07040
January 18, 2007

NCC says Bush Iraq troop increase plan is immoral

PC(USA)’s Kirkpatrick urges administration to use ‘other means’

by Chris Herlinger
Ecumenical News International 

NEW YORK — The National Council of Churches in the USA (NCC), a long-standing critic of U.S. military involvement in Iraq, has criticized President George W. Bush’s call for additional U.S. troops to be sent to the region.

     “Sending more troops is not a change in policy, nor is it even a change in strategy; it is more of the same,” the NCC said in a statement about the president’s declaration that he wants to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq by 21,500.  
 
     The NCC’s Jan. 17 statement described the call for more troops as “morally  unsupportable.” There are currently about 130,000 US troops in Iraq. “The surge as recommended by the president is immoral,” the group asserted. “What we do not need
is an assertion of more military strength. What we need is the strength of basic moral conviction.” 
 
     The declaration reiterated the NCC’s call for regional peace negotiations, including the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

     Several heads of the NCC’s 35 member denominations supported the NCC call. One of them, the Rev. John H. Thomas, general minister and president of the United Church of Christ, said U.S. policy and its results in Iraq call for “profound lament and repentance, not for stubborn commitment to the unilateralism and militarism that has been the hallmark of our failed policy in Iraq.”