I didn’t write what follows. I’m not sure I would agree with all of it.
But I have great respect for the prophet who did, who asked me to post it for general view and discussion.
Barack Obama: You are that man.
Anonymous
It has been nearly two years since you assumed your position of great power. And you command a mighty armed force that continues to make war on others. If only some of us can know some of the reasons these wars are wrong, you are certainly privy to all the reasons the wars are wrong. This message to you is not about the wrongness of the wars. That much is assumed. This is about you.
The sin of Pharaoh, we read in the Bible, was that he hardened his heart. And so that sin reoccurs in Scripture, all the way to Domitian. It is the moment the malevolent one takes charge, this moment of hardening one’s heart.
You have hardened your heart to the misery and hatred and terrible dangers of your wars. And they are your wars. You have presided over them for nearly two years. You have presided over them; and you have expanded them; and you have made them yours and yours alone now. Bush’s wars no longer exist. They are past. Now we are witnessing Obama’s wars.
Your are the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Armed Forces, and thereby legally endowed with the authority to order the wars finished, immediately. It is a rare thing for a person to have that kind of historically decisive power – to say a word, and end a nation’s participation in war.
You now have that power. Whether you use that power or not is a choice you can make. And you cannot detach yourself from that responsibility, no matter the rationalizations.
Many people do not realize that you can do that. But you know it is true. With a simple command, you can make the government troops, covert operators, and mercenaries leave both Iraq and Afghanistan. You are by law their Commander-in-Chief, and your authority is final.
You would suffer political consequences for ending the wars, it is true. That’s the way of the world. You would be vilified by enemies, by the press, by the violent patriarchal establishment that identifies itself with domination and force.
But history would remember you as a peacemaker, redeemed, and your warmongering would be forgotten. You would be compared to Gandhi or King… instead of Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, now footnotes of failure in history.
In the short term, however, you would lose an election, and you would be persecuted. It’s true. You. One man. But thousands would be saved who these wars are moving even now to claim.
Every day the war goes on, your career is paying for itself with the death, maiming, dislocation, and grief of others.
What is a self-centeredness that feeds on the lives of others but a hardness of the heart?
This power you possess, the power to stop these wars by fiat, gives you a unique responsibility, and a unique moral liability before God. Not one other person on the planet has the power to make as much right with a word. Or to continue so much evil with one’s silence.
That’s devil’s work over there you’re doing; and you can stop it like flipping a switch.
In 2 Samuel — you remember the story surely — King David had hardened his heart, not out of ambition but lust — self-centeredness comes in many forms — and sacrificed the life of another on the altar of self-interest.
Nathan came to the King and told him the story of a man who had also hardened his heart in self-interest. David played at the righteous judge.
Where is he that I may punish him, the King postured in his self-righteousness.
And Nathan told him, “You are that man.”
The wars continue. You have not stopped them. And you can.
Barack Obama, you are that man.