Late last year, I asked whether Susan Thistlethwaite, the president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, was a spokesman for the America First Party. I was, of course, not serious; I was merely enjoying making fun of her particularly frivolous leftism. I am beginning, however, to think she really is a party spokesman. Witness her latest Washington Post bit, an attack on John McCain. Most of it is a bizarre and laughable attempt to link McCain's comment that "the transcendent challenge of the 21st century is radical Islamic extremism" to some kind of Armageddon theology. But I am more interested in her comments about Iraq:
Five years ago, just before the attack, I appeared on a special Nightline Town Meeting with John McCain (and four others) to debate whether the United States should attack Iraq, a country that had not attacked us.
. . .
This "transcendent" view of world politics is dangerous and extremely volatile. It may in fact be a more dangerous ideology than the one that led us to attack a country that had not attacked us and has kept us at war for the last five years.
Twice she describes Iraq as a country that had not attacked the U.S. That is of course not true, if for no other reason than each time US planes were fired on during fly-over missions, it was an attack on the US. But leave that aside. Saddam was a mass murderer. Thistlethwaire is arguing against intervention to stop the Holocaust, against intervention to stop the genocide in Rwanda, against intervention to stop the genocide in The Sudan, against intervention to stop Milosovic, the Butcher of the Balkans. In the late 1970s, Cambodia, under Pol Pot, began a series of raids and invasions of Vietnam. This led to Vietnam invading Cambodia and overthrowing Pol Pot, ending Pol Pot's Killing Fields. Thistlethwaite would have us believe that the Cambodian incursions were grounds for the Vietnamese invasion, but surely not putting a stop to the Killing Fields. Thistlethwaite's position is that the US should do nothing unless it is directly inconvenienced. Maybe she really is a spokesman for the America First Party. Or maybe she is just a jackass.Posted by sjostrom on March 20, 2008 06:43 AM
Comments:
There are significant legal and ethical differences between Iraq and some of the other situations you describe:
1. The Holocaust was a policy pursued in the context of a German war of aggression which was opposed on traditional just war principles.
2. Action in Rwanda was sanctioned by a specific UN mandate. Tragically, the UN presence was underfunded and half-baked.
3. Sudan, Serbia, ditto.
What makes Iraq such an objectionable war to many is the way it was initiated not in self defense (Sadaam was already hemmed in by the no fly zones and sanctions) but as an act of aggression to remove a government that the US no longer wanted in power. That action crossed a line which the world has not yet recovered from.
