----- Original Message ----- From: "Nick Arnett" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <brin-l@mccmedia.com> Sent: Sunday, April 17, 2005 8:54 PM Subject: Re: Peaceful change L3
> We cannot easily, which is why the moral presumption must be against actions > that cause great evil, such as war, especially when many others in the body of > Christ oppose it. Let me clarify this with a question. Do you think that the death and maiming of people due to war is worse than death and maiming of people under a government that is in near total control? I listed my criterion for determining whether a war was in the interests of the people of Iraq...if my kids were magically transported there and were randomly assigned to take the place of 3 people in Iraq, would I personally favor the war? > > When, according to our best > > understanding, we have an opportunity to decrease human suffering > > and death, when does God call us to let things unfold instead, > > increasing human suffering and death? When does God call us to say > > no when people ask for help? > > Who called for help? >Exactly which Iraqis called for us to invade and occupy > their country? Was there any evidence of even an partial consensus for that? There were Iraqis who were in the US, some who were partially maimed, who were asking for us to help their families back in Iraq. But, I think it is not unreasonable to assume that people living horribly under conditions where they could be reported for something they didn't do and be taken away to be tortured and killed would prefer to not have that happen. We couldn't do an opinion poll in Rwanda either, but I think it was a fair assumption that the tribes being murdered would have a strong preference to have it stopped. The real point is that such actions cries to the heavens for justice. And, I certainly agree that God has no hands to work upon this earth except our own. It is not arrogance or illusion of control to think that we are called to stop such actions. But, we have to be sure that the cure isn't worse than the disease. Personally, that is where I've come to stand.....asking if the people where we will be fighting will be better off with the war than without. In Rwanda, the answer seemed extremely clear. In Sudan, Neli is mad as hell that the UN really couldn't care less that this is happening. In Iraq, I thought that the people of Iraq would be better off with a war to remove Hussein, but that the world as a whole would be better off with containment....so I opposed the war. > It is exactly this kind of situation when we are most susceptible to the > temptation to believe that "we" are good victims and "they" are bad people, so > anything goes. That's when it becomes most critical to listen to others > instead of shutting them out. Actually, if you look at Bush's speach that I posted at length, it seems clear to me that the "we" are not Americans but the peoples of the world who want and deserve to be free and the "they" are the dictators who want to keep them down. The world is, indeed more complicated than Bush imagines. But, making him into a zenophobiac doesn't help us understand the situation. This is not what Bush's fault is, IMHO. I think I can identify two of them: 1) He believes that the nobelness of his goals provides an assurance of sucess. In a sense, he acted in Iraq as a clueless do-gooder. Overthrow the guy opressing the people and their natural desire for freedom and justice will take care of everything else. This led to his criminal incompetence in the aftermath of the actual war. If you remember, I predicted that we'd bumble the peace afterwards before the war. But even I could not imagine the magnitude of his incompetence. 2) He does have a tendency to a black and white WWF view. It's not that the good guys are Americans and the bad guys are Arabs.....it's that he thinks that the bad guys are identifyable and that it's acceptable to use all means necessary against the evil doers. That is somewhat similar to what you've been arguing, but there is a critical difference. It's not Christians or Americans who are the good people, its the majority of people. Bush has a vision of a world of freedom, peace, and prosperity for all, and he is trying to bring it about. > > So, if we use reason to see who has the capacity to physically stop > > a dictator and the short list has one name, then it's presumptuous > > to trust reason. > > Must dictators be physically stopped? That is not only morally unclear, but > it is certainly not political policy, so I can't see it as anything but a > straw man. No, it was one of the justifications for used in the discussions before the war. Thomas Friedman, laid out the case of the hawkish liberal which was the most compelling case for attacking Hussein that I saw before the war. As I mentioned, he told a compelling story about a conference at which the consensus was that, unfortunately, we'd have to live with merely containing Hussein, until the personal testimony of an Iraqi changed minds and hearts. Even though I was still opposed to going in because I thought we'd mess up the peace afterwards, my heart sank when I read this piece......because the horror involved in keeping the status quo hit home. Indeed, trying to convey this sense of horror is the main motivation of my arguments in this thread. I fault most others who were also opposed to the war for going into denial over the horror. A plan that has little chance of working proposed as a realistic alternative is just one more stage of denial. By avoiding the horror of war, we accept the horror of the status quo for years to come. The status quo was that, in order to protect the rest of the world from Hussein, the US and Great Britain contained him through the no fly zone and through sanctions they got passed at the UN. As it turned out, this left him as a much smaller threat to world peace than was thought by most before the war, but as a major threat to his own p eople. I wasn't very impressed by Bush's arguments that Hussein was a risk to us. Tom Friedman's arguments about our moral responsibility to our brothers and sisters in Iraq gave me pause. God certainly does not favor war. But, I think there are worse things than war. The killing of tens of millions of Chinese through governmental action was not less of an atrocity because it could not be classified a war. The problem with the Iraq war was not the war itself...casualties averaged over the war and the first months after the war indicated to me that it was quite likely that the total casualties in '03 in Iraq would be lower with the war than without. The problem was what stability we could find after the war....so we could make a fairly quick exit/drawdown leaving the country in much better shape than before. Even I didn't anticipate that we'd so bungle the peace that we'd give the insurgency a chance to start a new war on a silver platter. If Bush had been competent, there probably would have been hundreds fewer American deaths and tens of thousands fewer Iraqi deaths. _This_ is what I'm angry at Bush about. I can easily see Tom's and Gautam's points, and I do not fault them for not being able to fathom just how badly the peace was to be run. It now looks as though the Iraqis were more than ready to start on the path towards democracy....and that thinks would have turned out better for the average citizen if only Bush et. al. were no more than sorta incompetent. Finally, I agree with Lincoln....we are called to use our best judgment. Lincoln was not a control freak when he set off a horrendous bloody war. It was that he thought that only by keeping the Union would we obtain an answer to the question "whether this country or any country so conceived could long endure." When both war to break the status quo and the continuation of the status quo both involve the suffering and death of many of our brothers and sisters, that's a hard judgment. The judgment for a discretionary war isn't whether war is good, it's whether leaving things continue as they are is worse. The extent of the damage to and destruction of human lives in each case is not a bad starting point for considering this. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
