The Preservation of Peace in Syria Is of Prime Importance

The Disastrous Consequences of

a U.S. Military Attack on Syria

by Pastor Paul J. Bern

For a website view, click here :-)

Lately I have been seeing or hearing the Trump administration telling the world that the use of chemical weapons in Syria by the Assad government must be answered by other worse weapons, even though the results of satellite surveillance has not proven this allegation – just as the Bush administration refused to wait for the 2013 UN report by the inspectors who had been looking for WMD in Iraq. Secretary of State John Kerry claimed back in 2013 that the UN inspectors “can’t tell us anything that we don’t already know.” President Trump has said that any U.S. attack on the Assad government will be as punishment, not regime change. The strike will be “limited” — but tell that to the civilians who will inevitably die when military attacks take place. President Bush and his advisers either didn’t know or didn’t care about the probable consequences of their decision to invade and occupy Iraq in March of 2003:

• Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and over 4,000 Americans dead;
• Millions of Iraqis and Americans wounded physically and psychologically;
• Legions of young men of the region now experienced in warfare and for hire moving from Iraq to Libya to Syria;
• And, the Iraqi “democratic” government unable to control the whirlwind of sectarian violence that now is killing hundreds each week.
• Although the U.S. invaded and occupied Afghanistan under a different rationale, I also want to acknowledge and empathize with the Afghan citizens who have been killed or wounded in the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

President Trump has not spelled out the possible consequences of a military attack on Syria, but U.S. military leaders are warning about the risks. In a letter to the Senate Armed Services committee, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey wrote last month said, “As we weigh our options, we should be able to conclude with some confidence that use of force will move us toward the intended outcome. Once we take action, we should be prepared for what comes next. Deeper involvement is hard to avoid.”

General James Mattis, who is the retired head of the U.S. Central Command and Trump's Secretary of State, said last month at a security conference that the United States has “no moral obligation to do the impossible” in Syria. “If Americans take ownership of this, this is going to be a full-throated, very, very serious war.” As U.S. warships gather off the shores of Lebanon to launch Tomahawk Cruise missiles at targets in Syria, we can make some educated guesses of what the “unintended consequences” could be:

• Syrian anti-aircraft batteries will fire their rockets at incoming U.S. missiles.
• Many Syrians on the ground will die and both the U.S. and Syrian governments will say the deaths are the fault of the other.
• The U.S. Embassy in Damascus will be attacked and burned, as may other U.S. Embassies and businesses in the Middle East.
• Syria might also launch rockets toward the U.S. ally in the region —Israel.
• Israel would launch bombing missions on Syria as it has three times in the past two years and perhaps take the opportunity to launch an attack on Syria’s strongest ally in the region, Iran.
• Iran, a country with a population of 80 million, has the largest military in the region untouched by war in the past 25 years. Iran might retaliate with missiles aimed toward Israel and toward nearby U.S. military bases in Afghanistan, Turkey, Bahrain and Qatar.
• Iran could block the Straits of Hormuz and impede the transport of oil out of the Persian Gulf.
• At this time of crisis, it is worth remembering another time, 35 years ago in October, 1983 when U.S. warships bombarded Lebanon, the country located next to Syria. Within weeks, the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by a massive truck bomb that killed 241 American servicemen: 220 Marines, 18 sailors and three soldiers. The truck driver- suicide bomber was an Iranian national named Ismail Ascari, whose truck contained explosives that were the equivalent of 21,000 pounds of TNT. Two minutes later a second suicide bomber drove a truck filled with explosives into the French military compound in Beirut killing 58 French paratroopers.

The U.S. and French military were in Lebanon as a part of a Multi-National force after the PLO left Lebanon following the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, ostensibly to create a 40 km buffer zone between the PLO and Syrian forces in Lebanon and Israel. The Israeli invasion was tacitly approved by the U.S., and the U.S. provided overt military support to Israel in the form of arms and material.

Colonel Timothy J. Geraghty, the commander of the U.S. 24th Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU) deployed as peacekeepers in Beirut, said that the American and the French headquarters were targeted primarily because of "who we were and what we represented…” American support removed any lingering doubts of our neutrality, and I stated to my staff at the time that we were going to pay in blood for this decision.”

Some of the circumstances around the incidents in Lebanon in 1983 and now 35 years later in Syria are familiar. U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of potential trouble but did not report the problems in sufficient time for actions to be taken. Former President Obama said at the time that the U.S. had intercepted signals indicating the Syrian government was moving equipment into place for an attack, but the U.S. did not warn the Syrian government that the U.S. knew what was happening and did not bother warning civilians that a chemical attack was imminent.

On August 31, 2013, 13 former officials of the U.S. government, including Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Dan Ellsberg, retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern, retired US Army Colonel Larry Wilkerson and former Chief of Staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, wrote an open letter to General Martin Dempsey, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, asking him to resign rather than follow an illegal order to attack Syria. “We refer to your acknowledgment.... that a decision to use force is not one that any of us takes lightly. It is no less than an act of war.... It appears that the President may order such an act of war without proper Congressional authorization. Seasoned veteran intelligence and military professionals solemnly sworn to support and defend the Constitution of the United States have long been aware that it is one’s duty to never obey an illegal order. If such were given, the honorable thing would be to resign, rather than be complicit.”

Those words were written five years ago, and the situation in Syria continues to escalate. As I write this, the Syrian government under Bashar Al-Assad has largely prevailed against the various parties of militants, some of whom are backed by the US. and still others by Iran. Syria and Iran are allied with Russia, with the ever-present potential for a clash between Russian and American military forces. A disquieting thought, to say the least. But it was Jesus himself who said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the 'sons of God'.” The flip side of that coin is that those who wage war are cursed. Meaning, if America doesn't cease and desist from her warlike ways, a military disaster will surely befall her. America's violence, killing and destruction overseas will come home to roost. Just let that sink in for a minute, and I'll see you all next week.

Free book excerpt #13 from Author and Pastor Paul J. Bern

"Sole Survivor" by Rev. Paul J. Bern

Now available in print, digital and audio formats. Offered on Amazon or from our website

Watch the video at http://youtu.be/5Bxi7x0nUc0

  Chapter 5

Restoration by God, Driven Away by Man

I finally got out of jail on the night of December 17^th, 1999 after an agonizing 4 month wait to get my court case done and over with. The main thing I remember about that night was how incredibly cold it was. I had been arrested in early fall near the end of September, and all I had on were casual slacks and a polo shirt. After treating myself to a full sit-down dinner at an all-night restaurant across the street from the jail, I was forced to make my way on foot to the nearest place that I was sure would be open all night, which was the community hospital on the suburban east side of Atlanta about 2 or 3 miles away. So off into the freezing cold I went as I hiked over to the hospital. The two main things that motivated me to get there were the lack of outer clothing and the fact that I was already a nervous wreck from having spent those 4 months in jail without the benefit of my bipolar medication. The clinic there – and it barely qualified as such – were giving me 2 different medications that I had never heard of. They did just barely work, but they were a poor substitute for my regularly prescribed 'meds'. I recall getting to the ER about 3:30 AM that morning. To make a long story short, I spent the next 13 days at an inpatient clinic right down the street from the hospital. While I was there I got stabilized on my regular medications, and I managed to get back in touch with the district manager where I had been working when all this mess first started. I had contacted him when I was first brought to jail, trying to raise some bail money. They could not help me with that, I was told, but my job would be kept open for me until I was released. They stayed true to their word and rehired me upon my release. That Wang Global district manager's name was James Dean. God bless you, James, wherever you are.

I checked out of the hospital on a blustery Friday afternoon, and I started back to work the following Monday morning. This gives me pause with regards to God's eternal mercy, the loving way He chastises us but then restores us – but not always immediately, because His timing is always perfect. Did you ever notice that about God? His timing is always letter-perfect and never too late. Had that gone any other way, when I got out of jail I could have immediately become homeless, wandering the streets without a coat when the outside temperature was around 35 degrees, and having lost the new job I had just acquired 5 months before. Instead, and by the grace of God alone, I had landed on my feet and I was able to miraculously pick up where I had left off before all the trouble started. I give Jesus all the credit for my success, and I give him all my praise, thankfulness, and honor!

I worked that entire year, right up until Christmas time. That's when they laid us off. But it was the way it was done that bothered me the most. One day a month or two beforehand, a 15-passenger van pulled up and parked in front of the office, and these 15 technicians from the Philippines get out and enter the office conference room. The door gets shut behind them, and it isn't until the next day that the rest of us found out they were there as our replacements. The senior techs, and by this point I was one of them, were instructed to train one of them apiece. One of them said it was unfair, and he refused to train any of them, saying he could make his job last at least a week longer by not having a replacement trained and ready to go. To no one's surprise, he was fired on the spot, right where he stood, and it didn't seem to matter to him. To this day I regard this as a good example of what can and should happen to racists in the workplace.

I spent the next six months searching like crazy for a replacement job. Unfortunately, the dot-com financial crash was happening right around this time, and the computer/IT industry had pretty much came to a standstill. So I did what lots of other technical professionals like myself were doing at the time: I went back to school to get my Microsoft certification. I already had my degree, plus an A+ certification and two Dell certifications, so for me the Microsoft certification made sense (remember, this was back in 2001). But instead of making me more marketable like I thought, what few job offers I did have seemed to evaporate. All together I went for over 14 months without drawing a paycheck. My saving grace during this time was that I had substantial savings, otherwise I would surely have been homeless by that time. But homelessness escaped me when I used the small pickup truck that I owned at the time to go to work as a private contractor for a courier company. I had to take a substantial pay cut from the $35.00 per hour I had been making as a Dell service contractor, but by now my savings balance was nearly depleted. By dodging homelessness the way I had, I thought I had dodged a bullet, but I had only delayed the inevitable for a few more years. I will have more to say on that in the next chapter.

This book is available on-line from the author at www.pcmatl.org/books-and-donations (free shipping, tax deductible) for $12.95. 

Or, get it on Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=node%3D154606011&field-keywords=sole+survivor%3A+one+man%27s+testimony+for+Christ&rh=n%3A154606011%2Ck%3Asole+survivor%3A+one+man%27s+testimony+for+Christ

Get it in audio format at https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daudible&field-keywords=sole+survivor%3A+one+man%27s+testimony+for+Christ&rh=i%3Aaudible%2Ck%3Asole+survivor%3A+one+man%27s+testimony+for+Christ 

Watch the video at http://youtu.be/5Bxi7x0nUc0 Thanks so much!

The positive side of error

Human Error And What It Can Teach Us

by Rev. Paul J. Bern

It has been my observation that people take a great deal of pride and personal satisfaction, not to mention their professional identity, in their educations and professional training. The existence of the Internet constantly reminds us that knowledge is power, but more importantly that knowledge is instantly available. Some self-righteous – even belligerent – individuals take this fact to its outer extreme by going through life with the attitude that unlimited Web access equals unlimited personal power and knowledge. This philosophy of no limitations is the seed from which human failure sprouts, having failed to recognize that human intelligence has its limits despite a wealth of available knowledge. King Solomon wrote in the book of Proverbs in the Old Testament, “The Lord catches the wise in their craftiness”, and the prophet Isaiah wrote, “The intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate”, and, “God had chosen the foolish things of the world, and the simple, to confound the wise”. So much for human intelligence.

The fact of the matter is that we do not learn anywhere near as much from formal education as we do from our own mistakes. For example, I will use the household cleaner known commercially as “Formula 409”. How did the inventor come up with this name? He had to make 408 different formulas that didn't work in order to come up with one that did. That means he/she had to make 408 mistakes in order to come up with the winning formula that we know today. Life experiences work exactly the same way. We learn and adapt from our experiences as we go along in life because that is how the human brain is wired. Our brains learn from constant modification based on our surroundings, our environment and the sum of our experiences. On the other hand, being right can also have its benefits. As pleasures go, it is, after all, a second-order one at best. Unlike many of life's other delights – chocolate, the great outdoors, movies, books – it doesn't enjoy any mainline access to our biochemistry: to our appetites, our adrenal glands, our sex drive, our emotions. And yet, the thrill of being right is undeniable, universal, and (perhaps most oddly) almost entirely undiscriminating. Nor does subject matter; we can be just as pleased about correctly identifying the model year of a vintage Corvette, or correctly identifying the sexual orientation of our co-worker. Stranger still, we're perfectly capable of deriving satisfaction from being right about disagreeable things: the downturn in the stock market, say, or the demise of a friend's relationship.

Like most delectable experiences, rightness isn't ours to enjoy all the time. As the apostle John wrote, “If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. If we claim we have not sinned, we make Him out to be a liar, and his Word has no place in our lives.” (1^st John chapter 1, verses 8-10, NIV) Clearly, humankind is prone to error because we're made that way. The time-worn phrase, “Nobody's perfect”, continues to be a gross understatement, and it always will. I think the biggest reason we enjoy being right is because it happens so relatively infrequently. Because when we're not, we're the one who loses the bet. And sometimes, too, we suffer grave doubts about the correct answer or course of action – an anxiety that, itself, reflects our desire to be right.

On the whole, though, and notwithstanding these lapses and qualms, our indiscriminate enjoyment of being right is matched by an almost equally indiscriminate and sometimes irrational feeling that we are right. At times, this feeling spills into the foreground, such as when we argue, evangelize, or make predictions. Often, though, it is just psychological backdrop. Most of us go through life assuming that we are basically right, basically all the time, about basically everything: about our political and intellectual convictions, our religious and moral beliefs, our assessment of other people, our memories, our grasp of facts. As absurd as it sounds when we stop to think about it, our steady state seems to be one of unconsciously assuming that we are very close to infallible. Most of us navigate day-to-day life fairly well, after all, which suggests that we are routinely right about a great many things. And sometimes we are not just routinely right but spectacularly right: right about the orbit of the planets (mathematically derived long before the technology existed to track them); right about the healing properties of aspirin (known since at least 3000 BC); right to track down that woman who smiled at you in the cafe (now your wife of 20 years). Taken together, these moments of rightness represent both the high-water marks of human endeavor and the source of countless small joys. They affirm our sense of being smart, competent, trustworthy, and in tune with our environment. More important, they keep us alive.

Individually and collectively, our very existence depends on our ability to reach accurate conclusions about the world around us. In short, the experience of being right is imperative for our survival, gratifying for our ego, and, overall, one of life's cheapest and keenest satisfactions. Yet even that can be an illusion (or a delusion, take your pick) as the apostle James, the half-brother of Jesus, wrote: “The brother in humble circumstances ought to take pride in his high position. But one who is rich should take pride in his low position, because he will pass away like a wild flower. For the sun rises with scorching heat and withers the plant; its blossom falls and its beauty is destroyed. In the same way, the rich man will fade away even while he goes about his business.” (James chapter 1, verses 9-11, NIV) But the ministry of Christ was aimed towards those who were willing to acknowledge their imperfections, just as Jesus said: “I have not called the righteous, but sinners to repentance”. As a minister myself, I am glad when I'm right, but more interested in how we as a culture think about error, what the Word of God says about it, and how we as individuals cope when our convictions collapse out from under us. If we relish being right and regard it as our natural state, then our feelings about being wrong are the exact opposite. For one thing, we tend to view it as rare and bizarre – an inexplicable aberration in the normal order of things. For another, it leaves us feeling idiotic and ashamed. Like the term paper returned to us covered in red ink, being wrong makes us cringe and slouch down in our seats; it makes our heart sink and our resentment rise. At best we regard it as a nuisance, at worst a nightmare, but in either case – and quite unlike the gleeful little rush of being right – we experience our errors as deflating and embarrassing. And it gets worse. In our collective imagination, error is associated not just with shame and stupidity but also with ignorance, lazyness, psychopathology, and moral degeneracy. It is the common view of oneself that our errors are evidence of our gravest social, intellectual, and moral failings.

Of all the things we are wrong about, this view of human error might well top the list. It is our mega-mistake: We are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction and courage. And far from being a mark of indifference or intolerance, wrongness is a vital part of how we learn and change. Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world. For those who refuse to acknowledge their errors, King Solomon wrote about people like them in the Book of Proverbs, “There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death”. (Proverbs 14: 12) People who insist on going their own way end up getting consumed by it. The lucky survivors wind up in jails, mental hospitals, rehab, or any combination thereof. Given this centrality to both our intellectual and emotional development, error shouldn't be an embarrassment, and cannot be an aberration. On the contrary, as Benjamin Franklin once observed, "the history of the errors of mankind, all things considered, is more valuable and interesting than that of their discoveries." I believe the healthiest and most productive attitude we can have about sin and error is that however disorienting, difficult or humbling our mistakes might be, it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are. And in the end, it is that recognition of our own sinful, mistake-prone nature that ultimately leads us to the sole solution – Jesus Christ. Ask Him into your hearts today. Jesus came that we might have life, and have it to the full. Go ahead, just do it.