This article, by Cameron George Halas, was posted to the IVAW website, march 25, 2009
If there was one thing that turned me against the war it was my faith in God.
After some time in Iraq, I saw that the Iraqis were regular people just like the guys in my unit. The propaganda surrounding them, like how they are a culture of hate and Islam is a violent religion, began to melt away.
Islam was originally a religion of peace, and the Iraqis had no problem practicing both their faith and friendship with us at the same time. I can never see myself as a Muslim, but how can I call myself an American if I didn't defend a Muslims right to be a Muslim. We were all brothers. Then we detained two innocent farmers, two men who had done nothing wrong.
That's when I began to question everything we were doing.
For answers I turned to my faith. Jesus taught us to love not only your neighbors but your enemies as well, turn the other cheek and that those who live by the sword die by the sword. In other words, fighting a war did not fit in with the things he taught us.
So what was I doing in a war if my faith was everything to me? Why does the religious right support this war if the man they so claim to follow is a man of peace?
The answer was that we kept making excuses. "Oh it's o.k. to go to war for this, it's o.k. to fight if they attack you." Well apart from the fact that Bush himself admitted that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, I decided to practice my faith without excuses this time in the last 6 months of my deployment.
And you know what it worked. I started getting along with guys in my unit who I never got along with before.
I also studied why they fight us in Iraq in the first place. We occupied them and started to take over. We invaded the lives of many Iraqis unnecessarily, like those two farmers. You take someone out, and you've made a family member or friend angry at you and they join the resistance against you.
We are the ones who are creating the insurgency.
Jesus did say, "You reap what you sow." So our mere presence and fighting over their is the source of the problem. It's not a white flag of surrender if we leave, it's a victory. We do what a very wise man told us to do by leaving and we remove the main problem, the occupation.
Jesus is indeed the Prince of Peace. So you can't follow God and support the war at the same time. He hates it when his children kill his children. God doesn't take the side of a war, he takes the side of peace, and if you open you scriptures (the New Testimant) you will find that to be true. "Blessed are the Peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God"
You can't keep making excuses for one or the other, it either God or the War. I choose God, what's your choice?