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Rick Warren of Saddleback Church Still Thinks Iraq War was Justifiied
Rick Warren is the popular and charismatic pastor at the Saddleback
Church. Barack Obama and John McCain are having a campaign forum at
his Saddleback Church on Saturday. He seems genuinely very nice and at
least somewhat open-minded on some issues. You might think a more
humble foreign policy would be one place where we could seek agreement
with Evangelical leaders and voters. Yet according to this
interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, he still thinks the
Iraq War was justified on humanitarian reasons:
[W]hether or not they found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is besidehttp://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/08/the_rick_warren_interview_no_c.php
the point. Saddam and his sons were raping the country, literally. And
we morally had to do something. If you have a Judeo-Christian heritage,
you have to believe it when God says that evil cannot be compromised
with. It has to be resisted, it has to be overcome.
It's going to be tough to reach any consensus with that rather simplistic viewpoint.
He advances this pernicious idea that the only foreign policy option
for dealing with bad international actors is to invade their countries
and occupy them. That hardly seems like the
humanitarian or Christian ideal.
It's
also amazing that he continues to hold this opinion after all of the
death, destruction and displacement that continues to take place in
Iraq. Isn't there some idea of proportionality or a humility that
suggests you should not intervene and make things worse?
Another
problem with his statement is the lack of intervention in all the other
places where people live with fear for their lives. Shall we invade
North Korea and Zimbabwe tomorrow? Saddam's regime was hardly the only
terrible one in the world. Why did we choose to invade it first?
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Comments (1)
I know I'm prejudiced, but this guy seems both simple-minded and biased towards McCain. I'll be amazed if this turns out to be a thoughtful and inciteful event.
I feel pretty confident that Obama can handle it, and McCain will do his usual platitudes and non-answers. It is the kind of forum that reaffirms everyone's preconceived notions; if McCain backers were bothered about the fact that he has absolutely no specifics they would already have left him in the dust.
The big question for me is this: is McCain going to blow up at some point when he gets backed into a corner with a truly challenging question? Remember how he seemed to be going into a trance when asked about Viagra vs Oral Contraceptives?
August 15, 2008 10:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
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