The Vicar of Baghdad

April 13, 2009
As head of a foundation for relief and peacemaking and vicar of an Anglican church in Baghdad, White has gained the ear of major power brokers, negotiated hostage releases and coordinated interreligious dialogue in the Middle East. Yet his memoir does not fit neatly into the canon of peacemaking literature, in part because he sees no problem with aligning closely with the U.S. military and accepting Pentagon funds for his interfaith peace summits. “Peacemaking of the old woolly-liberal kind no longer works, if it ever did,” he writes, and criticizes “bottom-up” approaches to reconciliation as ineffective in the Middle East. White's most controversial claim—that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction—goes unsupported, and some will find his support for the U.S. invasion ironic, inasmuch as it exists alongside interreligious statements that he helped to broker proclaiming a “total rejection of all violence.” White's stories of finding common ground between enemies and his commitment to finding out how religion can “advise, rather than supervise, politics” are truly admirable, however, and not lost entirely amid the book's other, more self-serving assertions.