Give war a chance

Jonathon Gurwitz:

"The consequences of doing nothing in the face of evil were demonstrated when the world did not stop the Rwandan genocide that killed almost a million people in 1994. Where were the peace protesters then? They were just as silent as they are today in the face of the barbaric behavior of religious fanatics."

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jose Ramos-Horta, writing

in the Wall Street Journal,

May 13, 2004

A peace laureate acting as an advocate for war might seem odd. Odd, unless you understand that war is not the worst evil known to mankind. And odd, unless you understand that the absence of war is far from being the same thing as peace.

"Some may accuse me of being more of a warmonger than a Nobel laureate," Ramos-Horta wrote. "It is always easier to say no to war, even at the price of appeasement. But being politically correct means leaving the innocent to suffer the world over, from Phnom Penh to Baghdad."

I recalled Ramos-Horta's powerful essay while reading the piddling statement from Christian Peacemaker Teams after coalition forces stormed a house on the outskirts of Baghdad and freed three of the organization's members.

...

There are plenty of denunciations in the CPT statement about the illegal occupation of Iraq, the illegal detention of thousands of Iraqis and the pain British and American forces are inflicting on hundreds of thousands of others.

What you won't find in the original statement is a single word of gratitude to the individuals who risked their lives to save those of the Christian Peacemakers.

Later, CPT augmented the original statement with an addendum. "We have been so overwhelmed and overjoyed to have Jim, Harmeet and Norman freed that we have not adequately thanked the people involved with freeing them."

Not adequately? How about not at all?

This is par for the course for CPT. The Chicago-based organization's interest in peace tends only to be proportional with the involvement of the U.S. government.

Christian Peacemakers urgently made it to Iraq in time for the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein. But they somehow missed out on his 25-year reign of terror, his gassings of the Kurds and his massacres of Shiites.

Similarly, Christian Peacemakers arrived in Afghanistan at the end of 2001, in time to document the devastation caused by U.S. bombing, but too late to peacefully mediate on behalf of the victims of the Taliban.

...

A truly disgusting organization.