Author: Lee M.

A sinister conspiracy by the beauty-fashion industrial complex, no doubt. Qui bono? indeed.

Alan Bock makes the case for immediate withdrawal from Iraq (without thinking that it’s actually going to happen).

Caleb McDaniel has a good post on the reaction to Pat Robertson’s now-infamous remarks.

Camassia and I have been going round a bit on infant baptism.

Pr. Frontz writes on “the domestication of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”

One common criticism of President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq is that the UN-imposed sanctions were “working” – i.e. containing Saddam Hussein’s expansionist ambitions and his drive to acquire weapons of mass destruction. That fact that the U.S. has indeed not found the dreaded WMD seems to confirm this.

While the efficacy of the sanctions certainly needed to be taken into account in assessing any possible threat posed by Saddam’s Iraq, it is eminently debatable whether sanctions are morally preferable to going to war, or even morally permissible at all.

Accounts differ, but most people agree that the toll of the sanctions on the civilian population of Iraq from the end of the first Gulf War until the re-commencement of hostilities in 2003 was anywhere between 500,000 to over a million deaths, largely due to lack of access to clean water, food, and medical supplies (excacerbated by the probably unnecessary destruction of Iraqi infrastructure during Gulf War I).

So, in sheer quantitative terms, sanctions rival or exceed war as a tool of policy. Moreover, sanctions are among the least discriminating ways of punishing another country for failing to comply with one’s demands. The political elite are usually the last to feel the punishing effect of sanctions, and ordinary people suffer the most. Sanctions intrinsically violate the principles of just warfare.

In fact, sanctions are essentially a form of siege warfare, so “let the sanctions work” was not exactly an “anti-war” stance. It may instead have been a policy for a silent, but more deadly, form of war.

Brandon at Siris posted his list of twenty “must read” science fiction novels. Very interesting. Readers chimed in with their suggestions. I’ve only read about five of the titles on Brandon’s list – looks like I’ve got some catching up to do! Currently I’m in the middle of Gene Wolfe’s novella trilogy The Fifth Head of Cerberus.

Though I was opposed to the Iraq war from the get-go, I’ve been ambivalent, like many people, about what the U.S. should do now that it’s there. After all, whatever the wisdom of going in, Saddam’s regime was truly evil, and I had harbored the hope that it might be possible to help create a decent government there that would at least be more respectful of basic human rights.

Lately though I’ve started to wonder if the insistence on the part of the political and pundit class that, no matter what, we must not “cut and run” isn’t motivated less by an objective assessment of what would happen in Iraq if we left rather than stayed, and more by a fear that leaving would undermine U.S. “credibility.” If there’s one view that is held in common by the mainstream Left and Right, the Thomas Friedmans and the Charles Krauthammers, it’s that the U.S. has the power and the ability to intervene successfully in other countries. But to pull out would be to acknowledge the limitations on our ability to “nation build” and generally shape the world in accordance with our ideals. And that would call into question a central pillar of the worldview of much of the ruling and chattering classes.

In that vein, Sojourners reviews David Rieff’s At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention. (I picked up Rieff’s book after reading the review, but haven’t started it yet.) Rieff appears to be a chastened liberal hawk of sorts; he was an advocate of various “humanitarian interventions” but first hand encounters with the results have left him a great deal more skeptical.

No one wants to abandon the Iraqi people to chaos and civil war, but what if, as conservative Andrew Bacevich recently argued, we’ve already done all we can?

I never took Pat Robertson seriously before, and I’m not about to start now.

A question on usage though: somewhere Robertson’s comments were characterized as a “death threat.” Now, it seems to me that it’s only a death threat if he was intending to carry out the killing himself, which is presumably not the case.

Fr. Jim Tucker has some interesting reflections on the idea of political assassination. Why do we regard it as somehow worse than going to war? And why is it more appalling to advocate the killing of one man than thousands (as respectable mainstream pundits and politicians routinely do)?

The latest issue of The American Conservative has an article by Daniel McCarthy comparing the views of Pope Benedict XVI with Catholic “neoconservatives” like George Weigel and Michael Novak on the question of Just War theory. While there’s not much new information here, McCarthy poses the difference between the Pope, who, like his predecessor, opposed the Iraq war, and those, like Weigel and Novak, who supported it in a way that invites further reflection:

Yet war is a matter of both moral judgment and prudential judgment. The church is not competent to deduce the likelihood of strategic success or to address other purely prudential considerations of Just War doctrine. But there remain moral considerations in going to war about which a pope certainly can speak with authority, if not with infallibility. Neither John Paul II nor Benedict—whose intellect neoconservative Catholics have in other contexts praised —needs reminding about what the Catechism says. In Benedict’s case, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he supervised its recent abridgement. In a May 2003 interview reported by Rome’s Zenit news service, Ratzinger was asked about the justice of the Iraq War in light of the Catechism. He agreed that Just War doctrine may require revision, as Weigel and other Catholic neoconservatives have suggested—but in a more, not less, restrictive direction.

If, as McCarthy suggests, the Catholic “neocons” and the current Pope both agree on the need for a revision of Just War theory, but differ as to how that should be carried out, it’s worth asking why they take the different positions they do. A cynical answer would be that the likes of Weigel and Novak are lapdogs for the Bush administration or have traded their fealty to Catholicism for the ideological brew of American conservatism. On the other hand, one might suggest that Pope Benedict and much of the rest of the Catholic hierarchy, is too imbued with the European spirit of appeasement and anti-Americanism.

A more fruitful (or at least more charitable) explanation would be that each party sees the need for revision of the theory in light of different moral judgments about particular actions taken in light of new circumstances. The reasons that folks like Weigel and Novak often offer for rethinking traditional Just War theory involve the changed circumstances of a struggle against rogue nations and transnational terrorist networks. These circumstances, they argue, clearly require rethinking how such concepts as “last resort” and “certain and lasting danger” apply in today’s world. To coin a phrase, they might say that Just War theory is not a suicide pact, and the spirit, if not the letter, of the theory licences things like preventative wars against states that we may have reason to beleive are harboring terrorists and/or developing weapons of mass destruction (leave aside for the moment that, factually, this didn’t apply to Iraq).

On the other hand, Pope Benedict’s reasons for favoring a “more restrictive” approach to war seem to have to do with the destructiveness of modern weaponry (after all, when Just War theory was formulated, wars were still being fought with swords, spears, and bows and arrows. When the crossbow was introduced in the Middle Ages the Pope at the time declared its use incompatible with civilized limits on warfare), and the greater potential for “collateral damage.” As warfare has become more destructive, the Pope reasons, the need to limit its scope and the frequency of its occurrence becomes all the more important.

In both cases, it seems to me, we have a proposed revision of the theory based on changed circumstances and the weight assigned to different facts. The “neoconservatives” emphasize that traditional Just War restrictions may fail to allow the public authorities to adequately secure the peace and well-being of those who are entrusted to their care, which, after all, is the whole point. The danger there is that justifying recourse to war will become too easy. The Pope, by contrast, is concerned to limit the ravages of war as much as possible, perhaps resulting in the “functional pacifism” that conservative critics of the Vatican decry.

Sober dove Alan Bock isn’t sure whether we’re seeing the beginning of a grass-roots anti-war movement that “looks like America”:

As a war opponent from the beginning, I have mixed feelings. Ms. Sheehan has not confined herself to doubting the war’s wisdom, but has unburdened herself of an array of remarks ranging from personal insults of the president and his family to offhand remarks about Israel and Palestine. It’s understandable that one might want to put an array of issues before the public when you have the chance to have your views magnified by the amplifiers of the media. But I think she would have been more effective if she had stuck stubbornly to a single question: “I just want to know what core American interest was served by my son’s death.”

There’s a constituency for comments like saying a protest is “for all our brave souls (American or Iraqi) who have been murdered by the Bush crime family,” which Mrs. Sheehan is widely reported to have said. There are unquestionably Americans who take delights in hearing someone call the president “that lying bastard” or “that maniac.” There’s a frisson in comments to the effect that without the Internet America “would already be a fascist state.” Plenty of people get their intellectual rocks off hearing comments like “You tell me the truth. You tell me that my son died for oil. You tell me that my son died to make your friends rich. You tell me my son died to spread the cancer of Pax Americana, imperialism in the Middle East.”

In terms of influencing the larger body politic, however, such remarks are not likely to persuade. They might even repel people who are coming to doubt the wisdom of the war in Iraq but are not even close to hating their country, their government or even their president.

None of this takes anything away from the fact that it was Cindy Sheehan, not you or I, who actually took the initiative to go to Crawford. Nor does it justify some of the more scurrilous and personal attacks on her that have come from the War Party from the beginning of her vigil. Indeed, it is impressive that at least several hundred other antiwar Americans, of varying political persuasions, have joined her there. It is encouraging that they have held prayer meetings, demonstrating that like most Americans, they are respectful of religion.

I suspect, however, that the fact that the predominant tone coming from Camp Casey has been embittered-left – which may be how it has been filtered through the media and not reflective of a wider variety of views on the road to the Bush estate – might have been helpful in the short run but not perhaps in the long run. We need at least some faces of the antiwar movement to be people whose deep love of America and respect for her institutions and the promise she still holds of expanding freedom the right way practically oozes from their pores, so there can be no doubt they are patriots. We need people in suits and ties as well as dungarees and bandanas. We need an antiwar movement that looks like America to begin to have a real impact on American policy.

Heavy metal may be the Next Big Thing for kitsch-crazed hipsters according to this Slate article. Well, some of us never stopped loving metal! Though, I admit my tastes run more to 80’s thrash at its peak (early Metallica, Anthrax, etc.), punk-metal fusion (Suicidal Tendencies, D.R.I.), and “classic” stuff like Iron Maiden, with an occasional dip into early 90’s Pantera.

However, allow me to plug the great new album from punk-metal pioneers Corrosion of Conformity. It seamlessly fuses Sabbath-influenced Southern sludge with a thrash element that in places rivals Slayer in their prime (and without all the satanic imagery!).

When it is said that God is the ground of nature’s existence and order, God is not being used to fill a gap in a scientific explanation that concerns the connections between members of the universe. Rather to speak of God as the ground of nature’s existence and order is to address questions concerning the existence of the universe itself and why it has the particular set of members and connections it has. Because these questions are about the universe as a whole, they are beyond the limits of scientific explanations.

[…]

Christianity does not claim that the order of the universe is such that we ought to infer that nature is designed. However great or little its complexity, nature’s order is intended by God. Since Darwin’s theory of natural selection more or less explained how very complex forms of life arise from much simpler forms, we have not been inclined to move toward the idea of design, however great the complexity is. But scientific procedures and assumptions which do not regard nature’s order as intended, do not contradict the Christian claim that the order of the universe is intended by God. It is the Lordship of God over nature, not nature’s complexity, which is the basis of the claim. God as the source of nature’s order gives us no specific information about the relation between its members.

—Diogenes Allen