Archbishop Tutu’s Moral Meltdown.
In my opinion, Tutu said some obvious truths:
Although admitting Saddam Hussein was a “despotic and murderous leader,” Tutu avoids elaborating and offers no alternatives to his removal by Western force. He cites 110,000 Iraqis killed in war but not the many more Saddam killed during supposed peace.
Wow, you mean Hussein killed more than 120,000 of his own people? Did he like, have a big long kill list or something? How many more? Did he, say, I don’t know… maybe…. Kill a half million Iraqi children and then say it was all worth it on national television? I seem to remember something like that…
Oh wait.
OK, forget about our mass murder of Iraqi children in the 90s. Let’s move on. What can make the above paragraph make any sense at all? Consider the logic: Was there any evidence that Hussein was going to kill even half as many again as we killed?
No. He was a toothless dictator.
So because Hussein allegedly killed more, we somehow got the moral authority to make up lies about him to go and replace a horrible secular dictatorship with a horrible radical Shiite dictatorship while killing 120k in the process? I’ll grant the body count is not yet nearly as high, but Iraq has the same secret prisons, the same secret police, and the same torture as before. Only now, we are the trainers and aiders (so I guess this puts us back into “early Saddam” era), and the Christian church in Iraq no longer has protection, and Iran has a new ally in the region. Oh, and it is now also a haven for Al Qaeda. Aside from the Iraqi civilians we killed, we spent American lives to bring about this result.
Yes Saddam committed crimes, but they weren’t our crimes. We’ve ignored and even now ignore massacres and genocides all over the planet. It was never our job to police Iraq. We know this is true because Bush would not have needed to make up lies about WMD.
And then this from Blair:
…and that of the Iran-Iraq war where casualties numbered up to a million including many killed by chemical weapons….
Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfeld shake hands
Those were US-provided weapons in a US-sponsored proxy war against Iran. The fact that Blair admits that this was a crime deserving of destruction makes me wonder if the Holy Spirit was moving him to prophesy against the Western world.
The article calls Tutu a liberal, which is true and a shameful thing. Sometimes the word of God comes to us on foreign lips and we refuse to listen. I doubt Blair is any less liberal.
Final paragraph:
As to the Iraq War’s morality, it’s still unexplained by critics like Tutu what viable alternatives were available in 2003 regarding a mass murdering dictator who had started 2 wars and joined the Taliban regime in publicly endorsing 9-11. Although Tutu is now over age 80, his claim that the Iraq War has destabilized the world more than any conflict in history indicates he has no memory prior to 2003.
The “viable alternative” was to not lie about Hussein to make him into a threat and to allow the toothless dictator to rot in his country. I have no idea how much the Iraq war destabilized the world compared to Napoleon, but it was certainly a horrible and destabilizing act that was directly against the national interest even though it served to enhance the power of the US Federal Government.
One final note: the picture I included in this post, is not an Iraqi child, but an Afghan or Pakistani girl.
(Originally posted at Christendom Unbound)<>
