Stop-Loss

I watched a movie called Stop-Loss last night.

Stop-loss, in the United States military, is the involuntary extension of a service member's active duty service under the enlistment contract in order to retain them beyond their initial end of term of service (ETS) date. It also applies to the cessation of a permanent change of station (PCS) move for a member still in military service. Stop-loss was used immediately before and during the first Persian Gulf War. Since then, it has been used during American military deployments to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and during the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent military actions against Afghanistan and Iraq (see War on Terror).

The policy has been legally challenged several times, however federal courts have consistently found that military service members contractually agree that their term of service may be involuntarily extended. ~ Wikipedia

It is an excellent film and difficult to watch. I highly recommend it to anyone who can stomach the initial 20 minutes of the film, which contains action in Iraq by US troops. The film is dramatic, sad, frustrating, infuriating!

Stop-Loss is a back-door draft and its been used on (and against) 81,000 troops in the past 6 years of the IRAQ war. It is as immoral as the war itself.

from another messenger....

Dear Bishops,
One of my most hopeful moments of church came when the bishops of the United States were willing to wrestle with the questions of nuclear morality in a nuclear world. One of my most disappointing moments, on the other hand, came when you failed to say that deterrence that is aimed at the destruction of the globe is morally unacceptable, that a defense system that has already begun to erode the social fiber of our country with its lustful, gluttonous, profligate use of resources could possible be a sinless activity.

How can we possibly say that what is immoral to use is moral to design and develop and deploy? How can we possibly say that to abort a fetus is morally wrong but that the weapons intended only to abort the whole human race is not? How can we possibly make ourselves and our generation more worthy of the ultimate act of retaliation than at any other possible moment in history?

Isn’t the arrogance of those postures alone a sin against the Holy Spirit?

How is it that we can ask people to be prepared to die in nuclear warfare in the name of a “defense” that is destructive but refuse to ask them to be prepared to die in passive resistance in the name of the gospel? All that would happen to us if we faced a nuclear attack without weapons is that we would die, but isn’t that the very posture that we clearly espouse even now in the name of “defense”? And isn’t that precisely the kind of deterrence that we expect from the non-nuclear world even now?

The point is that we say nuclear weapons alone can be a deterrence to nuclear war. But surely there is a rational and Christian deterrence as well that would be equally effective.

It was a Christian state that designed the Holocaust, and Christian countries that waged the Inquisition, and Christian states that burned witches and napalmed Vietnamese villages and used the atomic bomb, not once but twice, for experimental purposes. Now, with all the planet and universal human morality and civilization itself at stake, in an age when errors cannot be forgiven, we are begging you, lead this Christian state to more than that.

The Rule of Benedict requires humility as the cornerstone of spirituality built in the patriarchal culture of imperial Rome. We need that same humility now from the church. Call the country to negotiations, to human respect, to faith and to humility in our dealing with both the little and the great ones of the world.

There is an ancient proverb that teaches, “Wherever there is excess in anything, something is lacking.” Finish the fine work you have begun and give the nation what it lacks, to its peril, in its excessive militarism—the challenge of peace.

– letter by Joan Chittister from Dear Bishops: Open Letters on the Morality of Nuclear Deterrence Addressed to the US Catholic Bishops, Pax Christi USA, 1989, 5th anniversary of US Roman Catholics pastoral, “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response.”

The only thing that surprises me about the Bush-Cheney nightmare is that they have not, to date, opted to use the nuclear option. That surprises me as the other decisions they have made, world efforts for peace ignored, requests for disarmament they've rejected, violations of the Constitution they have perpetuated, and allies they have betrayed, would lead one to believe that their quest for world domination and exploitation for political and monetary gain would include nuclear terror. But the administration is not over yet.