Y Safle

The second president of the United States of America, John Adams, said:

Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond the comprehension of the weak.

Today the EU accepted a report on secret CIA rendition flights. Rendition is a strange word to use. It brings to mind either a recital of music, a translation or such like, or else images of mechanical processes used in the food industry. It is also related to the word surrender, but what it seems to mean in this case is simply “transport to a location for torture”.

There is no doubt that the CIA has been torturing prisoners (usually using other regimes to actually get their hands dirty with the deed, but anyone participating in the act in any way is equally guilty). Now it seems that EU states have been conspiring with the USA over this torture.

The powers in our nations do indeed like to think they have a great soul - but they are all evil. Those in power are fallen and evil people, and their imagined great soul is mired in hypocrisy.

It is trendy these days to wear fashion accessories with the letters WWJD written on them. The letters stand for “What Would Jesus Do”?

This question is a pertinent one. In any situation, we should ask, what would Jesus believe was the correct course of action? If we follow him, then we need to know what he would do, so that we too can do it.

But I would like to add some extra letters: DWRHAC - “Do we really have a clue”? Have we any idea what Jesus would do about the illegal and immoral detention of people in Guantanamo bay? Do we know what Christ would say about going to war to secure oil supplies in Iraq? Do we know what his view would be on the destruction of our environment? Do we know what he would say about mortgage debt? Social security? Health care? People using the asylum system to escape economic deprivation? The EU and U.S. trade rules and dumping of food that keep Africa poor so that we can stay rich?

How do we know what Jesus would say on an issue? Only by studying the message of the Bible and studying the situation. Even then there is often room for doubt, which is why Christians can disagree. We have the Holy Spirit as our guide and the Bible to teach us, but what would Jesus do about Guantanamo bay (where no doubt the prisoners are being tortured too)? I have no idea.

But one thing I know - he would not do nothing. It was not within him to turn his back on injustice, and that is the Christ I would follow.

A coalition of charities, faith groups and unions has warned Tony Blair that any military action against Iran would have “unthinkable” consequences. The organisations are urging the prime minister to put pressure on the US to enter talks with Tehran. The US has refused to rule out military action if Iran does not halt its nuclear activities.

Here we go again. As we are warned of the very real dangers of nuclear proliferation in the repressive state of Iran (which does terrible things, such as hanging 16 year old boys for homosexuality, and women for killing in self defence people who are raping them), we are enjoined to demonise that state so that we can then invade it with impunity.

Iran’s culture is foreign to us, and the people there cannot be said to be free in the way that we might say that Canadians or Norwegians are free. There is much wrong with the state, and much we can criticise.

But on the other hand, it is a state that is now surrounded by an aggressive United States military, which has a reputation of acting violently and aggressively against those who do not fall in line with it. From the Iranian point of view, there is much to fear from the US, and there would be good reasons of self preservation in seeking to create a nuclear weapon. That is what currently safeguards North Korea, after all.

Look at this map of Iran. Notice that to the east it has a long land border with US occupied Iraq. To its south are arab states friendly to the US, where there are many thousands of US combat soldiers stationed. To its west are US friendly Pakistan and American occupied Afghanistan. To the north east is Turkey, a Nato country, and the only relief is to the North where former soviet states border Iran. It is not surprising they feel surrounded.

But what if Iran were given security guarantees?

In 2004, as Noam Chomsky reports, the European Union and Iran struck a bargain: Iran would temporarily suspend uranium enrichment, and in return Europe would provide assurances that the United States and Israel would not attack Iran. Under US pressure, Europe backed off, and Iran renewed its enrichment processes.

So are the political options exhausted? Certainly not. The US is precipitating this crisis, and the disasterous results of an illegal invasion of yet another sovereign state will be more death, misery and a huge store of ill feeling that can only be expressed in further terrorism, murder and violence, lasting for generations.

US President George W Bush is warning Iran that America will “respond firmly” if the country increases what he calls its “interference” in Iraq.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200701/s1835861.htm

Quite right.

We would not want foreign countries interfering in Iraqi affairs!

‘We do not seek peace in order to be at war, but we go to war that we may have peace. Be peaceful, therefore, in warring, so that you may vanquish those whom you war against, and bring them to the prosperity of peace.’

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, vol. 3 (quoting St. Augustine)

Augustine’s Just War theory still is at the heart of ethical justification of many of our wars, but is the teory sufficient? Augustine argued that Christians should rather suffer loss than go to war, but did not make the same case for the head of a Christian state. Rather, the head of state may declare war in the interests of maintaining peace. If our peace is threatened, or if we have suffered grave loss, then our head of state may declare war.

I am not particularly happy with the just war theory, and part of my objection lies in this statement, made by a friend:

A pretty standard observation is that non-combatants get killed in wars of any “stripe”. That is often said as if it were a surprise. The important question, it seems to me, is whether fewer civilians get killed in a Just War than would be killed if there were no war.

There is an issue of responsibility here, and we should note that humans are not like beans that can be counted and weighed one against another. If there is a room full of unconcious people who are about to die in a fire, and I throw them from a window so that half of them survive, whereas half of them die from the fall, then I have indeed saved half of them, and my actions - it seems to me - are ethical (assuming there was no better means to save them available to me!).

But now consider this same room, and I decide I will save these people by releasing a flood from some water tanks that will quench the fire. I do so knowing I will drown several other people in another room. Is it now ethical for me to spend the lives of other people to save these?

If one volunteers for action then one says that their life is available to be laid down for the cause for which the action is prosecuted. But what of those who do not volunteer for this action and do not want it? What right have we to lay their lives down for the sake of others?

This is the kind of messy ethical situation one finds oneself in when attempts at a peaceful resolution to a festering problem are abandonded for the economic, logistical and political expediency for war.

I think it is a mistake to try and shoehorn our actions into Augustine’s Just War theory - we may manage to do so, or we may not, but the danger is that in uncritically accepting a theory from another age, whose underlying ethics we have not investigated, we may attempt to abdicate our responisbilities as Christians to consider the issues carefully for ourselves in the light of a fundamental biblically derived Christian ethic. In the case of the invasion of Iraq, such a Christian ethic would need to examine everything from our current lifestyle, our culture and its assumptions as well as the morality of both the Iraqi and western regimes.

Saddam Hussain wore his immorality on his sleave, and a reading of Amnesty International reports is terrifying, but let us not fall into the trap of imputing some overarching morality on our own nations - many of Saddam’s atrocities were perpetrated with western backing, and using western weaponry. The massacre he was executed for was perpetrated under the noses of the US army, and with their permission given to Saddam to breach the no fly zones to perpetrate the massacre.

The headlines on this one keep getting worse for Tony Blair. Now his friend, Lord Levy, the Labour Party’s chief fundraiser, has been arrested on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. It seems that the police are investigating a cover up - presumably to keep Tony Blair’s involvement in the illegal business quiet. Sounds just like Watergate.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6314959.stm

Regarding the government’s new morality:

This completely fails to take into account the views and beliefs of all those involved. The idea that new Labour — which has got every second thing wrong and is back-tracking on extended drinking hours, is in a mess over this cash-for-peerages business, cannot keep all its prisons under control — the idea that new Labour can come up with a new morality which it forces on the Catholic Church after 2,000 years; I am sorry, this is amazing arrogance on the part of the Government.

Dr Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham.

Prime Minister Tony Blair has denied he is running out of steam as he faces his final months in office, insisting: “I want to finish what I have started”.

Well what Blair started with was a government stressing its commitment to education (but failing to stop rampant A Level grade inflation, and with little ground being made in actually pushing our children up the education league tables); Labour was committed to saving the health service - the service that nearly collapsed last year and started the year laying off thousands of staff; They were also committed to an ethical foreign policy - and now live with the reputation of being the first government to deliberately abandon an ethical foreign policy.

But never mind, because the one issue that defined Labour over John Major’s bickering and grandstanding Tories was the sleaze issue. At least the new Labour party would avoid all that cash for questions style sleaze.

Well, that is until they offered honours for unaccountable party loans. With the arrest of one of Bliars most senior aids, and the prospect that he too will soon be interviewed under caution (which, frankly, would have already happened if he wasn’t the PM) - it is time for this lame duck to step down and let the law catch up with him.

Blairs time in office has the same legacy as John Major’s. Failing public services, crippling levels of personal debt, poor pension provision, sleaze and corruption, poor investment in educashun (and poor returns on the investment).

Indeed we have worse: a deputy prime minister (who between affairs) gets driven 100 yards in a car to deliver speaches on climate change, criminalisation of more and more people, wholesale destruction of civil liberties and fundamental rights, constitutional vandelism that never materialised into any positive constitutional change!

Although to be fair, devolution was a great success. Maybe Blair should have left after one term (like he promised Gordon Brown). But as it is, the only thing history will really remember Blair for is his disasterous foreign policy in Iraq.

Tony Blair’s Labour Party today has refused to allow exemptions to Catholic adoption agencies regarding placing of children with homosexual couples. Instead they have given the agencies 21 months to comply with the law (which at least makes it no longer Tony Blair’s problem).

On BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor said:

“There is legislation and legislation and some legislation, however well intended, in fact does create a new kind of morality, a new kind of norm - as this does.” “The legislation about the adoption by homosexual people of children, it does seem to me we are having a new norm for what marriage is, because I think normally children should be brought up by a father and a mother and I think that we hold that that is extremely important. “The government has a right to legislate and homosexual couples are also able to adopt in other agencies but we want to hold onto this principle.”

It seems that we are heading down the French secular model - where religious expression and morality is to be outlawed for the sake of inclusiveness - without realising that the inclusivity is sacrificed in the process.

Notice what the Catholic adoption agencies are not saying. They are not saying that adoption to gay couples should be outlawed. They are not saying that it should be illegal for gay people to adopt children. If they were, then we could say that they are not being inclusive. But rather, the government is saying that a Christian body may not act to improve the common good in the British state, unless they are forced to act against their own moral values - in a way that they honestly believe to be to the detyriment of the state.

That is a new morality which outlaws the old. (and Labour knows all about outlawing things. They have outalwed more things and destroyed more civil liberties than any peace time administration).

The sooner this bunch of crooks (Tony cash-for-honours Bliar), liars, warmongers and career politicians (voted in by a mere 36% of voters - the lowest share of the vote ever received by a governing party) gets out of office, the better.

In the continued illegal US detentions at Guantanamo bay, we see an administration that continues to flout international law, human rights and its alleged commitment to truth and justice for the sake of some fuzzy expedient predicated on the spurious grounds that an administration can declare war on a concept. This is clearly a serious departure from any moral underpinnings one might perceive.

When I make statements like these, someone often replies:

I’m relieved that those who are sworn to kill us and other innocent people are being held somewhere. But their desire and efforts to kill us probably has something to do with it.

The fallacy of this argument is in the assumption that these people are guilty.

It is uncontentious that evil people be locked away, where they can do no harm. Few people would have much difficulty with such an opinion (and indeed, I do not).

But the false belief here that brings the argument for continued detention crashing down is that someone can be validly considered evil and a menace to one and all, simply because some politician dictates that it is so.

No one in Guantanamo bay can now ever be successfully and fairly prosecuted for a crime - the illegal detention has seen to that, so legal doctrine tells us they are all innocent.

But more than that, the vast majority really are innocent. If there were evidence of a crime then they would surely have been prosecuted by now. Some are simply victims of mistaken identity, and others were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But one way or another, they are innocent, and so the case for locking them up comes tumbling down.

Another argument:

In WWII both sides took prisoners, with America and it’s allies keeping most of theirs alive.

As, indeed, did the Germans.

The intention being that removing combatants from the battlefield would hasten the end of the conflict.

But the “war on terrorism” is not war. I believe in the war on want. Shall I kidnap everyone who runs a business, has a share portfolio, owns a house or runs a car with an engine larger that 1 litre, and lock them all away in…ooh, shall we say… Merthyr Tydfil, until such a time as we have won the war?

Terrorists are criminals. If we capture a terrorist we should prosecute them according to our established legal systems and doctrines. If we cannot prosecute them, because we have no actual evidence that they really are terrorists, then they are free to go.

That is what it means to live in a free(ish) society.

Christians like to ask, what would Jesus do? Would he lock people away in Guantanamo bay, leave them to rot, with no legal representation, nor contact with their families, allowing them to be tortured and abused?

Is that what Christ said we should do with our enemies?