A King Is Not Saved By His Great Army

An Invitation to Prayer
The Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) in Baghdad, Iraq invites you to join with us every Tuesday for a day of prayer, fasting and action that will continue until Easter week. Participate as you are led either by fasting (the team will do a bread and water fast) and/or participating with us in a time of joint prayer. At 9AM Eastern Standard Time (1400GMT) the team will gather for an hour of focused prayer. You are invited to join for the entire hour or for as much time as you can. Please also note the Action Steps connected with each week's sacred passage. If you are so led, the CPT Iraq team asks that you take the suggested action between Tuesday and Thursday so that we can be working together.

Website for posting now available:
CPT in Iraq has begun a web log found at http://prayerandactionforiraq.blogspot.com. To post a comment on our web log, follow these steps:
1)Scroll down to the bottom of the posting you wish to comment on.
2)Click on the place that shows the number of comments made on the posting.
3)Scroll to the bottom of that page and click where is says, "Post a comment."

Tuesday, February 1, 2005: A King is Not Saved by His Great Army

--Isaiah 31:1

"Woe to those who go down to Egypt for help, who depend upon horses:
who put their trust in chariots because of their number,
and in horsemen because of their combined power,
but do not look to the Holy One of Israel nor seek the LORD!"

Iraq has accumulated vast quantities of armaments. Under the previous regime, large stockpiles of conventional weapons were stored across the country. When the Coalition Forces began their attack in March 2003, they brought more weaponry. Some of this new ammunition was made of depleted uranium. The health risks of Depleted Uranium are unknown and the Coalition forces using it have remained wilfully ignorant. In the period immediately after the Coalition’s invasion, Christian Peacemaker Teams urged the Coalition to collect the unexploded ordnance remaining in the country to reduce the risk of civilian accidents, and restrict its further use. A United Nations report at the time said that Iraq might have more unexploded ordnance than any other country in the world. The Coalition was slow to respond. One soldier told CPT, “Things like that tend to go away after awhile.”

An increasingly well-armed Iraqi resistance movement has been attacking Coalition forces, Iraqi military and police, and civilians every day. Heavily armed Coalition forces respond with ferocious attacks on anyone suspected of armed resistance, including whole cities like Falluja. No side is able to claim victory. Iraq is slipping further and further back from the high standards of living it once enjoyed. Billions of dollars in reconstruction funds are increasingly diverted to “security,” but security in Iraq remains elusive. The only ones to profit from this war are the arms manufacturers.

ACTION STEP:
Write to arms manufacturers urging them to convert their enterprises from death-dealing to life-affirming ones. The major suppliers of ammunition to the war in Iraq are:

SNC TEC, c/o SNC-Lavalin Inc., CEO Jacques Lamarre, 455 René-Lévesque Blvd. West, Montreal, QC, Canada H2Z 1Z3, Email: info@snclavalin.com, Web: www.snctec.com

ATK, Alliant Technologies, CEO: Daniel J. Murphy, Jr, Corporate HQ, 5050 Lincoln Dr., Edina, MN, USA 55436, Email: alliant.corporate@atk.com,Web: www.atk.com