JH wonders:
I have read your coloumn faithfully for years, and have come to admire your level-headed and logical approach to the problems you present.
I have a question. Most social conservatives declare that life begins at conception, thus concluding that all abortions are murder. If you take this stand then you must conclude that America has the blood of 50 million innocent lives on her hands.
What right do we have then to drop bombs on ” ragheads and goat herders ‘ and the like if this is so, and how can we possibly think that God will bless our troops in foreign wars when we can’t possibly be on HIS side?
It is so. And America has no more right to bomb the goat herders of the Middle East than Rome had to invade Pontus, Armenia, and Parthia. Nor does America have any better reason to believe that God will bless their invading troops than the Romans or the National Socialist-era Germans did. Gott war nicht mit der Wehrmacht, their belt buckles notwithstanding, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that a nation whose government increasingly denies and rejects God, a nation that has slaughtered more of its own children behind closed clinic doors than the Moloch-worshipping Canaanites ever threw into the fires, enjoys divine favor.
America was founded on predominantly Christian principles, but she no longer lives by them. She is profligate, gluttonous, murderous, and repressive. She can no longer be reasonably described as either the land of the free or the home of the brave, but rather the land of the fat and the home of the indebted. I concluded some time ago that America was already finished in the historical sense, but it may take some time for most Americans to realize it or for America’s foreign policy to reflect that reality. This is entirely normal, few Britons understood that their empire was in decline until the sun had already set upon it.
It would, of course, be deeply ironic if the neocons were to get their way and America were to eventually learn of her loss of global superpower status not too terribly far from where Marcus Licinius Crassus lost his seven legions and met his death at the hands of the Parthians. Interestingly enough, Crassus, rather like Bush and Obama, failed to abide by the legal forms of making war before launching his ill-fated invasion.