Winchester Peace Walk        Saturday February 22^nd 2003

I warmly welcome the fact that this Peace Walk  has been arranged by a small group that includes both Muslims and Christians; and I count it a great privilege to be asked to speak.

We have come this afternoon to express our prayers and our longing for Peace, and the  conviction that there should not be War against Iraq.

We might not all agree with each other’s reasons for this conviction; as I speak, I hope that many of you will find in what I say something of your own anxieties and beliefs.

I have no doubt, and I need no further proof, that the regime that Saddam Hussein heads in Iraq is an evil one, with an appalling record of cruelty against great sections of the population of the country; nor that it possesses weapons, chemical and biological if not nuclear, that continue to threaten both the peoples of Iraq and their neighbours. But I do not see that this justifies the act of aggression, the pre-emptive strike, that the United States and our own country are threatening, and straining every nerve to get others to join – and which if undertaken will set a terrible precedent to other states in the future. So for me, though a resolution of the UN Security Council might give some legality to what is proposed, it will not alter my sense that  it will be  wrong, profoundly unwise and widely damaging.

Here, baldly stated because all of us are standing, are two main reasons for that judgement.

Though in the most exceptional of situations war may as the ultimate of last resorts be justified, it must never become acceptable as a means of resolving international disputes however serious.   The word is too lightly on our lips and in our ears.  War is always, as the Pope recently said, “a defeat for humanity and a tragedy for religion”. We have to be clear about the sheer awful destructiveness of war, and about  its uncontrollable  humanitarian consequences; and that if this war happens, it will be a war on Iraq, on Iraqi children and women and men, not a war on Saddam Hussein and his immediate colleagues.

The effects of a war now on Iraq are of course unpredictable in detail; but they are likely to be long-lasting even if the war itself turns out to be short – disorder, destruction of the basic supports for civilised life, encroachment by neighbours, pillage, dismemberment, civil war; and  from all of these the sufferers will be ordinary people in their tens of thousands.  Remember Afghanistan, remember the Congo after the decades of war in each. And are those planning the war as seriously planning their own commitment to the many years of reconstruction that should follow it?

And then there are wider-screen, longer-term effects to be considered:

Preparations for this war have diverted attention from what for many of us, Jews, Muslims, Christians and others, is the imperative priority of the search for a just and lasting Peace in the Holy Land – and if the war happens it will  arguably make that Peace still harder to achieve.

It is likely that an American-led, British-supported war against Iraq will be widely seen as a Christian war against Islam. What will be its effects across the Arab and wider Islamic world? On the relationships between the three Abrahamic Faiths, Judaism, Christianity and Islam – perhaps the question of the twenty-first century? On the well being of Christians in majority-Muslim lands?  On the Muslim communities of this country?

And what will be its effects on the well being of Jewish communities all over the world and in this country?

If the war takes place,  will it not  play into the hands of Al-Qaida, and boost recruiting  for the so-called  “War against Terror”?  With the result that this country will be still more exposed to such terrorism of this sort?

Where is the connection, the “joined-up thinking”, between this war and the Government’s  commitment to give priority to Africa, and then to the rest of the majority of the world that is becoming ever poorer? What could be done there with the vast resources already devoted to this war? And is it not likely that  our identification with the United States will disable this country, in the eyes of millions in desperate need,  from fulfilling its  responsibilities to them?

Many of us feared, months ago, that the drive towards war on Iraq would damage the credibility, and the integrity, of the United   Nations; and that it would strain the relations between the major countries of Europe upon which much in the rest of the world depends. Both anxieties have now been justified.

I passionately believe that all these issues have to be brought into the reckoning – yet they are not the stuff of current political and media discussion. Taken together, I believe that they weigh conclusively against war with Iraq whatever the UN Security Council is persuaded to say.

I ask you now to join me in some moments of silence for reflection; and then there will be first a Christian, and then a Muslim, Reading and Prayer; followed by more silence, which will end with a Blessing.