. When he was fighting Iran we Americans supported him and gave him good deals on military equipment and helped him build his bunkers and arsenals of weapons, including the technology for chemical weapons. Britain helped him build bunkers for aircraft and missiles. Russia sold him his SCUDs. Sweden sold him trucks. American was selling him lots of hi-tech equipment right up to the day he invaded Kuwait. And all of this was done in spite of the fact that Amnesty International was at the same time reporting Saddam's gross violations of human rights, including torture and chemical war-fare. Why didn't those violations and acts of terror and torture bother President Bush last year, or the year before, when Amnesty International made its annual reports? The answer is that at that time Saddam was under control.

But then he got out of control, embarrassing the U.S. most of all! The U.S. policy toward Saddam had been to give in to his cruel peculiarities as a way of keeping him on a leash of dependency. Even though he threatened Kuwait, Washington did not take him seriously. He got no firm message from Washington to stay out of Kuwait prior to August 2. The U.S. intelligence and government offices were simply caught napping. Saddam, who had been the U.S.'s buffer against Iranian threats to the Gulf oil supply, now became such a threat himself. And over night Saddam, who had been just a rough bully while under U.S. control, became the embodiment of Hitlerian evil when he broke out of that control. Now he is suffering the full force of the violence of the nation which he dared to cause to feel a twinge of impotence.

IV. Lesson Four. The ferocity of the violent retaliation against Saddam is a reaction of America to being challenged over her lose of moral authority in today's world. We can see that the nation's culture is going through what counselors today would call "denial", but on a massive scale. While President Bush insists this is a just and moral war, the reaction of a nation based on principles of justice to acts of terrorism and inhumanity, the intelligent of the world can only wonder which is more dangerous, the possibility that he believes his own denial of the truth or the probability that it is a purely cynical but successful attempt to help a rather stupid but sizeable segment of the American population continue to deny the extent of its cultural erosion?

Only Americans in terminal stages of clinical denial can go on refusing to admit that their culture has become not only nihilistic and self-destructive at home but offensive and threatening to people abroad. Why, these Americans wonder, would such backward countries as those in the Middle East want to resist the glories of freedom and progress which we have here in the good old U.S.? How dare those poor little countries consider us the enemy or call us Satan? Just look at what our freedoms have produced. In the December 31 issue of Time we have a list of the "Best of '90" which shows what American culture is all about: for example, pictures of Bart Simpson, condom ear rings, a ten year old kid who's made over a $100 milion in a silly movie about a rich suburban family, a girl who's made millions in a movie about a nice prostitute, an athlete who's been forgiven for drug violations, a rap group made famous by dirty lyrics and a nice big picture of Madonna, the most popular role model among America's young women, naked and holding an American flag over her bare butt, and quoted for her most famous and defiant line, "I'm in charge!". If that isn't enough to win ancient Arab cultures over to the American way of life, let them look at the picture in Time (January 21, 1991) of one of our young women warriors. There she stands (page 43) in army green tee shirt and short shorts with her cigarettes in her belt and her M-16 over her shoulder. Why wouldn't that inspire an ancient traditional family structured culture to want to follow the American way of life? Aren't they impressed with our freedom? Look what we've done for our women - made them into soldiers. And look what we've done for our men, especially our minorities. We are currently jailing a higher percentage of our male population than any nation on earth, and a percentage of our black men four time higher than South Africa!

But America is a God fearing nation, isn't it? Those unenlightened Muslims should respect our religious nature as a culture. But notice one thing. The distress brought on by this war has driven our people not to seek the guidance of God but to set up hot lines to psychological counselors. Even the local TV station has set up a panel of psychologists so that anxious viewers might call in and get help in coping. Even Mr. Rogers has gotten into the act. While the war weary and hungry victims of Saddam's madness in Iraq turn to the Koran for comfort under our bombing, our people who are anxious about the guilt or impotence involved in sending those bombs turn to television shrinks for technical assistance in coping. Why wouldn't the Muslim world welcome such a cultural model for themselves?

While the high-tech bombers of the richest and most neurotic nation on earth bomb to bits the cradle of civilization and destroy poor people who represent the struggles of the hungry third world in order to get rid of a puppet who has gone out of control, the world is seeing the guts of American culture exposed. There is no better symbol of American culture's collapse into secular materialism than this scene: a government controlled by rich oil men using moral arguments and promises of cheap gas to control the home population sending billion dollar planes to drop million dollar bombs on hungry people in the third world who die clutching their holy book and whose only crime was to be born in a land rich in oil ruled by a tyrant the West created but could not control.

V. LESSON FIVE. Confessing Christians must see American culture for what it has become and instead of participating in epidemic denial create models in local congregations which offer alternatives. What our government is doing on the international level is the same thing our people are doing on the local family level. Our government has a control problem, a neurotic need to control everybody and everything, which is the primary symptom of lose of real authority and respect. Frustrated control neurotics tend to become abusers, so goes our current understanding. Our government has become like a tyrannical father who creates monstrous reactions in his own children and then tries to destroy them with violence. Domestic murder, child abuse, war on drugs, jailing black men, bombing Iraq - they are all part of the same reaction of a culture in collapse, unable to carry on the denial much longer and lashing out in desperate violence. The tree is hollow. Genuine respectable authority is gone from our institutions and our leaders, replaced by the will to control, whether through seduction or coercion.

Our confessing congregations need to first of all help people understand this situation. Then, second, help people realize that we have the seeds of respectable authority in our Biblical revelations and teachings. In Christ is literally the hope of the world, for he showed the way of God's authority as an alternate to the secular understanding of power. As we follow Christ we will be setting up a model of a Biblical culture, one that is not identified with American culture, one that even Muslims can respect. Each confessing congregation faces an urgent call to demonstrate such a Biblical culture as distinct from American culture before the entire world writes off Christianity as just one of the rotten props of American decadence.

How do we do this? The first task is to lead our own local people to recover from America's sense of impotence. As our members learn and live the Biblical Christ they will sense a new kind of potency, one which has to do with authority rather than money or secular power. Leading believers through work on issues such as keeping black men out of jail or giving welfare families a shot at rewarding lives or exposing toxic waste dumps or teaching local residents about politics on the school board level not only opens eyes. It opens hearts to the Holy Spirit who gives fearless authority and drive. Imbued with such spirit our confessing Christians do not think it ridiculous to consider confronting American culture even on a national level to cease its denial, own up to its impotence and violence and accept the peace which comes into hearts calmed by God.