Faith in Public Life has a link to this article in the Newsweek/Washington Post's "On Faith" series in which New Testament Scholar Marcus Borg offers his suggestion for retrieving our chestnuts from the Mesopotamian Fire we have set - get the international community to help.
After a review of the general concepts guiding Christian attitudes towards war - from the pacifism of Jesus to the Just War Theory of St. Augustine (neither of which is exhaustive; neither of which represent the ethos that guides many Christians' reflections on these issues) - Borg insists that the US elicit help from the other countries, specifically Iraq's neighbors. What is missing from this "suggestion" for a "just way" is the part about repairing all those burned bridges to the international community the Bush Administration has engaged in for the past six years. It is all well and good to say, with many right-wingers, that other countries need to step up to the plate, but so many questions are begged that one wonders if Borg has been paying attention to what has been happening since the invasion four years ago.
It would seem to me a more comprehensive approach, based upon Christian ethical principles, would include an national admission of guilt; a willingness to co-operate with international judicial organs from the ICC to the World Court in The Hague in investigating and prosecuting possible war crimes committed by American troops and officials; closing not only Guantanamo Bay and all other facilities that house illegally detained individuals; not only ending torture, but prosecuting those who conduct and direct it, as well as paying compensation to its victims or their families; a thorough, legislative-based recapitulation of basic American legal principles, from habeas corpus to the First Amendment; the public disclosure of FBI eavesdropping and infiltration upon American citizens in direct violation of the law; barring, by law, any and all persons who are convicted of any crime of violence, including official acts of intensive interrogation, from seeking either elected or appointed office (call it the Elliot Abrams Memorial Act); paying our back dues to the United Nations with interest; recognizing the Hamas-led government of the Palestinian Authority as a first step to moving forward with a real peace process; stop calling the democratically-elected President of Iran a dictator, and pursue negotiations on a broad range of issues; replace out-sourced, privatized hacks in Iraq with trained government functionaries who actually know how to do their jobs, at less expense and with greater success.
This list is hardly exhaustive, but one would think Borg, who is at least titularly more intelligent than I am, might have listed one or two of them.
Whodathunkit?
Virtual Tin Cup
