 |
 |
|
|
|
|
On Sunday we learned that Iraq had tortured and executed U.S. POWs then advertized their atrocities on Muslim TV. This on top of years of cutting out tongues and nailing them to walls, feeding people alive into plastic shredders, conducting rape as a national policy, and other barbarisms too grotesque to recount. You have to ask yourself, is liberating the Iraqi people worth the lives of fine young American men and women? It is really kind of silly to claim that the only problem is Saddam, that the Iraqi people are not our enemies. It may just be a handful of Iraqis that actually carry out the atrocities, but the handful could not perpetrate their crimes without the cooperation and consent of the majority of the Iraqi people. The clear lesson of history is that government looses its power to coerce without citizens willing to be the agents of that coercion by serving in the military and police. Where the majority of citizens are willing to die rather than suffer evil, evil cannot gain control of government. After all, the American colonists threw off the "tyranny" of Great Britian when the overall level of taxation was about 1% of the taxes we pay today. We didn't wait until our tongues were being cut out to take action. Saddam and his regime did not just appear out of thin air in 1979. Britain gave Iraq independence without a fight in 1932, but by 1940 Iraq was cozying up to Nazi Germany. Britain took temporary control with a brief war in 1941 to put Iraq back on course, but by the mid 1950s Iraqis were living under a military dictatorship. Still, it took another 25 years for Iraq to fall to the level where Saddam could step into power. The point is, the character of the government reflects the character of the people, and the Iraqis have demonstrated over a long period of time that they are sinking steadily deeper into what all reasonable people can only call true evil. They certainly would not be worth dying for if we could not give them some way to understand what is good and what is evil. And they would not be worth dying for if they refused to accept that definition of right and wrong and try as best they could to follow it. Not that their mere trying to do good would earn our blood, but if they were willing to turn away from evil and try to do what is right there is not much more we could ask. And if we have to die to get them to that point, well, it just might be worth it, because then, at least, they might not be enemies to the loved ones we leave behind. Is this starting to sound familiar? The Bible says "God demonstrates His own love toward us in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." When American servicemen and women give their lives to liberate the Iraqi people they are demonstrating, in a very small way, the type of love God showed by sending His Son to die for our sins. The difference is Jesus did not die to protect God from our future evil. Jesus's death was totally selfless to benefit us, God's enemies. We cannot work our way to Heaven or "earn" our salvation. Nothing we could do could ever possibly repay Jesus's death for us. All we can do is accept God's free gift on His terms, accepting the standard of right and wrong God has given us in the Bible, and living our lives in such a way to please and serve the One who died so that all might have everlasting life. This is what it means to be a Christian, and to be righteous. It doesn't mean we never sin. It means we accept God's standard of what sin is, that we admit our sins, that we seek God's forgiveness, and yield our hearts to Him so that His Holy Spirit can change our sinful nature to conform to His Godly nature. America's freedom and prosperity are the result of the Judeo-Christian "laws of nature and of nature's God" that the Declaration of Independence identifies as our founding principles. If those ideas find an open door in Iraq after this war, then our servicemen and women will not have died in vain. |
|