FAITH, HOPE & SAVAGERY - RushOnline.com
FAITH, HOPE & SAVAGERY By Nicole Gelinas (2/24/04)
Larry and Jean Elliott were not sent straight from central casting
to serve as soldiers in the War on Terror. They were middle-aged
Christian missionaries who went to Iraq armed with mercy to minister
to the pitiful. Instead, they were savagely murdered by the pitiless.
But their hope for their fellow man transcends the horror that enveloped
them.
The Elliotts went to Iraq to serve God, their son Scott told me.
But they had a more worldly offering: clean water.
Larry, 60, and Jean, 58, had spent a lifetime teaching the world's
poor how to filter their own drinking supplies.
The Elliotts' team of Baptist aid workers had spent years devising
an inexpensive filtration system that could be built from scratch
in Third World countries. After Hurricane Mitch ravaged Honduras
in 1998, Mr. Elliott ran hundreds of reconstruction projects to
rebuild that nation.
The Elliotts were disaster-recovery experts. And after decades
of Saddam's brutality, Iraq was a disaster.
This husband and wife risked their lives so that Iraqis could enjoy
the most elemental of human rights: freedom from thirst.
In February, they brought a small team of volunteers from the Southern
Baptist Convention's International Mission Board to Iraq to scout
sites for water-filtration plants.
Their efforts were appreciated. "A consistent theme in e-mails
we received from my parents was how much they liked the Iraqi people
and how warm and friendly they were," Scott said.
But on March 15, their work was cut short. The Elliotts and their
aid partners were gunned down in their car in Mosul, in northern
Iraq. Their unprotected vehicle was shot through by terrorists firing
AK-47s.
Larry and Jean Elliott were killed instantly, along with Karen
Watson, 38. A fourth worker, David McDonnall, 29, died from his
wounds the next day. McDonnall's 26-year-old wife, Carrie, survived.
The four were among the first of dozens of Western civilians, secular
and religious, who would be killed or taken hostage in Iraq during
the morale-sapping month to come.
For terrorists have rolled out an efficient strategy with a diabolical
ripple effect: Kill those who would help the Iraqis learn to help
themselves.
It is tempting to view such aid workers as naive eccentrics inserting
themselves where they don't belong - unwelcome foreign meddlers
in a culture the West can't understand or change.
It is tempting to view them as pawns in an unwinnable American
war against the immutable elements of Middle East politics: the
cruelty and hopelessness that culminate in vicious nihilism.
But the Elliotts didn't die in vain for a lost cause. They were
compelled by their faith - but they also went to Iraq in service
of the impulse that advances global civilization: to painstakingly
etch a thin line of light through the darkest glass, to mold order
from chaos.
That impulse is what pushed President Bush to send state-sponsored
civilian workers along with U.S. troops into Afghanistan in 2001,
and to keep them there to rebuild that country after 20 years of
war and deprivation.
America didn't just destroy Afghanistan's capacity to harbor our
enemies and then walk away. Instead, at great cost to ourselves,
we resolved to help build a modest democracy there; to heal the
broken humanity of that nation's people.
That same impulse pushed the president to stage an ambitious democracy
project in Iraq. Bush called upon our bravest citizens to go to
war - to bring self-government to a people who have spent generations
serving as subjects, not as citizens, in their own nation.
It will be hard to bring off democracy in Iraq. But the West has
no choice but to try. We cannot let Middle East populations fester
under brutality. Nihilism becomes the desire to annihilate others:
Witness 9/11.
America's theory for Iraq is simple but revolutionary. Bush has
staked the lives of our soldiers on the faith that the long-oppressed
Iraqi people will have the courage to channel their newfound self-determination
into freedom and respect for individual rights, not intolerance
and wholesale violence.
The Iraqis may fail. Choice always carries that risk. Failure in
Iraq would belong to the Iraqis, not their liberators - but a failed
Iraq would break all of our hearts.
E-mail: nicolegeli@hotmail.com
