After months of increasing talk of military strikes against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons, the Bush administration has suddenly received a dose of reality. In what news reports called A Blow to Bush's Tehran Policy and An Assessment Jars a Foreign Policy Debate About Iran, a new "National Intelligence Estimate," representing the consensus view of 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, used its strongest language – "We judge with high confidence" - to say

We judge with high confidence that in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program;

The NIE followed with its language for a lesser certainty - "We assess with moderate-to-high confidence" - to add

we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.

And why this change?

We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran's announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran's previously undeclared nuclear work. … Our assessment that Iran halted the program in 2003 primarily in response to international pressure indicates Tehran's decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs. This, in turn, suggests that some combination of threats of intensified international scrutiny and pressures, along with opportunities for Iran to achieve its security, prestige, and goals for regional influence in other ways, might—if perceived by Iran's leaders as credible—prompt Tehran to extend the current halt to its nuclear weapons program.

As our Words Not War statement said a year ago:

In response to the real threat of Iran's nuclear ambitions, strategic combinations of pressures and incentives must be seriously and persistently tried, beginning with direct negotiations. … short of full scale war and complete occupation of Iran, military actions will not remove Iran's potential nuclear threat; indeed, it would likely intensify Iran's goal of acquiring nuclear weapons.

Yes, Iran probably is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons (like many other countries), but the way to prevent them is continued diplomacy that offers incentives to cooperate further with international inspections, not reckless talk of military attacks.

Several weeks ago, Larry and Andrea - Christian friends who live and work among Muslims in the Middle East - sent me their reflections on the recent U.S. visit of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad which outraged so many. My friends were bothered by what transpired too, but for different reasons. I think their reflections are well worth sharing here:

Paul Gordon Chandler, in a recent book Pilgrims of Christ on the Muslim Road, describes how a young Muslim, Mazhar Mallouhi, refused to read anything about Christianity because, as Mazhar says, "Christianity was seen as the enemy. And you need your enemy to be ugly. You don't want to discover anything good in your enemy, or you will find yourself in the wrong." Mazhar eventually embraced a relationship with Jesus, and in his contact with Christians discovered that they, too, desire to regard their enemies as ugly as possible. When we portray our enemies as utterly depraved, then we feel justified in treating them however we want.

I risk stating the obvious by mentioning the less than gracious reception President Ahmadinejad received at Columbia University where he was an invited guest. He was also insulted at the United Nations when the American delegation got up to leave at the beginning of his address. It is worth noting that in the Bible, as in the Middle East today, hospitality is seen as a sacred duty. The New Testament says, "extend hospitality…" The sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was seen by the ancient prophets to lie primarily in their lack of hospitality!

Contrast that with the meeting of religious leaders organized by the Quakers and Mennonites. The participants at the meeting did not shy away from hard questions about human rights or the Holocaust, but they asked them politely in an atmosphere of respect.

Interestingly, the religious leaders were criticized for being naïve in their expectations that dialogue would make a difference; some critics even considered them traitorous because they were giving the Iranian leader respect just by meeting with him. Those who choose dialogue are refusing to see only the ugliness, and this makes many people nervous because their clear-cut boundaries are being eroded. Again, this sounds familiar—didn't the Pharisees ask Jesus' disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?"

In my visits to Muslim countries, I have been honored by the friendship and hospitality of ordinary people. What will ordinary Americans offer in return? Will we allow ourselves the "outrageous" experience of seeing the humanity rather than the ugliness in our enemies? Will we reach out to Muslims in our communities and in other countries, and in the process, allow our own lives to be transformed?

Perhaps it is a distant hope to see political leaders gathering around a table in a true gesture of reconciliation and respect. But it is the changed hearts of ordinary people that will help to transform both societies - and our world.

My friends are echoing something Bono said in a recent interview: "But then you've also got to try to cut off the oxygen supply of hatred, which is false ideas about who you are as an American, who you are in the West. I know that sounds like limp liberalism, but it's really not."

When we treat guests in our country with contempt, when we refuse people the dignity of speaking with them, when we focus on the ugliness of our enemies to the exclusion of their humanity, we are reinforcing a pretty ugly idea of who we are as Americans. Ultimately, we're hurting ourselves. Again, to quote Bono, "Isn't it cheaper and smarter to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later?"

As we approach the season of Advent, we will recall our central story: that the holy God who created the universe was mysteriously incarnated in a vulnerable baby among an oppressed people, entering a hostile world full of vicious but beloved enemies to talk to them, walk among them, befriend them, and seek to reconcile with them. What would happen this Christmas if we applied this message to our world and its hostilities today? Preachers, there is a subject for you to work into your sermons. Don't expect such sermons to be popular, but do expect them to be faithful.

Brian McLaren (brianmclaren.net) is board chair of Sojourners, and his most recent book, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope, explores these themes in depth.

Last week I wrote about the possibility of waking up to war with Iran. My fear that we are sleeping now, and should be in the streets and taking action, turns all of my anxiety into a feeling of profound nausea.

But at the very moment of nausea, I see a glimmer of hope. A group of 138 Muslim leaders from around the world and across the various denominations of Islam have come together to reach out to Christians through a statement entitled "A Common Word Between Us and You." In this document, they affirm that they share the same commitment to the great commandment of Jesus that we hold dear: the call to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. This command, they make clear, means that they see Christians as their neighbors, and to be faithful to their faith and values, they want to reach out to us in our faith – in love, as neighbors.

They acknowledge the obvious truth: Christianity - with over 30% of the world's population - and Islam - with over 20% - together comprise over 50% of the world's people. In light of those numbers, unless Christians and Muslims learn to get along as neighbors, nobody in the world will be secure. Our world's great religions must either allow themselves to be manipulated by political and corporate interests as agents of fear and distrust that predictably lead to war, or they must be converted into agents of peace, justice, and love.

This is not simply another mushy, gushy, least-common-denominator, "I'd like to teach the world to sing" style of feel-good "can't we all just get along." The Muslim leaders acknowledge, "… Islam and Christianity are obviously different religions—and … there is no minimizing some of their formal differences." But then they go on to say, " ... it is clear that the two greatest commandments are an area of common ground and a link between the Qur'an, the Torah, and the New Testament."

Thankfully, a group of Christians that includes evangelical theologian Miroslav Volf has responded with a beautiful reply. This emerging dialogue represents to me a tremendous opening, a needed alternative to terror and counter-terror, a gesture and counter-gesture of peace - the makers of which, Jesus said, will be blessed indeed (Matthew 5:9). Thank God for these signs of good hope amid spreading fear. Let us throw our prayers and energies behind them.

Brian McLaren(brianmclaren.net), board chair of Sojourners, explores these themes further in his new book, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope.

I am afraid, but not for the reasons our government is telling me to be afraid. I am afraid that I may wake up one morning soon to discover that our government has launched a preemptive attack on Iran. While our government is issuing national orange alerts about "them," I wonder whether we Christians should be issuing global orange alerts about our own government.

I am disgusted, concerned, appalled, and furious about the current saber-rattling of our government - so reminiscent of the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. My feelings intensify in many of our presidential candidates' forums, where each candidate seems to be in a hissing contest, declaring that he or she is the loudest hisser against terrorism - as if the only danger in the world is posed by an evil "them" and not by evil resident within us. Our Congress' bipartisan vote last month, which labeled the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, seems to me to be handing our president a "go to war free" card, another rather frightening development.

Meanwhile, our media are becoming an echo chamber of fear: after all, fear keeps people tuned in, which means better ratings, and thus more advertising income. Fear pays - economically and politically - but sadly, we haven't reached the point yet of fearing fear itself and what it may do if it keeps accelerating.

On top of these fears, I suspect that many of my fellow Christians will, in the name of God and Jesus and Christianity and the Bible, support and justify a preemptive war on Iran before and after it happens - no matter how unprovoked, no matter how brutal, and no matter how foolish and costly, both financially and morally. Forgetting even the traditional Christian criteria for just war, and forgetting the falsified "intelligence" used to justify our last preemptive war, we Christians in the U.S., I fear, will once again be high on credulity and low on scrutiny - all too eager to believe what our government tells us to legitimize a pre-emptive attack and feed our growing fears. We Christians who cannot follow this path into another war must ask ourselves two kinds of questions:

1. What will we do if we wake up and find our government has attacked Iran while we were sleeping? What actions - public and private - would be appropriate?
2. What can we do now to decrease the possibility of that occurring? What will we wish we would have done in the weeks and months before the morning after?

(To be continued…)

Brian McLaren (brianmclaren.net), board chair of Sojourners, explores these themes further in his new book, Everything Must Change: Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, recently returned from a visit to Armenia, Syria, and Lebanon. While there, he met with politicians, Christian and Muslim leaders, and visited with Palestinian and Iraqi refugees.

In an interview with BBC radio, Williams shared some of the observations he gathered, particularly in Iraq and Iran. He spoke movingly about the Iraqi refugees he met, saying, "the stories we heard were, I have to say, really hair-raising." He went on:

We heard of the firebombing of houses and shops, we heard of abductions, and of murders, and we heard stories - for example, one about a young woman who was travelling in a car with her father (a Christian family). Her father had been shot and killed in the car, she had been left for dead because she was covered with his blood, and when she got back to her home afterwards she had further threats - 'next time we'll finish the job …' - and so she had to leave. When you add those stories up by the hundred and by the thousand you see something of the fantastic human cost of what's going on in Iraq at the moment.

When the questions shifted to the war in Iraq as the cause of this situation (which Williams clearly thinks it is), he then had this to say about Iran:

When people talk about further destabilizing the region, when you read about some American political advisers speaking about action against Syria and Iran, I can only say that I regard that as criminal, ignorant and potentially murderous folly. … I mean that we do hear in some quarters about action against Syria or against Iran. I can't really understand what planet such persons are living on when you see the conditions that are already there. The region is still a tinderbox.

Strong, but true words. The region is still a tinderbox, and a U.S. attack on another country would be throwing gasoline on the fire. Williams is an exemplary church leader, a deeply respected theologian and scholar, a poet, and, I would say, genuine contemplative—all rare these days. He has never been prone to overstatement, and clearly his recent experience in the Middle East affected him deeply. What one hears in his strong words is, indeed, the authentic voice of prophetic criticism (again rare among church leaders these days). Bless you, Rowan Williams, and may our leaders in Washington take notice of your warnings.

With all the fuss around Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's recent visit to New York, you'd think that he had political power, command of the military, or at least strong popular support in his homeland. Actually, he has none of the above, as Stephen Zunes argues in a recent Foreign Policy in Focus article:

Why...is all this attention being given to a relatively powerless lame duck president of a Third World country? ...The emphasis and even exaggeration of Ahmadinejad's more bizarre and provocative statements ... makes it politically easier for the United States to refuse to engage in dialogue or enter into negotiations, such as those that led to an end of Libya's nuclear program in 2003.

What's really going on, Zunes argues, is an attempt to put the Iranian figurehead into a very familiar role - "the Saddam niche" - which offers people in the U.S. a sense of righteous superiority and a justification for the U.S.'s over-militarized Middle East policy.

Elizabeth Palmberg is an assistant editor for Sojourners.

Columbia University students got it right. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's bombastic president, told the packed university auditorium that there were no homosexuals in Iran, the student crowd burst into laughter. Humor and satire have always been good weapons against political stupidity and tyranny. The eager-to-be-provocative Iranian president said a number of stupid things yesterday, as he often does—for example, repeating that the Holocaust should be treated as a theory and not a fact—all of which were worthy of ridicule.

Instead, a growing group of political and media figures, mostly on the Right, are doing their best to use Ahmadinejad's provocations to help stoke the argument and prepare the context for U.S. military conflict with Iran. Fox News just loves Ahmadinejad.

Iran's serious human rights violations (including allegations that teenage boys were hanged for being gay), support for terrorism in conflicts around the world, support for insurgents in Iraq who are killing Iraqi civilians and American soldiers, and—most alarmingly—its development of a nuclear capacity that could easily translate into weapons, are serious problems the rest of the world is rightly concerned with.

But there are no military solutions to those problems, and potential military strikes against Iran by the United States or Israel will only make the above problems worse. A dear friend of mine, an influential rabbi, once told me that if there was a way that a surgical air strike against Iran could remove their nuclear threat, he would support it as a just use of force. But because there is no way that such a military strike could accomplish those goals, he is against such an American action. Nothing short of an American invasion and occupation of Iran might assure the destruction of Iran's nuclear program; and a second occupation in the region is hardly a practical or political—let alone moral—option.

What Fox News doesn't tell us is that President Ahmadinejad is not the supreme leader of Iran—the religious leader Ayatollah Khamenei is. The role of president in Iran is only one of many figures with political power, and not the most important one in the country's complicated political and religious system. And Ahmadinejad's clear immaturity as a leader, combined with his failure to deliver things that he has promised, has placed him in serious political trouble in his own country.

Nothing would serve the political career and purposes of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad better than to be able to provoke a military confrontation with the United States which would, almost certainly, unite all the competing factions in Iran around him in a nation under attack. And that is exactly why this irresponsible and self-aggrandizing politician is being so deliberately provocative. Ahmadinejad and Dick Cheney ultimately want the same thing—another confrontation. What does that tell you?

So don't give him what he wants by bombing his country. Then take all the problems above very seriously. Enter into real negotiations with Iran, using a variety of carrots and sticks, and especially reach out to the forces of democratic reform in that country (which we would only help crush with a U.S. military confrontation). In the meantime, laugh at Ahmadinejad.