Prayer and Probability

The Moral Equivalent Of War
Or The War We Should Be Fighting

Make no mistake about it the Iraq War, the Bush War, call it what you will as long as it doesn’t include “the War on Terror” is about markets and resources. It has nothing to do with terror or terrorism. The Bush Administration even admitted this last summer when it attempted to rename the war, perhaps anticipating the current firestorm over just why we are in Iraq.

The terrible thing is that we didn’t have to find ourselves in this destructive quagmire. We were given plenty of time and ample opportunity to avoid it. In April 1977 the President of the United States, Jimmy Carter, gave a speech [1] to the nation detailing the dire peril in which we would soon find ourselves. He declared war on America’s addiction to oil. He listed proposals for reduced energy consumption and for new alternative energy sources. He acknowledged, “Many of these proposals will be unpopular. Some will cause you to put up with inconveniences and to make sacrifices.”

We were not willing to make those sacrifices as a nation then, just as we are not willing today. Let there be no doubt that as long as American troops are fighting in Iraq we, the American People, do endorse the Bush Creed, ‘No sacrifice is too great for others to make.”

To date that sacrifice has been made with the lives and blood of almost 20,000 U.S. troops and even more Iraqi citizens. So for now we have no moral equivalency, we just have a war.

[1] Carter 1977

[2] Greenhouse

The Bush Credo - No Sacrifice Is Too Great For Others To Make.