Word: moralizers
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...sane person, after all, is opposed to peace as such. The question is, Peace at what risk? Peace on whose terms? Peace for how long? Looked at this way, war is not only sometimes a moral option--as theologians have long argued. Sometimes it's the only moral option we have. In some ways, this war is a textbook example of that. First off, we are not initiating a war. We are not the aggressor. We are still in a long process of defense. It's hard to remember now, but this...
...obvious alternative to war: continuation of economic sanctions on Iraq. But these sanctions have long been abused by Saddam to allow him to finance his weapons programs while leaving thousands of innocent Iraqis, including children, to starve or die for lack of good medical care. Is it moral to allow this intense suffering to continue indefinitely while we congratulate ourselves for giving "peace" a chance? Is it more moral to maintain that horror indefinitely rather than to try to win a quick war to depose Saddam, free the Iraqi people from tyranny and end the sanctions...
...including almost every Iraqi exile, endorse a war to remove the tyrant. If we can do so with a minimum of civilian casualties, if we do all we can to encourage democracy in the aftermath, then this war is not only vital for our national security. It is a moral imperative. And those who oppose it without offering any credible moral alternative are not merely wrong and misguided. They are helping to perpetuate a deep and intolerable injustice...
...same time, we must insist on being told the truth about why this war seems so inevitable. The moral justifications for war against Saddam would surely lack any persuasive power had Sept. 11, 2001, not happened. As Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has rightly observed, any attempt to sustain truthful speech was lost as soon as the word war was used to describe the events of Sept. 11. What happened on that day was not war; it was murder. In his rush to assure the American people that everything could return to normal, President Bush declared...
Blix--one of those rumpled lawyers who always see both sides of a question--could hardly be more different from George W. Bush, a man of clenched jaw and moral clarity. Yet the Swede's words now have the sort of power that some Bush Administration officials would otherwise ascribe only to Holy Writ. If Blix says that his inspectors are making progress on disarming Iraq, then the U.S. probably will not soon win broad international backing for a war. If, on the other hand, Blix concludes that Iraq has had no intention of cooperating with the inspectors, then...