I was glad to hear the news of the reaffirmation of conservation of natural lands and resources as the top priority of the National Park system. It’s a step in the right direction. May there be many more such steps to come!
Read the Los Angeles Times editorial: Restoring sanity to the Interior
Is anyone else disturbed that the two 500-pound bombs that took out Abu Musab al-Zarqawi also killed five other people, including a woman and a child?
Is anyone else disturbed that having positively identified the location of al-Zarqawi, we chose to target the house with two 500-pound bombs instead of attempting to apprehend him as was done with Saddam Hussein?
Is anyone else disturbed that we are rejoicing over the death of any human being?
I do not watch television because the world on the screen is not the world I want to live in. It is not the real world, but if I spend enough time watching it I know I will forget that.
A thought-provoking quote from Barbara Brown Taylor. The entire article from which this quote is taken (What’s new?) is worth reading, to provoke thought and to encourage us believers to keep on doing evangelism, telling good news in a world overfilled with bad news, telling stories of human kindness and divine grace.
By William Kristol:
Washington (The Weekly Standard) Vol. 011, Issue 37 – 6/12/2006 – U.S. MARINES are under investigation for alleged misconduct in the deaths of Iraqi civilians. The inquiry into the events at Haditha last November 19 is ongoing–but the Nation’s editors already know what happened: A U.S. “war crime”! A military “massacre”! A “cover-up”! (And also a “willful, targeted brutality designed to send a message to Iraqis”–something a cover-up would seem to make more difficult.) The anti-American left can barely be bothered to conceal its glee.
As for the pro-American left, they write more in sorrow than in anger. Here’s The New Republic’s Peter Beinart:
Americans can be as barbaric as anyone. What makes us an exceptional nation with the capacity to lead and inspire the world is our very recognition of that fact. We are capable of Hadithas and My Lais, so is everyone. But few societies are capable of acknowledging what happened, bringing the killers to justice, and instituting changes that make it less likely to happen again. That’s how we show we are different from the jihadists. We don’t just assert it. We prove it. That’s the liberal version of American exceptionalism, and it’s what we need right now in response to this horror.
No, it isn’t. The last thing we need in response to Haditha is hand-wringing liberalism. The war against the jihadists, a war Beinart supports, is not a metaphorical one. Liberals may want to win a war on terror without fighting, and are shocked that in a war, crimes and abuses occur. But here’s the hard, Trumanesque truth: In war, terrible things happen, including crimes and abuses and cover-ups …
Mr. Kristol is right about one thing: In war, terrible things happen … That’s exactly the problem. War, by definition, under the best circumstances and the best leadership, always unleashes a terrible monster. War is never “clean and easy;” war is never “under control.” War is always messy and out of control and war always exacts a terrible price, usually upon those who least deserve it.
That’s why we must — we must! — use extraordinary caution before going to war in the first place. What may be gained by going to war rarely outweighs its costs: unintended consequences, unforeseen suffering, the terrible price paid by noncombatants, the terrible price paid by the land itself, and the damage done to a nation’s ideals … because in war, terrible things happen, including crimes and abuses and cover-ups.
We did not use extraordinary caution before going to war in Iraq. We looked for ways to justify what had already been planned. We did not go to war in Iraq reluctantly, but eagerly. That is the problem. That was the mistake.
When you go to war, things like the massacre at Haditha happen. The problem isn’t “bad soldiers” or “soldiers under too much stress.” The problem is war itself. Its risks and its costs are simply too great, too grave, to be overlooked and ignored in the decision-making equation.
What happened at Haditha is a terrible human tragedy. We must bear the blame and take the responsibility, because we, we the people, we the people to whom the government of the United States is accountable, sent the Marines there. This tragedy is simply a sign of what war brings, of what we knew war would bring. It proves the point, and there will be those who will shout out: “I told you so!”
But not with glee …
From the Los Angeles Times, June 5, 2006:
The Pentagon has decided to omit from new detainee policies a key tenet of the Geneva Convention that explicitly bans “humiliating and degrading treatment,” according to knowledgeable military officials, a step that would mark a further, potentially permanent, shift away from strict adherence to international human rights standards.
The decision could culminate a lengthy debate within the Defense Department but will not become final until the Pentagon makes new guidelines public, a step that has been delayed. However, the State Department fiercely opposes the military’s decision to exclude Geneva Convention protections and has been pushing for the Pentagon and White House to reconsider, the Defense Department officials acknowledged.
For more than a year, the Pentagon has been redrawing its policies on detainees, and intends to issue a new Army Field Manual on interrogation, which, along with accompanying directives, represents core instructions to U.S. soldiers worldwide.
The process has been beset by debate and controversy, and the decision to omit Geneva protections from a principal directive comes at a time of growing worldwide criticism of U.S. detention practices and the conduct of American forces in Iraq.
The directive on interrogation, a senior defense official said, is being rewritten to create safeguards so that all detainees are treated humanely but can still be questioned effectively.
President Bush’s critics and supporters have debated whether it is possible to prove a direct link between administration declarations that it will not be bound by Geneva and events such as the abuses at Abu Ghraib or the killings of Iraqi civilians last year in Haditha, allegedly by Marines.
But the exclusion of the Geneva provisions may make it more difficult for the administration to portray such incidents as aberrations. And it undercuts contentions that U.S. forces follow the strictest, most broadly accepted standards when fighting wars.
“The rest of the world is completely convinced that we are busy torturing people,” said Oona A. Hathaway, an expert in international law at Yale Law School. “Whether that is true or not, the fact we keep refusing to provide these protections in our formal directives puts a lot of fuel on the fire.”
The State Department has it right. How can we protect and defend our ideals … while casting aside our ideals? How do we defend liberty by restricting liberty? How do we defend justice by ignoring internationally accepted standards of justice? How do we advocate for human rights while picking and choosing which people have rights and which do not?
