Who is the enemy?
by Omar Al-Rikabi

I have been on the road a lot in the last three months, taking different
road-trips to New Orleans, New York City, Nashville, and Dallas. Constantly
in the shadow of the endless line of 18-wheelers, I noticed that one
particular trucking company had this sign posted on most of their trucks:

Support our troops whenever we go!
No aid or comfort to the enemy!

No way!

So who is the enemy?

Last summer my older cousin Ali was able to come in from Ohio to be at our
wedding. I think it was really good for my dad to have someone from back
home who was able to be there, and he filled in as my grandmother's escort,
sitting with her on the front row.

Ali was forced to serve in the Iraqi Army in the first Gulf War. Other
cousins were also conscripted, stationed on the front lines and in Kuwait
City. Some of them were rounded up in the mass-surrenders after the ground
war began, and they all made it home. But Ali had a different story. He was
a field surgeon on the front lines with the Republican Guard. Sadaam
thought that if he placed the medical units close enough to the rest of the
soldiers then the Americans wouldn't bomb and shell them. He was wrong.

Somehow the Iraqis knew when the American ground troops would be coming
over the dunes, and so they were given a five-day pass to go home to
Baghdad and say their goodbyes. Ali knew it would be a meat-grinder, and he
knew that under Sadaam desertion meant death and trouble for your family.
So while he was in Baghdad he had another surgeon friend take out his
perfectly good appendix. While he was in the hospital, his entire unit was
annihilated.

Around that same time a Marine friend of mine named Nelson had been part of
an artillery outfit that was shelling Iraqi positions inside Kuwait.
Suddenly an Iraqi artillery shell slammed into the hood of the truck Nelson
was standing next to, but it was a dud and didn't go off. He lived to come
home and tell me that story.

Also at our wedding, only four rows back from Ali, was my friend Joe, who
is an Army Ranger veteran. On the other side of the isle from Ali was one
of my two mothers-in-law, whose stepbrother was part of the Army forces
that moved through the same area of Kuwait where Ali had been. On another
pew was my friend Johanna, whose husband has served in Afghanistan and is
now training for Special Forces duty in the Middle East.

I could go on, but you get the idea. The best phrase came from a taxi
driver in Cairo, right after the invasion of Iraq three years ago, who upon
finding out that my brother was half Iraqi and half American said, "Ahhh
... is funny. Your country is attacking your country."

I have often become frustrated when I have heard people in my church make
statements like, "Remember who we're fighting here," before they lead
prayers for our military victory. A professor here at Asbury once said that
the only two choices we have is to either "convert them or keep them from
hurting us."

Well ... first of all you can't fight and win a "war on terror." Terrorism
is a method, not a country or ideology. I once heard it said that fighting
a war on terror is like having the flu and declaring a war on sneezing:
you're only attacking the symptoms. As long as there have been people,
there has been terrorism.

But what frightens me is the mindset in this country, and in the church,
that seems to think terrorism was born and raised in the Middle East, and
if we can take out the Muslim Arabs then the world will be a safer place.
Put this idea up against the idea in large segments of the Arab world that
America has, in a sense, created terror herself with her policies toward
the Middle East. So the cycle continues, and we have "become a monster to
defeat a monster."

So who is the enemy? I believe that on this side of the cross, according to
the scriptures, that "we are not fighting against people made of flesh and
blood, but against the evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world,
against those mighty powers of darkness who rule this world, and against
wicked spirits in the heavenly realms" (Ephesians 6:12)

If you track through the whole story of scripture, you see that while God
may have fought battles on Israel's behalf in the Old Testament, the
trajectory was always towards to the cross, which redeemed God's intention
for creation. Jesus set for us an example of living and witnessing that
intention through loving, serving, and forgiving our enemies. The way of
Christ was not to kill and destroy those who had abused and killed him.

Imagine what would have happened if the entire mass community of Christians
who prayed so fervently for our troops to "defeat the enemy" would have
instead prayed against the real Enemy and for peace between humanity.

So who is the enemy? We must first remember that the enemies of America are
not the enemies of God. I have Iraqi Army veteran family and U.S. Army
veteran friends. I have been raised by Southern Methodists and Shiite
Muslims. I cannot abdicate the gospel message of Christ to a bomb, but can
only bear the cross: the ultimate battlefield victory over the Enemy.

Omar Al-Rikabi is the son of a Southern Methodist mother from Texas and a
Shiite Muslim father from Iraq. He is in his final year of earning a
Masters of Divinity degree from Asbury Theological Seminary, and a declared
candidate for ordination in the United Methodist Church.

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