We knew Saddam Hussein
and his regime were monstrously evil. The evidence was overwhelming. Now
we’re getting more details.
Like the
children’s prison, where kids were jailed – some for up to five years –
for not joining the youth branch of the Ba’ath Party.
Like the Basra torture
chamber visited by a
BBC journalist:
To call all this a
chamber of horrors is a cliché - and this place is beyond cliché. The
hundreds or thousands that died here and were given no trial, no voice, cry
out.
Or the one found in
Nassiriya by
US Marines:
We recovered
photographs here that were on the floor in a pile that depicted bodies that
had been burned. From the positions of the bodies, it appeared they may have
been alive when they were ignited.
There were the
explosive
suicide vests, some stored at schools along with caches of weapons.
According to Newsweek:
Every Iraqi
school searched - more than 100 - contained a weapons depot. In one
Baghdad
school, Marines unearthed scores of black leather vests stuffed with
explosives and ball bearings. Empty hangers suggested that some of the
lethal vests were on the backs of would-be suicide bombers.
(An acknowledgement to
Steven Den Beste for the above links.)
If there is one
institution in our society which ought to be able to recognise evil it is
the church. Yet so much of our own church here got caught up in the
anti-American frenzy of the liberal media, which seemed to want to demonise
President Bush.
Sure, there was
hypocrisy on the part of the US, which had previously armed and encouraged
the despotic Hussein. But humans aren’t perfect. That’s something else the
church ought to know. The Bush administration might not have had pure
motives, but in a battle with evil it’s surely not too hard to work out
which side to support.
John Lloyd, former
editor of Britain’s left-wing New Statesman,
wrote about the left’s attitude to the war, but his comments could apply
to the Australian church:
A large part of the
British left - and the left elsewhere - has made a fundamental mistake. In
opposing the invasion of Iraq, it has shown itself incapable of thinking
through not only the nature of the world as it is today, but also its own
claims to be the leading force in making the world better….
Relativism is crucial
to this argument: others are as bad; others have weapons of mass
destruction; others have attacked neighbours. Why pick on
Iraq?
Why pick on anyone? What moral basis can the developed West possibly claim?
The argument about
this war cannot be readily squeezed into left-right categories. It is best
conducted on the basis of truths, which should be self-evident and held in
common: that Saddam Hussein has run a state unparalleled (as far as we know)
in sadistic cruelty, perpetrated by a Ba'ath party and security apparatus
licensed to slaughter, torture and rape…
I’ve been reading
The Younger Evangelicals by Robert Webber. He sees enormous
potential for the church in
America
from an emerging generation of leaders with quite new thinking about what it
means to be a Christian. He writes:
The post-modern
September 11, 2001,
world has led to the recovery of the biblical understanding of human nature.
The language of sin, evil, evildoers, and a reaffirmation of the deceit and
wickedness of the human heart has once again emerged in our common
vocabulary. The liberal notion of the inherent goodness of humankind and the
more recent Evangelical neglect of the language of sin and depravity have
failed to plumb the depths of the wickedness that lurks in the human heart.
The younger Evangelical approaches humanity with a more realistic and
biblical assessment of our estrangement from God.
Pray that God will
raise some younger Australian Evangelicals.
April 14th, 2003
