----- Original Message ----- From: "Nick Arnett" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Killer Bs Discussion" <[email protected]> Sent: Sunday, April 10, 2005 12:50 AM Subject: Re: Peaceful change
> On Sat, 9 Apr 2005 18:40:38 -0500, Dan Minette wrote > > > I know church leaders personally. In the US, there is no > > requirement to study history or international relations before > > enterming seminary. > > Or politics. Right, and all are useful in trying to determine the most probable consequences of actions. Those type of questions can be regarded as emperical questions, for which analysis and modeling of observations provide our best predictions. > > So, in essence, the debate is on how powerful we are. > > Not from here. It's about how we use our power. Look back over the debate. Gautam and I have been arguing about what are choices are....not which choice we should have made. Indeed, you eventually favored going into Iraq because you placed trust in highly exaggerated reports of evidence for an ongoing nuclear weapons program. I favored not going in. I can understand how angry you would be, now knowing that due diligence was not taken when those reports were made. My point has never been that we should have gone in. My point was that anyone who was opposed to going in, as I was, needs to acknowledge the cost of not going in. If we look at history, we see military interventions to overthrow dictators works some of the time, but not others. In the Balkans, the police action didn't work, the acts of war did. The human costs of action were clearly lower than the human costs of inaction. In other cases, the cost is just too high. We couldn't have stopped the massive killings in China during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. We were, alas, morally obliged to sit on the sideline while tens of millions of people died because action would have caused/risked much higher casualties. Due to our weakness, we have to make this choice. I can go back through the posts, but I see repeated claims that we can find a choice that involves far less violence than war, yet accomplish the most important objectives. Personally, I see claims that convicting Hussein in the Hague would have a good chance of ending his regime as a very arrogant claim of moral power. However valid such a conviction would be, it is very unlikely to be compelling to the Republican guard who was keeping Hussein in power. Finally, I would argue that the only justification for killing and war is weakness. If we were strong enough to stop evil actions without such extreme measures, then we would be morally compelled to do so. But as it stands, remembering that postponing a decision is also a decision, we often have to make complicated moral choices. The lack of a simple choice, IMHO, is best understood by being as rigorous in investigating the negative consequences of the course of action one favors as the course of action one opposes. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
