The Iraq Crisis: A Moral Perspective

There are some problems with this perspective on the Iraq War based as it is upon religious 'moral reformism'. The Bishop provides good examples of the International War Crimes perpetrated on Iraq. He does not issue a call for justice to be done by arresting and putting on trial the perpetrators of these monstrous acts. He does not attack the propaganda base, the flood of lies used to justify attacking Iraq in the first place back in the 1990s. He offers no broader perspective that a listener could use to put such an offensive war into context and thus gain a clear understanding of what is going, but then being a religious bishop, he probably lacks this clear insight himself, and you cannot give away what you do not have. His political perspective consists of 'saying no to war.' You might recall that the population is saying 'no' to this war, but the fascists are saying 'yes' and so we have war. 'Saying no to war' is like 'saying no to poverty.' When we 'say no to poverty' we can make touching and heroic speeches, and then we can join together in a resounding chorus of 'no', but given how systems of oppression exist which require the deliberate creation and maintenance of poverty, saying 'no' to poverty will get us nowhere. We need to say 'no' to the present system of Capitalism, which creates the poverty, which is the only way we can say 'no' to poverty. If someone says 'no' to war or poverty, but refuses to say 'no' to the system that requires war and poverty, they are either confused and thus can only moralize and drag humanity into another sewer hole of moral reformism where nothing gets done except speech making, or it could be that they support the system, either consciously or unconsciously. I notice that the Bishop does not mention 'war crimes' not does he call for justice against the war criminals and he issues a de facto endorsement of the propaganda brainwashing assault of the system by stating that the war does not fulfill its objectives, which is another way of saying that the objectives are valid (oil privatization) but should be pursued using methods other than war.