LV clergy call for end of war

“It is time for people of faith to rally and make our voices heard in Washington,” the Rev. Paul Colbert, an Episcopal priest, said at Friday’s event at the Dula Senior Center downtown. “Our mission is to wage peace, not war. We are reconcilers.”

Colbert, the Rev. Marion Bennett, Rabbi Mel Hecht and Sister Rosemary Lynch spoke in front of a memorial erected in 1952 to honor Clark County war dead as part of a national project called America Speaks Out on the War. The project is backed by the liberal group Americans United for Change.

“Our time to get out of Iraq is now,” said Bennett, minister of the Zion Independent Methodist church. “We have a moral obligation to help restore the chaos our country has caused in Iraq.”

Lynch, a Franciscan nun, praised Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., for his “brave stand” to pull troops out of Iraq. “This war in which we’re engaged is a cruel and unjust war,” she said. She said her patron saint, Francis of Assisi, should serve as an example to “look at one another with love, with respect, with the promise to protect and cherish.”

Hecht said it was time for U.S. leaders to admit that Iraq had been a mistake.

“The passion of our democracy has always been its willingness to struggle with painful issues and recognize that even when we enter into a commitment that only time proves to have been wrong, we have the moral and ethical strength to reverse history,” he said.

Hecht compared the situation to religious leaders’ objections to the war in Vietnam but said there was a notable difference: “We love, respect and adore our servicemen,” he said. “We’re not making them the target of our feelings.”

The clergy members didn’t mention the ostensible targets of their protest, Sen. John Ensign, Rep. Jon Porter and Rep. Dean Heller, by name.

Porter spokesman Matt Leffingwell said the Southern Nevada congressman wants to see whether the situation in Iraq will change over the summer.

“The congressman is not happy with how this war has been handled, and he sees our options as being very limited,” Leffingwell said. “He firmly believes that we have to give time for this strategy to succeed and then make a new assessment in September.”

Army Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the forces in Iraq, is due to return to Capitol Hill in September and report on the progress of the current strategy to increase the number of troops there.

Porter, Heller and Ensign opposed a recent bill that passed both houses of the Democrat-controlled Congress that would have tied war funding to a timetable for withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq. President Bush vetoed the bill last week.

“Surrendering will not make America safer,” Ensign spokesman Tory Mazzola said. “We need to get the troops the resources they need, and we need to pass a war spending bill that gets them those resources soon. We need to win in Iraq. That means as long as it takes.”

Ensign is willing to compromise with Democrats in setting political benchmarks for the Iraqi government as conditions on funding, but not for U.S. troops, he said.