Dear Lorette - I believe your point of view is sincere and you express it eloquently. However, it is based on assumptions - perhaps because you yourself have not adequately investigated the facts. We are all guilty of doing this at times - it is always easier to take somebody else's words and regurgitate them then to take the tedious course of our own study.I am far from an expert on history or the Scriptures, but from what I personally have been able to piece together, I have found that neither historically nor Scripturally has appeasement ever been the right course of action as a strategy for self-defense.
Therefore, please allow me to address a few of your statements from my limited base of knowledge and allow the doves to correct me if I am mistaken. My comments are in red.
Marie Komar
Lorette Nobles: http://www.fivedoves.com/letters/oct2004/loretten1012.htm
"which sins we pick and choose"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------I read the letters daily and just feel I can be silent no longer. The complete "selling" of the Bush agenda seems to have been total among professing American Christians.*Bush's agenda basically parallels the conservative agenda and American Christians are divided as evidenced by the turmoil in our major congregations. But we live in a world that is not American---which seems to be a concept lost in the good old USA.*The merits of 'exporting' American democracy seems to have been of benefit to Germany and Japan. I love my country, I love our humble beginnings accomplished by devout protestants, vagabonds and get rich quick entrepanuers. I love the fact that we fought for our independence with farmers and storekeepers *and 1 million dollars funded by a Jew and given to George Washington for supplying the army, in the front lines and I love the idea of freedom and justice for all. Still, I know that our God and if you will, the Son of God has love for every person in every nation on the face of the earth and if there is any particular stand out among those nations it would of course be for the nation that he called forth through Abraham, Israel. But even this nation is of the world and cannot claim to have done anything less that dissappoint the Lord, therefore His chastisement has been strong on their stiff necked obstinance in disregarding His Son. With all of this in mind, how can we be so arrogant in our "rightness". * From the Revolutionary War for Independence to the War on Terror, America has not fought a war based on humility and "wrongness". Nations fight wars for power, land, freedom from tyranny and /or self-defense. We have, for the first time in our history waged a war based on nothing much more than a whim. *No. We waged war because we were attacked. The intelligence was sorted and distorted so that our President could say we had proof of imminent danger from weapons of mass destruction when in fact there were no weapons. *No. Intelligence from all Western sources, the previous Clinton administration, the UN's IAEA, Pakistan and even Eygpt supported the existence of WMD's in Iraq. Not ever has Bush said that the threat was imminent. The point was to dislodge Sadam BEFORE the threat was imminent. US policy for regime change in Iraq was instituted by the Clinton administration in 1998. He promised to not "hurry" into war and yet, he did just that, and now we have 1000 plus deaths, 7000 plus maimings of our young men and women brought about by a mistake. *A nation does not mobilize for war overnight. It took several months to prepare for Afghanistan and many more for Iraq. Saddam Hussein is and was an evil man, but the world is full of evil men and many nations that we have supported in the past, most especially in the southern hemisphere of our own continant, have been cruel and evil men.*but of them, none have violated 17 UN resolutions over 12 years. We cannot invade a country each time we realize that citizens of any particular nation are being ill treated. *Ill treatment and mass-murder are not the same. Obviously we have known this for some time as we did nothing about Ruwanda, little about the Sudan, and we sit almost quietly while North Korea imprisons and torture it's citizens. What invasion took place after Tianamen Square in China----where people were dying to obtain their freedom? *Pre-emptive war presumes a threat, the capability to carry it out, and the inclination to do so.We did not invade because we cannot send sons and daughters to die just because we don't like the philosophy or actions of another sovereign nation. We fight and die when we have a true and imminent threat to our own citizenry and our own shores. This is a wise and necessary priniciple because we cannot police the world and I firmly believe that our Lord does not wish us to do so. When He walked this earth his own nation was occupied by the Roman conquerors, his people suffered humiliation and as many as 300 crucifixions in a day at the hand of their oppressors but even in these dire circumstances Jesus did not express so much as one statement suggesting that they rise up and throw off the Romans because of their wickedness.*That is exactly why the Jews rejected Him as their Savior. Why? They would have been well within their rights to do so? They probably would lose thousands of lives, which they eventually did, but wouldn't freedom be worth the sacrifice? So right and the principle of freedom was on their side and yet he spoke no words of war or rebelllion. Do you ever wonder why? *That was not His mission at that time. "That time" will come shortly.
We have asked other children to go die based on at worst lies and at best incompentancy, we have killed thousands, they won't tell us how many, of the citizens of the country we went to "save", we have destroyed what facilities they had for living normal lives and as yet have not spent the money to restore these. *No. We have a volunteer army of adults who are well aware that they may be called-on to be put in harm's way to defend their country. If we have 'killed thousands' it is a well-kept secret by the world's media who are in place to tell us all about it. It does inform us that Iraq currently has more electricity, water, schools and businesses then before the war and that the average Iraqi has almost doubled his monthly income. Strange.We have awarded Halliburton with no bid contracts to overcharge our young men and women for sodas and other goods and we have absolutely no idea how many of our people will still loose their lives or their health in this place that does not belong to us. *Halliburton does not sell sodas. In some cases, it is the only company in the world which does what it does - hence the no-bid contracts. And , while our own children at home languish in underfunded schools, while thousands have fallen below the poverty index and while our own infrastucture crumbles so that bridges collapse and send people to their deaths on our nations highways we spend billions and billions of dollars to fight a war for which their was absolutely no necessity. *Our children and our infrastructure will crumble much faster if we are forced to fight the terrorists on our soil instead of in the Middle-East. I believe that we are assigning God's will with a little too much assurance of our own rightness and I question the wisdom of such arrogance. We live in a world that the Lord created, not just this space we inhabit on this piece of it. We are not alone in this world and we cannot live as though we are.*Absolutely. The British, the Aussies, the Italians, the Poles, the Ukrainians and 29 other countries who have committed troops to Afghanistan and Iraq agree with you, not to mention the Iraqis themselves who are fighting and dying for a chance at freedom. Jesus did not advocate a "cowboy" attitude even when his own blood brothers and sisters were suffering under a tyrants oppression and I cannot believe He would do so now. *Neither did He hinder the 'cowboy attitude' that prevented the remainder of the European Jews from being slaughtered in the Holocaust. If the sanctity of life is a concept than all life is included, not just certain lives at certain times. *The OT is not in agreement with you. Self defense is a protection of life but war on a whim is murder no matter how you look at it and we have committed murder as a nation---this was not self-defense----*Based on which facts? Please do not repeat liberal talking points. The primary reason for government is the protection of its citizens, in our case, from foreign and domestic enemies.
One last principle---we are not living in a nation based on God's government on earth. If we were we would all worship one God on one particular day of the week and our laws would be ordained by God and our government would be headed by one annointed by God and that person would be the supreme ruler, with the church advising the supreme ruler, with or without his compliance. This would be a kingdom like the one David ruled over. *According to your definition, it would also be one of the ones currently ruled by Allah and the mullahs.We are not living with this form of government ordained by God, we live under a government formed by men, implemented by men and the leader is chosen by men, *under God albeit for prophetic accuracy God is at the helm just as He was at the helm when Hitler came to power. *So, Hitler also attempted to "......secure the blessings of liberty"? He knows the end from the beginning, our responsibility to adhere to His Word in as much as we are led by the Spirit----but do not make the mistake of presupposing that anyone who names the name of God is naturally doing His will. This war was a mistake, a mistake God will surely use to bring about his Own plan but it was not based on honest facts or on honorable principles and the last time I looked, lying *you have obviously dismissed all the reports proving that Bush did not lie to get someone killed was exactly what David was judged for and he lost his own son, possibly as chastisement for his dishonesty and actions that resulted in murder. Be care about feeling so right and rightous ---it is dangerous and arrogance is in no wise Christ-like.*Arrogance, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder and the ones who are most exposing themselves to danger are the ones who bury their heads in the sand.