War and Peace

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Permalink Reply by Reginald Jay Townes on September 22, 2009 at 11:55pm

We as Christians are exhorted many times in the New Testament to bring justice to the widow and the orphan, to look after the sick and the infirm, to visit and care for the imprisoned, to love our neighbors, and to be good stewards. We live in a world where sometimes those things are not easy to do; and good at times has to come about only through struggle and sacrifice. We also recognize that people have certain God-given rights and liberties that no other person has the right to totally take away.

Just as it is our duty as Christians to address injustice where ever it maybe in the world according to our abilities--even by force, it is our duty as powerful Christian Nations to be guardians of truth and defenders of those who can not defend themselves. What would our world be like today had not valiant soldiers given their lives in World War II to defeat the Nazis? What would have eventually happened to the Jews all over Europe and maybe the world if Hitler was allowed to spread his evil regime? What would have happened to the great liberties we enjoy here in the USA had Japan been able to succeed in an invasion of US territory? What would happen if we allowed terrorist to keep us in fear and continue to destroy innocent lives and property? We Christian nations have really been blessed and enjoy wealth and freedom envied by the rest of the world. Whether God has blessed us directly or our way of life has produced the good life that we have, we have an awesome obligation to spread this wealth and freedom to all parts of the world to those who desperately want it and need it. "To whom much is given, much is required!."

It is up to us to keep the powers-that-be in the world in check and balance to protect the rights and welfare of all. Sometimes we must protect what we hold sacred (Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) by exercising force. Jesus gave us one example of this when he violently entered the courts of the Temple overturning the tables of the money changers and throwing down their coiffures in protest. They had turned the house of God into a den of thieves, violated the sanctity of the temple, and cheated and short-changed those who purchased from them. Jesus saw an injustice and acted upon it--even with force! Somethings are just worth fighting for!

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Permalink Reply by Reginald Jay Townes on September 23, 2009 at 4:20am

I also forgot to mention that the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" is mistranslated. It should read, "Thou shalt not commit murder" as most translations of the Bible read. And we know that to kill means simply to take a life and doesn't necessarily equates a crime or an evil act. Killing can be an accident. Killing can be in self-defense. Killing can be done by a mentally depraved person who can not be held responsible or accountable for his actions because there is no real intent or real degree of free will.

Murder, of which the commandment speaks of, is a deliberate, unjustifiable, free-willed, selfish act of taking someone's life with malice and aforethought. With murder there is always a killing, but with a killing there doesn't necessarily have to be a murder!

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Permalink Reply by David Beales on December 22, 2010 at 10:21pm

Sadly, yes, I fear.  To sit by and allow an aggressor to to kill the innocent makes the bystander complicit in the aggressor's acts of violence.  Therefore, to me, it is morally justified in such a situation to engage in war with the aggressor. 

 

A couple of decades ago, the USA and others battled Iraq after the Iraqis invaded Kuwait.  I felt the war was justified for the reason stated above.  The glee publicly expressed by many Americans regarding the ease with which we mowed down Iraqi soldiers was so disheartening, however, that any moral justification I felt for our actions was replaced by a strong feeling of shame.

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Permalink Reply by Lynda Keen on December 23, 2010 at 7:08am

David, you said, “To sit by and allow an aggressor to kill the innocent makes the bystander complicit in the aggressor's acts of violence.”
In the case of Hitler, it was pretty clear who the aggressor was. But I don’t think so in the Kuwait-Iraq war or the latest war in Iraq, either.

Here in the west, we have a terrible tendency to believe what our media tell us even when it's patently untrue so in the Kuwait-Iraq war, we believe Saddam Hussein was the aggressor and the American and British forces were the heroes who dashed in to save Kuwait.

The news can look very different from the perspective of another region, however. I was working in the Gulf at the time of the Kuwait-Iraq war. Word on the street was that the American government had actively encouraged Saddam Hussein to take over the oil wells that were in the disputed territory between Iraq and Kuwait and assured him that they wouldn’t intervene so he thought he could do it with impunity.
America then jumped in to help Kuwait.
Why?

And why did they leave Saddam alive for another 10 years? American military personnel in Fujeirah told me they could easily have killed him at that time.

So they weren't complicit in an aggressor's acts of violence?

Sounds a little too altruistic altogether to be true.
So let's look for a more self-interested and much more likely reason.
The American forces established temporary military bases for the duration of the conflict in several Gulf states: Saudi, Dubai, Fujeirah, Oman etc.
Since they didn’t kill Saddam so he could still be considered a threat to the region, they signed contracts with the countries where they’d established bases, to keep their bases in those countries for another five years.
All those bases are still there over 20 years later even though Saddam is no longer a threat.
Because Saddam was deliberately left alive then, an American colonel told me, “We’ll have this to do all over again in 10 years time.” He was 100% right. And how was the invasion of Iraq 10 years later justified? By both Bush and Blair lying that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. So who was the aggressor in both cases and what exactly justified all the killing in both wars?

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Permalink Reply by David Beales on December 24, 2010 at 4:27pm

I don't think the USA or British media misreported the first Iraq war.  It would be hard to lie about the purported fact that Iraq took all of Kuwait and treated the Kuwaiti people harshly. 

As I hope I made clear in my earlier message, I think that any moral justification for USA involvement in that war was vitiated by the gleeful zeal with which the war was prosecuted.  I have never felt that the second Iraq war was justified, even if Iraq were stockpiling weopons of mass distruction.

 

Events such as those wars call into question the concept of moral progress and make each Cristmas eve an ever-more-important source of hope that something more loving and elevated will be born within or among us, or both.

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Permalink Reply by Lynda Keen on December 25, 2010 at 8:37am

I agree with you about moral "progress".

We've made technological progress but our moral status has stayed pretty much the same since Adam blamed Eve over the apple business and Eve blamed the snake.

I also agree with you that Christmas gives hope for something better for and in us.

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